This will be my last entry of 2006, as I’m about to launch into my annual multi-day eggnog bender, complete with hallucinations of flying reindeer and peace on earth, so I thought I’d use this opportunity to pay homage to Time magazine’s Person of the Year – yes, You! – and list the ten Rough Type posts that, over the past twelve months, have been most frequently eyeballed by the wisdom-spewing multitudes. This is a Genuine Zeitgeist, by the way, in contrast to that Fake Zeitgeist that a certain API-deprecating search engine ginned up a couple of days ago.
(There is one caveat: This list doesn’t account for posts that were read on the home page, which, not surprisingly, was the most visited page of all.)
Without further ado, here’s your Rough Type top ten for 2006:
10. Welcome Web 3.0 (7,750 page views)
9. Your new IT budget: $10 (7,885 views)
8. The great unread (8,497 views)
7. The great Google float (9,109 views)
6. Seven rules for corporate blogging (9,654 views)
5. The five Google products (13,188 views)
4. Avatars consume as much electricity as Brazilians (13,411 views)
3. The death of Wikipedia (16,078 views)
2. Dweebs, horndogs and geezers (24,143 views)
Drum roll.
1. The amorality of Web 2.0 (43,237 views)
Merry Christmas to all.
Hey Nick, this isn’t a 100% fair Zeitgeist. All keywords have been available on that certain search engine throughout the year, but some of your posts were published more recently than others. For instance, if you had written the very thought provoking “Sharecropping the long tail” back in Jan, it’d have a much higher probability of racking up more than 7,750 pageviews by now.
Your zeitgeist is as selective as Google’s: your highest ranking story – “The amorality of Web 2.0” – was published on October 3rd 2005.
My ‘rithmetic says that was more than 12 months ago but I could be wrong.
– Steve
Isabel,
re: if you had written the very thought provoking “Sharecropping the long tail” back in Jan, it’d have a much higher probability of racking up more than 7,750 pageviews by now
True, but then again the post that’s #2 on the list, with more than 24,000 views, was published just three days ago.
Steve,
re: Your zeitgeist is as selective as Google’s
A false and near-libelous accusation (and not at all in the holiday spirit)! “Amorality” was indeed published on October 3, 2005, but for this list I only counted page views since January 1, 2006. If I had included 2005 page views, its count would be considerably higher.
But I forgive you.
Nick
You sleigh me!
Nick,
Darn. I thought that I had you on the run after catching you trying to pull a “google”. It is very gracious of you to forgive the slight.
I concede defeat.
And I forgot to mention this in my initial comment: thanks for the posts.
– Steve
I wouldn’t consider that filtering a Zeitgeist from all the ways you can misspell “seks” would make it Fake. But we would need a German linguist to tell use if the oldest instinct of all can be part of “the mood of the time”.