Best of 2006 – The Year the Web Turned 2.0

Welcome to dt’s Best of 2006, a look at the past year through the eyes of a web 2.0 agency. So much has happened in this space this year that we thought it was only right to share it with all of you out there. This isn’t your typical “trends in 2006″, “best website of 2006″; these are categories that shook the web this year and are changing the way users interact with businesses and their products. The following categories will guide you to the appropriate areas you want to see: (Usability is important right?)
Technology | Search | Design | Development | Viral | Analytics | Blog | Web 2.0 | Video | Marketing Campaigns | Mobile | Social Media | Conferences

TECHNOLOGY
Best Emerging Tech
Winner: Mobile [Bluetooth/SMS/MMS] Marketing – Due to the established infrastructure, user base, and user knowledge of the form factor, if managed and engineered properly, Mobile Marketing shows tremendous potential as being the next email marketing tool.
Honorable Mention: Methanol Fuel Cells, Ultra High Efficiency Solar Cells [40%+]

Best New Video Game System
Winner: Nintendo Wii [Based on best exercise potential] – The “Jared Fogle of Nintendo” Ryan Mercer wants his body to go from Mario to Luigi and has already lost 2 pant sizes in 9 days!
Honorable Mention: XBOX 360, there just are not enough PS3′s out there and people are rioting.

Best iPod Add-on
Winner: Geneva Sound System – Tired of all those wimpy iPod sound accessories? 600 watts made for iPod ($1,075 for the XL model!)
Honorable Mention: MP3 Shower Radio ($29.95)

SEARCH
Best Tool for Search Engine Marketers
Winner: Google Sitemaps – This tool for webmasters and SEM’s gives an overall picture of your website, problem areas, referring search terms, helps you maximize visibility in search.
Honorable Mention: MSN adLabs

Best Search “Drama”
Winner: BMW Doorway Pages Gets Them Banned From Google
Honorable Mention: Talk Origins Strikes Back

Best Search Celebrity
Winner: Danny Sullivan – Danny Sullivan leaves Search Engine Watch after 10 years
Honorable Mention: Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz – He is everywhere!

DESIGN
Best Use of the Color Yellow
Winner: Sprint – In their rebranding effort than included acquisition of Nextel the website went from white/red to yellow.
Honorable Mention: Yellow Pages

Best use of an Animal
Winner: Its the Mirrors by DLP – I love that elephant they have in the Its the Mirrors commercials, there is so much detail in the animal that it makes it look like you are watching HDTV even if you don’t own a set.

Best Redesign
Winner: Yahoo – The ovehaul of their entire site including the homepage, mail and new technology section caught our eye. It’s Yahoo so they’ve got some resources…
Honorable Mention: Flock – This social web browser makes it easy to share all your favorite media like photos and videos. True Flockstars Unite!
Salvation Army – Features new blog, podcast and done in web standards!

DEVELOPMENT
Best CMS Platform
Winner: Joomla sets itself apart from Mambo with v 1.5 and the highlights are new administration skin, Ajax enhancements, open source, new JDoc API, built in syndication, bread crumbs, large library of user created extensions and a new WYSIWYG editor.

Best Web Development Framework
Winner: Cake PHP - An elegant a lightweight rapid development framework written in PHP and inspired in Ruby on Rails. It uses very sexy design patterns such as MVC, Association Data Mapping, and Active Record; it comes out of the box with a built-in fast templating engine, request dispatcher with pretty and SEO friendly URLs, ACL, and application scaffolding for the lazy folks.

Best Emerging Web Technology of 2006
Winner: Identity 2.0 – We are all about the Unified Profile. You used to worry about 5 unique passwords – now it’s 50 different active account logins. Who wants to have to remember stuff anyway? Identity 2.0 has a long way to go, but we believe that they will play a big role in the future of the web. Pack up your eBay reputation and Amazon preferences to go! Thanks to that Dick with a big Hardt for turning us on to ID2.0. Check out Identity2.0 for more.

Best Development Blunder
Winner: Microsoft MP3 Zune not Compatible with Windows Vista, It seems the Windows Media Player DRM and the Zune DRM were not going to be compatible. (According to this Knowledge Base article, Zune supports Windows Media Player 10′s DRM, but not WMP 11′s.) arg!

VIRAL
Best New Word Added to Merriam-Webster
Winner:(Tie)“Unibrow” / “Soul Patch”
Honorable Mention: “google”

Best New Buzzword
Winner: Truthiness – “The Word” that continues to define this administration made famous by the Colbert Report
Honorable Mention: Social Media Optimization; Rintone Rage

Best Viral YouTube Video
Winner: OK Go - 9 million views and counting. Not to mention an incredible fancy set of treadmills and space age wall coverings.
Honorable Mention: Free Hugs – Yes, slightly cheesy and not a ton of views, but this video spawned 7 pages of new hug videos in several continents. How’s that for an international feel good virus?

ANALYTICS
Best Platform Promotion
Winner: Google Analytics – If you write the algorithm that people use to search for “analytics” then you have a pretty good chance of having the first listing for those type of terms, no matter is organic or PPC. Put some money back into the support

Best Platform that’s Still Around
Winner: WebTrends – The acknowledged global web analytics market leader for more than twelve years!
Honorable Mention: Analog, Awstats

BLOG
Most Influential Bloggers
Winner: Steve Rubel
Honorable Mention: John Battle , Seth Godin

Best Blog to waste your time on
Winner: Buzz Patrol – With a tagline like “waste your time wisely” it amasses some of the best news stories and videos you would need a how bunch of RSS feeds to keep up with this site.
Honorable Mention:
Freakomonics – If you have read this book then you will love the blog
Will it Blend? – Not really a blog at all but a site where you can watch the world’s best blender shred up iPods and Hockey Pucks

Best Blog to Hate
Winner: Clay Aiken – Just doesn’t seem like a site you would spend time on. Nice mention of all members at the bottom who are online!
Honorable Mention: Wal-Mart – If you don’t like Wal-Mart here’s a blog for you.

WEB 2.0
Best Logo
Winner: Nerdy Shirts – Grab your birthday suit and visit the awesomest shirts in the world!
Honorable Mention: Google – Geez these guys have a logo for everyday of the week; PB wiki – I love peanut butter and jelly, don’t you?

Best Web Application
Winner: Zillow.com -Combining heavy use of Ajax maps, these guys empower the buyer and seller in the real estate market. Come on, 60M+ homes and you can compare them to each other? What more could you want on a Sunday afternoon, sipping on your Starbucks latte?
Honorable Mention: WidSets – With WidSets you can do all that – and more. You can get traffic alerts, news, blogs, gossip, restaurant reviews, weather reports and loads of other stuff that you would normally get through a web service.

Best Use of Ajax
Winner: Netvibes – What did we do before Netvibes? Sorry MyYahoo, Google Homepage and MSN. These guys are just what we want, when we want it and how we want it. I love that fact that I can check my 50 newsletter RSS feeds, watch Borat on a Youtube video, see the weather in San Diego and have pictures of my new kitten Mr. Jones all on one screen.

VIDEO
Best Corporate Video
Winner: Bank of America signs U2′s One – Big banking never sounded so good

Best Agency Video
Winner: Agency.com Subway Pitch – What happens when an interactive agency goes to work for SUBWAY? Late nights, fun times, and lots of sandwiches. When Agency.com has the chance to win the SUBWAY interactive business, they immediately go to work… in the restaurants, on the streets, and, of course, on the internet.

MARKETING CAMPAIGNS
Best Overall Campaign
Winner: (Tie) Lexus 460 Degrees, Honda CR-V (CRAVE)
This was a tough one because neither of these included search marketing very prominently which makes me think different departments don’t communicate very well at larger companies. The use of design, art, web and TV for Lexus 460 got our attention, especially since one of the featured artists was also a major contributor at Burning Man ’06. The CRAVE campaign by Honda was very clever as well and included social and consumer generated content, which ties very nicely into the new web.

Best Deceptive Marketing Campaign
Winner: Sony – For their fake video viral campaign “All I Want For Xmas Is A PSP. Of course, Sony is only the latest company to be caught creating a phony blog, joining Wal-Mart and McDonald’s, to name two well-publicized examples. Chances are other big brands have fake blogs of their own out there, just waiting to be exposed.
Honorable Mention: Wal-Mart, McDonald’s

MOBILE
Best use of Bluetooth
Winner: CBS Promotes Fall Lineup in Subway – No, not the sandwich shop, riding on the subway. It makes sense to connect to a CBS TV poster instead of the stranger commuting next to you.
Best Social Network
Winner: Twitter – how can you not love this little mobile community! They’ve got an API, viral badges and the New Year’s Nudge. Go check it out!
Honorable Mention: Saki Mobile

SOCIAL MEDIA
Best Niche Social Network
Winner: Dogster – The original model for niche social networking sites.
Honorable Mention: Boompa – Sleek rides, sleek designs. This community features cars for everyone from 2006 Audi S4s’ to BMW M3s’ to 2006 Bugatti Veyron 16.4s’ to 1977 Nissan Patrols. Pimp Yo Ride Profile!
Yelp – For the users, by the users. Where to eat? Ask anyone in any city and read 10, 25, 40 reviews on your favorite restaurants. Use the “Talk” feature to ask questions if you’re just in town for the day too. All Welcome!

Best SMO Tip
Choose your SMO tactics wisely. Be cognizant of what actions will influence the desired outcome with the most impact. According to Hans Peter Brondmo of Plum during the SES San Jose session “Marketing with Social Media“, 1% of those involved with social media are creating content, 10% will enrich that content and 90% will consume it. That’s a lot of influence wielded by content creators and those that re-blog and mashup. Think about what you can do to enable content creation as well as the re-purposing of that content for what might possibly be the most productive outcome.

Most Popular “Tag”
Flickr: wedding
Delicious: design
Technorati: weblog
Amazon: dvd

BEST OVERALL CONFERENCE
Winner: The Future of Web Apps (San Francisco)