From announcements about new iPhones and e-readers to a mysterious apparition in Google Earth, a look back at which blog posts captured readers' attention in 2009.

Fellow Futurefeed Twitterer and London-based social media expert Neil Perkin is always good for an artful reminder; I found the video below on his most recent post. Nice one, Neil - thanks for sharing! This egged me to predict (or rather... post-dict;) that 2010 will be all about Mobile: Mobile Broadband Take-Off Mobile Devices 2.0 (readers, tablets etc)   Mobile Communications X.0 (Google Wave, Twitter, apps etc) Mobile Reading (what... news to you? Start with my free Music 2.0 book, here;) Mobile Content ?.0 (drastically new, cross-media models... such as the tablet will offer) Mobile Applications, round 2 (and ...html5!) Mobile Advertising (i.e. not at all like on PC but mobile ads as targeted content) *Data is the New Oil! Mobile Location-Based Services Mobile Augmented Reality (Layar et al) Mobile Money (Africa, Asia) Mobile Me (as in...'Me' in the Cloud) Mobile Social Networking Mobile Disruption (Google Nexus is just the start) Mobile Music (Spotify, Pandora, RDio) Mobile Convergence and the coming TeleMedia Economy As to the video: says its creator James Theophane: "Each phone is individually addressed by a computer to cofunction and create a choral arrangement.  Assigning each phone a tone, the mass is transformed into an aural form that appears to come alive, shimmering and flirting for onlookers." Experience Mobile Mobile from James Théophane Jnr on Vimeo.Related articles by ...

Cover via AmazonTechdirt's brilliant Mike Masnick wrote about this a few weeks ago: Corey Smith achieved massive success as an indie artist apparently based on some ideas outlined in my 2005 book "The Future of Music" (co-written with my buddy and BerkleeMusic chief Dave Kusek). Very cool! It feels really good to hear this; and to find that some of our work actually falls on fertile ground. May there be a lot more of this in 2010! If you have similar stories please feel free to share them.  If you want to read my follow-up book, Music 2.0, please go here to order it (dead-tree or PDF), or here to read it on your iPhone or blackberry (for free;)."One of the things that he discusses in the podcast is that what really got him started down this road was realizing that it could be done. He read Dave Kusek and Gerd Leonhard's excellent The Future of Music, and it made him realize "hey, this is possible." And that, alone, made a huge difference. It's amazing what you can do once you realize that something is possible -- and one of the great things we've seen in writing about Corey and ...

Though total online spending was up, the average amount spent per person actually declined. Credit: fosforix via Flickr. Blame it on Mother Nature. Holiday shoppers, perhaps thwarted by snowstorms in the Northeast, went on an online spree this holiday, spending $27.1 billion between Nov. 1 and Christmas Eve, according to a report released today from ComScore. The amount is a 5% uptick from 2008, when buyers spent $25.8 billion online during the same time period. Of course, last year represented a low bar, with sales down 3% from 2007. This year's increase should not be taken as a sign of broader economic revival, cautioned ComScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni. For one thing, online sales continue to be less than 10% of overall retail spending. Secondly, part of the sales uptick came from an increase in the number of people turning to online stores, perhaps because of the bad weather that plagued parts of the country in the days prior to Christmas. In fact, the average amount spent online per person actually declined as shoppers remain wary. "Online sales growth this year was driven by a continued increase in the number of people buying online," Fulgoni said, "but consumers’ economic challenges resulted in a ...

E-commerce sites stole market share from their offline counterparts. Shoppers spent $27 billion on the Web, an increase of 5 percent over last year.