What is it about the dawn of a new year – and, in this case, a new decade – that inspires such an interminable parade of lists? The 100 best albums of the decade
(The Strokes? Seriously?), the 30 best TV series of the decade (The Wire? Seriously?), the 10 most influential games of the decade (The Sims? Seriously?) – even the 10 best conservative movies of the decade (just — seriously?). Apparently in the days between Christmas and New Year, the world stops demanding actual journalism – or writing. Instead, stuffed large with leftover turkey and re-gifted booze, we’re happy to accept any old rehashed crap, provided it’s appended with the words “…of the year” (2.5 billion results on Google) or “…of the decade” (72.8 million results).
But not so at TechCrunch. There’s a reason why we had more stories on Techmeme’s list of the ‘ten objectively biggest tech stories of 2009‘ than any other single news source, and that’s because – even in a week when no one is reading anything we write – we retain our passion for real journalism and impassioned campaigning, along with our hatred of lazy, crowd-pleasing bullshit.
Nah, just kidding. Here’s this week’s list of the best lists published on TechCrunch this past week…
2010: My Fifth Annual List Of The Tech Products I Love And Use Every Day
Arrington has been doing this for five years now: naming the 24 products and services he can’t live without, presumably so that his legions of fanboys can use the self-same apps and in doing so become even closer to their hero. Let’s just hope Foursquare’s servers can cope with the tsunami of new users signing up just to fake check-in at the Pyramids.
Snapstream’s Top TV Trends of 2009
Leena reports on Snapstream’s interesting – if utterly predictable – research into the most frequently used words and phrases on American TV in 2009. According to their findings, which are generated by analysing closed caption text from all of the major channels, this year’s top television obsessions were “Iran, Michael Jackson, Swine Flu, North Korea, AIG, Pirates, Hamas, (The) Inauguration, Ted Kennedy, and Balloon (boy).” In other “no shit” news, we also learn that over-exposed media darling Twitter was mentioned more frequently than Facebook, MySpace and other social media platforms. Twemendous.
Amazon’s Best-Selling Products of 2009
If you were in any doubt that 2009 was the year that ebooks finally reached their tipping point then consider Amazon’s list of best-selling products for 2009, as analysed by CrunchGear. Not only was the Kindle their best-selling electronic item but the utterly mainstream Dan Brown was the device’s best-selling author. What was it Clay Shirky said? Here’s comes everybody!
370 Passwords You Shouldn’t (And Can’t) Use On Twitter
From the depressing to the terrifying, Robin scored an interesting scoop this week by uncovering Twitter’s (not very well hidden) list of banned passwords. To save you the effort of paging through all 370 words and phrases, all you need to know is that there are no fewer than five euphemisms from vagina (not counting vagina itself, which is also there), but only two for penis (with penis itself curiously absent). The word ‘monkey’, meanwhile, is inexplicably on the list twice. Can’t be too careful with monkeys.
Ten Technologies That Will Rock 2010
And finally, while everyone else on TechCrunch was looking backwards, Erick whipped out his crystal ball and tried to predict what we’ll be looking back on this time next year. No surprise to see “the tablet” on the list, or Geo(location) or real-time search. In fact, no surprises at all: if Erick is right (and when is he not?) then 2010 is going to be the most dull and predictable year ever. I mean, HTML5 is going to rock 2010? Would it have killed him to have included hoverboards or robot maids?
X-ray sunglasses?
Cybergeese?
Come on!
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