The year in search

Several sector commentators have been busy looking back at the predictions they made for the growth of search engine optimisation and social media in 2008.

One such individual is Noah Mallin, writing on the online pages of SearchViews, who stated that one prediction he believes came true was the movement of RSS feed adoption into the mainstream.

Another successful forecast was that Yahoo!'s Kickstart - described as a rival to LinkedIn within the field of career social networking - would fold.

However, Mr Mallin admits that the group had also predicted that Yahoo! would use personalised start pages to link people which would create a social network - a movement they speculated Google would also make - but this was not apparent in 2008.

Furthermore, he claims that the website unsuccessfully forecast that government officials would adopt the use of social networks to communicate with constituents - although earlier in the year Gordon Brown did make an online request for questions from the public on an internet video hosting site.

Meanwhile, SEOmoz's Danny Dover has made a prediction that the internet is recession proof.

Contact the experts at home james for Social Media services.