I'm back from my wonderful Christmas/New Year holidays, feeling rested… and ill. Shame.

I caught up on some blog posts and came to form five ideas, all of which I decided I'd like to see happen over the course of the next year. Or two.

1. Companies quit making viral TV ads (think flash mobs dancing in railway stations) and instead make a few people smile with YouTube highlights of their brand mentions. Imagine the work of companies like 1000heads, who run projects like 3mobilebuzz, scaled to a level where the consumer's voice appears in the ridiculously expensive 15 second TV commercial.

2. Online publishing sees the emphasis shift heavily to curation and conversation, much less full length blogging – beaten out by TL;DR trolls.

3. Twitter hashtags, WordPress/Tumblr/Posterous/Flickr/Delicious/etc post tags, keywords, and other metadata are combined by a bright startup and become a new way to filter data. 

I get excited by startups like UberVu, who I met last year at SparkPR's birthday party, and the idea of tracking conversation across platforms. OneRiot and the latest real-time offensive from Google will help the search effort greatly, but I'd like to be able to use what I find right there and then to participate in the conversation and not just track it. I think the JournoTwit tag cloud feature became a fixation of mine (and definitely of Spode) in 2009, just because it IS the simplest way to look at/through a stream of information (your Twitter feed) and discern what conversations are happening there. Someone should do more to marry keywords and actual hashtags.

4. Twitter API becomes an open standard.

When I first saw Dave Winer's post about the Twitter API potentially becoming the next RSS or other such open standard, I was struck by how awesome it would be if this could actually take place. So far, WordPress, Tumblr and Twitter have all taken up this style of API. I'm not certain that Posterous could follow – this service has been built from the ground-up to be similar to TwitPic.

5. Twitter lists plus LinkedIn Company Directories equals transparent HRM. 

Companies will require job candidates to enter their online credentials / brand, if they haven't already. I guess I'm just frustrated. I completed my Masters in 2009, and so far the only module I've seen take a seat at the social media table has been Marketing. Social media = transparency. So why isn't there a greater focus on pushing ideas from services like StockTwits to include all types of useful company and market data. Let's see all of business benefit from the warm fuzzy glow of sharing everything. I was taught by the elders in academia that one of the keys to success (theoretically) was to hide away your best secrets, but all my own personal experimentation with building businesses produced results which showed openness and sharing of my experiences to be one heck of a catalyst.