In what will likely be my final year-end list of 2008, I have compiled one more taking a look at the year in social media. This follows my articles looking at the year in online video and the year in online music. Like with those, I dug through our archives and picked out a number of highlights from the social media industry.

I’ve always felt that comments have the ability to enhance articles, as they expand the conversation and often provide more thoughtful insight into the topic being written about. Of course this is not always true. There is plenty of spam, and always a fair amount of unconstructive criticism, name calling, and general ugliness. But it’s a small price to pay for making content more community-driven, which still overall, I feel is more useful to the end-user in the long run.

Invesp Consulting, a company that does landing page optimization asked online marketers to nominate the best online marketers of 2008. These are marketers who have been innovative and contributed to online marketing as a whole. They named 100 of the best.

I’m in an awards mood today, and it’s almost time to reflect on 2008 as we head barreling into 2009. The New York Times blogged about a company’s quest (great PR move by Sawhorse Media)  to find the best tweeters of the year. The awards are called the Shorty Awards, and it’s a hot topic on Twitter. Over 12,000 entries have come in already.

Yesterday, we looked at the top question searches on Ask for 2008, Dictionary.com’s Top Gainers of 2008, Ask’s Top Celebrity Baby Mamas of 2008, and Ask’s Top Deals & Steals Searches. We looked at the top mobile searches and the top viral videos.

If Internet users held a particular position about a candidate, Stanford University’s Management Science & Engineering department probably caught their opinions in a bubble. Through the use of real-time data firm Wise Window’s software as a service for qualitative data, …

Now that the US Presidential candidates have been campaigning for a solid year, we’re running out of angles from which to look at them. Since the Googleplex has hosted each of the remaining candidates, we thought we’d use the Google search engine to find those new angles.

This can show us a few things: what the Internet "climate," so to speak, is for the candidates; how they stand on issues affecting the Internet; and which ones are making the best use of the Internet for their campaigns.

And I’ll try to keep my opinions out of it. (Cub)Scout’s honor.

Video search site Truveo opened a new page, featuring Presidential candidate campaign videos from the official sites as well as unofficial ones created by supporters.

A forecast of doom and economic gloom encompassing the tech world may be more reality than nightmare this year.

The campaign for Presidential nominations began in earnest today with the first primary being held in Iowa. The major search engines have resources of interest for the politically inclined surfer to visit.

Prognostications are the last can of chicken noodle soup in every writer’s cupboard, and we have a bowl of them for you.

2008 could be the year of the YouTube Election, an argument the video sharing site made based on the participation of candidates and voters.

Apple TV leads when it comes to Internet video delivery devices but such devices have had difficulty gaining traction with consumers because of higher prices and competition from set-top-boxes according to ABI Research.