Non-travel spending during the 2007 holidays reached $29.2 billion despite a slow start in November.

A lot of predictions were made about 2007, just like every other year. Some came true, some didn’t. Here’s a list of what didn’t happen.

Vertical search and niche social networks didn’t take off

As acquaintances go, Google AdSense isn’t a particularly "auld" one – most people are likely to have more aged underwear.  Still, the Inside AdSense blog has taken a moment to remember the technology’s past year, and it was, by all appearances, a rather busy one.

Despite the absence of much good stuff, in at least one sense, 2007 wasn’t bad – on a year-to-year basis, total advertising spending for the first three quarters was almost flat, down only 0.1 percent from the previous period.  Furthermore, things continue to look positive for online segments, as Internet spending increased 15.9 percent.

We’ve seen Yahoo’s most popular queries this year; we’ve seen Google’s.

Here are some numbers about blogging and social networking sites according to Nielsen Online. They just released November’s numbers on the top 10 social networking sites. The biggest gainers are Flixster (where you share movie reviews) and LinkedIn, a social network for professionals.

Phishing attacks in the U.S. rose in 2007 as $3.2 billion was lost to these attacks, according to a survey by Gartner.

The survey found that 3.6 million adults lost money in phishing attacks in the 12 months ending August 2007, as compared with 2.3 million who did so the previous year. Phishing attacks were more successful in 2007 than they were in the past two years. Of those who received phishing emails in 2007, 3.3 percent said they lost money because of the attack, compared with 2.3 percent who lost money in 2006, and 2.9 percent who did so in 2006.

Hang your head, America – Google’s 2007 Year-End Zeitgeist has arrived, and we’re a nation obsessed with small plush toys and undressed and/or smashed celebrities.

No one received more top ranking story placements on Google News than the New York Times, which dropped its subscription-based Times Select model earlier this year.

Last week I spoke on two (yes, two) panels (at the same time) at the Pubcon conference held at the Las Vegas Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada. I would to thank Brett Tabke and Webmasterworld for putting on yet another great conference.

Paris Hilton, Michael Vick, and George W. Bush rated tops among bloggers discussing celebrities, sports, and politics respectively.

Social networking is so popular online that it’s spilling into the physical world – at actual stores. Called social retailing, the concept debuted at the National Retail Federation’s (NRF) show last January 2007. Recently, the concept, by IconNicholson was selected by Time Magazine as One of the Best Inventions of 2007.

Microsoft’s multimedia technology will be the delivery mechanism of choice for videos on the National Basketball Association’s website.

At the PubCon session "Startup Costs-Getting in the Video Game" the panel discussed the process of adding video you your site.

Analysis firm comScore said the first 32 days of the US holiday non-travel retail shopping season topped $14 billion for a 17 percent gain over the same period last year.

The keys to successfully creating content that really grabs social media users – think not just Digg and Del.icio.us but also forums – are commitment and creativity, or so says the Interactive Site Reviews panel at PubCon.

The dominant search engine, Google, doesn’t have a problem with nofollowed paid links, but few webmasters want to pay for something that brings minimal value to their sites.

Choose correctly, and keywords will make one’s career. Choose poorly, and becoming SEO tartare for the competition may be the least of one’s career worries.

Sometimes it’s not so much that you’re handling traffic from Digg.com, it’s that the traffic is handling you. Crashed servers, slow-loading site, all that traffic and nobody clicking on ads can equal wasted time and money, but it doesn’t have to, as long as you know your visitors and how be ready for them.