Here’s your one stop shop for a list of lists. These reflect a little geekier bent; you won’t find the “top wines of 2005” here, or even the “sexiest geeks of 2005” (proving to me once again that I’m missing nothing by completely ignoring Wired magazine). Here are (my) Top n “Top n of 2005″ lists of 2005.
In no particular order:
- Google Zeitgeist 2005. The de facto authority on all things webby. Or, a good look at what people are searching for on the inter-web.
- Yahoo! Top Searches 2005. Have you heard of these guys? Apparently they have a search engine. Oh, and they bought flickr and del.icio.us.
- 2005 Top Searches, from some Search Engine Marketing site. For a comparison of search terms among varying demographics (ie, Google users or AOL users), it’s rather interesting.
- Best Apps of 2005, from LifeHacker. Not a site I read too often, as it seems (to me) to have quite transparently jumped on the “life hacks” bandwagon, but it’s a decent list.
- Top 10 interesting people in the blogosphere in 2005. I am still unable to use the word “blogosphere” with a straight face. Blogherald is not bothered by it, though.
- File-sharing winners and losers of 2005. You win some, you lose some.
- 25 most interesting webcams of 2005. I’ll take their word for it. Does anyone actually spend any time looking at/for webcams?
- 2005 Foot-in-mouth Awards. Most of these are actually pretty funny, even if it is from Wired.
- Best Web Games of 2005. Wow. There are a lot of these.
- Best Products of 2005. A fairly predictable list — the top three items are Firefox, Gmail, and Mac OS X (10.4) — but that’s to be expected. We don’t like lists that we don’t agree with. ;-)
- Top 10 Innovative Web 2.0 Applications of 2005. For better or worse, I think the “web 2.0″ label is not going to go away. This is a good list, regardless.
- Best Webcomics of 2005. Everyone likes comics, right? This list is missing a few of my personal favorites, but has some good selections.
- Best Web Companies and Innovators of 2005, from Read/WriteWeb. I don’t know if the word “best” is the one I would use, but his selections are among the most interesting, for sure. Also, I for one am sick and tired of hearing about digg.com. No digg.
- Best Web 2.0 Software of 2005. Like “blogosphere”, I can’t say “web 2.0″ with a straight face. I like this list a lot, though. Apparently “web 2.0″ just means “useful web applications”.
- Best of 2005, from Amazon.com. No list would be complete without a list of books. This is actually another list of lists, which is just fine.
- Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005. Jakob Nielsen did not expect anyone to make any more mistakes after October, so he published this early. An interesting list.
I also have a few worst lists that I found while looking for these:
- Top Ten Web 2.0 Moments of 2005. Why did this one attract my ire, while other “web 2.0″ lists did not? I’m not sure. The use of the phrase “web 2.0″ seems so much more… inane. Sorry. Subjective ranting.
- Top 101 websites (Fall 2005). I suppose this is technically not an “end of the year” list, but that’s how I found it; and boy, is it bad. I don’t mean that the list is bad… it’s the presentation. You must click “next” on each page, presumably 101 times, in order to see all the sites in their “list”. This seems like a blatant attempt to get more page views for their advertisements. I’ve nothing against advertising, but this is ridiculous. Blech.
Postscript: As I searched and selected “lists,” I noticed a curious thing. I was most interested in lists when I was predisposed to agree with their choices. Is this biased? No, I think it’s probably a normal reaction. If you pulled up a list of “top 10 movies of 2005″ (I left all those off my list, you can find them easily enough if you search) and find the top three to be movies you didn’t care for, you’d pretty quickly evaluate that list as “non interesting.”
