So not all of these posts were explicitly about local but I think they all discuss leading trends and toward solving problems that local is dealing with or will be dealing with in the near future.

Here are eight posts from 2009 that sum up the year and point toward where we are going in 2010.

1) Battlelle sums up a trend early in the year (March 2009) that made me think about the importance of social media as a traffic source, and there have been several other articles about this topic since, but this particular article captures the reality of the change taking place. I think the implications for local are still playing out, but it’s a trend that will impact local in 2010.

•The Conversation Is Shifting

2) Danny Sullivan has been all over the newspaper/Google conversation and back in April 2009 I ran across this article on his personal blog. Again, this isn’t exactly local and the authors opinions are his own and not necessarily mine or my company’s, but I think it’s interesting to see how newspapers are struggling to monetize their content and I think that concept will impact local more in 2010.

•Google’s Love For Newspapers & How Little They Appreciate It

3) Sebastien Provencher always has great thoughts, plus I am a huge Gladwell fan, so this is a natural for me. Social and local remind me of those 1980’s REESES PEANUT BUTTER CUPS COMMERCIAL’s Hey! you got peanut butter on my chocolate, Hey! you got chocolate on my peanut butter. Most of your social network is relevant to where you are, and where you are is your location or something like that. Anyway, Sebastien clearly frames the opportunity here in April 2009.

•Malcolm Gladwell: “Re-Framing” the Yellow Pages Industry

4) Greg Sterling, as always gives everyone in the industry a compass to follow. I found this recap of all the iPhone apps important not only because it was informative but sort of shocking to see just how many local apps already had some success by mid-year 2009.

•Survey of Local Apps for the iPhone

5) Mike you gave us this terrific illustration of the proliferation of locksmith spam in February 2009 and it has increased the profile of claiming your business listing, stunning at the time and has led to significant change in the industry.

Google Maps Proves More Locksmiths in NYC than Cabs

6) David Mihm’s – thoughts on categorizations – he touches on many of the interesting and difficult questions concerning business listings today.

•Thoughts On Categorization In Local Search

7) Of the things I wrote this year, this one summarizes the core concepts that the aforementioned trends, articles and posts led me to think about: Business Owners: Are You Sabotaging Your Own Local Listings? The key concept is that a business location’s information can be accessed, shared, researched, judged from so many different places, platforms and applications that a SMB needs to establish an anchor and from my perspective that anchor should be a well defined, consistent representation of your NAP (name, address phone).

Enjoy 2010. As a former boss Jeff Herzog from iCrossing used to say, “search will be everywhere”. I think that’s becoming more and more true and as Greg Sterling points out in his post: Location Will Be Everywhere, local search just might be everywhere by the end of 2010….

Gib Olander’s bio….

Gib Olander currently serves as Director of Business Development for Localeze, the leading provider of merchant content management services, which includes; collection, organization, validation and distribution of merchant content. Having a complete focus on making local search more relevant, while giving local businesses ownership of their local search findability. Localeze has over 100,000 merchant contributors, whose business content is stored in a merchant repository of more the 16 million business records and distributed to more than 50 Local Search Properties and Internet Yellow Pages Directories.

Prior to Localeze, Gib Olander was a Business Development Director with iCrossing (named search marketing agency of the year 2005), where he educated Fortune 500 companies on the positive results that can be achieved by creating smart content, strategic linking and a clean platform to improve organic and paid search visibility.

Living in Chicago, IL for the past 13 years, Mr. Olander was involved in the launch of Chicago.Citysearch.com when Citysearch began its push for nationwide coverage following the purchase of MSN’s Sidewalk property. Early in Gib’s career, he witnessed the power of the local advertising market and its impact on local and regional businesses when he developed advertising campaigns as well as direct mail marketing programs with The Ameritech Yellow Pages and Advo.