Recap of 2008 and forecast for 2009

Its been a hectic and rewarding 2008, and the holidays allowed us to step back, re-assess, and strategise for 2009. First, let's tally up 2008's hits and misses:

• To shamelessly mix metaphors, we put our money where our mouths are and walked the Web 2.0.

  With 50 blog posts in 2008, we averaged a little under a post a week. Our traffic suggests you find the content relevant and worth returning to (and to make things easy for you, the blog feed is automagically available since this is Drupal site).

  Social-ly and network-y places we would love to connect and share with you are: Twitter, Slideshare, Delicious, and Mixx.

• We also worked hard to contribute back to the Drupal community by helping with the Drupal conference, the monthly meetups, and a number of free themes (listed under 'Projects').

• We backslid on some of these, with the Drupal demo, the Library 2.0 demo, and the themes suffering from lack of Drupal 6.0 goodness.

• We decided to commit even more strongly to being 'open'. We're proponents of open source software, we believe in sharing our technical and industry expertise with our blog, and we're also making project pricing completely transparent.

• And our project engagements gained some serious traction, the highlights of which include Camp Photoshop (case study), UTS' Culture Map (currently in private beta, will be live soon), Artist Level (brought on for theming by the project's implementors Blue Screen).

Now, moving on to 2009:

• SMEs who have not ventured online yet, or have only made tentative efforts, will realise the real business benefits of leveraging these communitation, marketing, and/or sales channel. To that end, we are concentrating on helping SME retailers with this.

• The economy will result in the Australian marketplace turning to cost effective (and arguably better quality) open source software solutions.
• The economy will also influence the Australian marketplace to increase their uptake of Web 2.0 marketing.

  Tourism Queensland has kicked this off with their widely covered The Best Job In the World campaign:

  Tourism Queensland is looking for a caretaker to live on Hamilton Island in the Great Barrier Reef, with a job description that includes blogging and vlogging, and has invited hopefuls to submit their applications to http://islandreefjob.com in the form of an online video application. The campaign will continue with user participation by enabling the shortlist to be determined by online votes.

And finally, 2009 will become the new decider of which organisations are to conquer and continue. We're going to be pragmatic about what the year promises, are prepared for both the challenges and the opportunities, and are looking forward to seeing you on the other side!