First, let me announce my own humble contribution to the Internet: my return to this long-dormant blog which has been a barren wasteland for far too long. But with my new site design and my current role as a Senior Copywriter I’m inspired to pick up the pen, so to speak, and continue from where I left off. So let’s just get back into it.

In case you blinked, online sharing has changed and evolved at lightspeed in just a handful of years. Hell, when I moved from New York to Sydney six years ago there was no Facebook, Google was for search only, forums were you befriended strangers online and YouTube was just a baby. Flash forward to today and it’s hard to avoid contributing your private thoughts, preferences, location and personal connections to a private, massive database; and while you don’t pay to do it the price you pay is that your information is up for sale to a horde of hungry buyers eager to learn all about who you really are — from the mom and pop business buying AdWords to governments monitoring your every contribution to the petabytes of information collected by privately-owned corporations whose interest is not to provide you with the best online experience but to satisfy its shareholders and investors.

So clever. And the thing is, I understand everything he’s talking about.

Great video showing what people searched for in 2010. Hard to believe all this happened in just one year.