Weekly Wrap: Saving Our Web-Addled Brains, Augmented Reality Marketing, TV's Decade, Mobile App Boom, Kindle's Killer Holiday, Texting In The USA, Social Media 2010, Brightkite AR & More!

10 Reasons This Was TV's Decade: Ten years ago this month, there was almost no reality television, and the networks still had a near-stranglehold on quality scripted content. People generally watched TV using that quaint device, a television set — and for most people, watching a show anytime other than in its regular time slot meant hauling out a VHS tape.

It's an understatement to say that, as we edge our way toward the second decade of the century, a lot has changed. Here are 10 of the things that have changed the most. [NPR]

The Novel Can Save Our Web-Addled Brains: The idea is that stories can do for us what they’ve always done—allow us to understand something that we can’t yet see, to experience something that might be geographically distant.

And if the stories break through our fog of information and self-absorption to shock us into awareness of what’s happening to the planet, then maybe we can do something about it. Maybe stories, with their narrative progressions, their beginnings, middles, and ends, their heroes, can save us from ourselves. [Double X]

10 Awesome Uses of Augmented Reality Marketing: Visuals are an important part of advertising, so it’s not surprising that so many companies have jumped on the augmented reality bandwagon, offering tools that visualize their products in a magical and memorable way. [Mashable]

Kindle's Killer Holiday: On Christmas day, Amazon customers purchased more Kindle books than physical books. [Amazon News Release]

Mobile Application Downloads to Hit Five Billion in 2014: The iPhone’s share of the app market will contract from its 2010 level during the latter part of the forecast period, but it will remain the leading platform for applications…The big beneficiary will be Android, which will see its market share of total application downloads increase from 11% of the market in 2009 to 23% in 2014. [ABI Research]

Vancouver 2010 and Young People: We also built stronger connections to young Olympic supporters with new initiatives on social media. Those efforts will increase as we near the opening of the first Youth Olympic Games in Singapore in August 2010. Related: Olympics Must Embrace Social Media or Lose Youth Audience [Olympic.org] [Barking Robot]

Six Social Media Trends for 2010: So what could social media look like in 2010? In 2010, social media will get even more popular, more mobile, and more exclusive — at least, that's my guess. What are the near-term trends we could see as soon as next year? [Harvard Business Review]

Why Embeddable Virtual Worlds are the Future: Why are so many users migrating to graphically simple in-browser virtual worlds like Metaplace? Pixels and Policy looks at why increasing graphical capability is no longer the biggest deal in online gaming. Related: Game Over For Metaplace [Pixels & Policy] [Yahoo! Finance]

Teens Pump Up Texting Trend: Americans fired off 110 billion text messages in December 2008, according to data released this week by the Census Bureau. In the same month of 2007, they sent 48 billion. Related: Generation Text [Chicago Tribune] [Barking Robot]

Brightkite Launches AR Advertising: In addition to photos and posts from friends, users of the Brightkite layer can receive up-to-date and relevant location based advertising in an AR format simply by opening the application and pointing their phone at a participating business. [Android Guys]

Why Indie Directors Give Away Movies Free Online: Vuorensola took matters into his own hands: he used a Finnish social networking site to build up an online fan base who contributed to the storyline, made props and even offered their acting skills.

In return for the help, Vuorensola released Star Wreck in 2005 online for free. Seven hundred thousand copies were downloaded in the first week alone; to date, the total has now reached 9 million. [TIME]