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This year saw some big changes on the technology front here.

You may have noticed a more spiffy "landing page" for major events, like the Paris Air Show.

We also launched the Flightglobal image store, enabling you to purchase photos and reprints from our 100 year archive.

Our community page AirSpace got a big overhaul that will let us (and you!) be more active on the site. Check out the Editor's Blog for details on site updates.

We also unveiled a new look to our blog homepage, making it easier to navigate our numerous blogs as well as blogs from our AirSpace users.

Probably one of the biggest news items for the year was the development of a Flightglobal application for the iPhone. It's free and lets you stay updated with all the latest news, blogs, and even Tweets from the Flightglobal team.

This year also saw the return of our cover competition.

2009 was undoubtedly the year of Twitter, and with many of our journalists Tweeting away every day, we made an easy to follow groups list to keep track of all Flightglobal journos on Twitter. Tweet away!

A special kind of scrutiny was applied to the European Aviation Safety Agency last week.

On 27 September the Royal Aeronautical Society (RAeS) imported five of the top executives from EASA, seated them behind a long desk facing a packed hall of industry people, allowed them a few words each to update the audience on current issues they face, and then opened the session for about two hours of questions.

This doesn't normally happen to the senior executives in European agencies. So why EASA? And why did the agency's big five - executive director Patrick Goudou, communications head Daniel Holtgen, quality and standardisation director Francesco Banal, certification director Norbert Lohl and deputy head of flight standards Eric Sivel - agree to undergo this public grilling?

I was watching a documentary on UK television the other week about the impact that bloggers had on the race to become the US Democrat party's candidate for the Connecticut Senate election last year. Out of nowhere anti-Iraq war businessman Ned Lamont defeated sitting senator Joe Lieberman for the Democratic nomination last August but Lieberman, running as an independent, won the actual Connecticut senate election.

The documentary made the case that anti-Iraq war, anti-Lieberman bloggers had generated support for Lamont and the programme's production team followed the bloggers around giving an insight into how they work, what technology they use, who the individuals were. During the documentary one blogger made the comment that now he had got involved in covering the senate candidate race he didn't think what the media did was so tough and anyone could do it.

I am the first to admit that listening to what people say, asking them questions and then writing it up in a clear and concise form is not rocket science but the bloggers big mistake was to think that writing anything and publishing it on the internet makes you a journalist. By writing anything I mean only writing about one issue and approaching the subject with preconcpetions about what reality should be presented. For example these Connecticut Democrat party candidate race bloggers always wrote supportive reports about Lamont and always attacked Lieberman.