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One of the things I've always loathed about the end of a year is the flood of year-end lists that seems to be a requirement to mark another passage of the Earth around the sun.

It was bad enough in newspapers ("every one of our movie critics shares his 10 best and worst movies of 2005..."), but the Internet has carried the trend to new extremes. It seems nearly everyone with a blog is offering a year-end list of something, usually predictions. (Incidentally, BusinessWeek carried a great piece titled "The 10 Worst Economic Predictions of 2005," which included, at the top of the list, this gem from the Tropical Meteorology Project of Colorado State University: "The U.S. will have fewer hurricanes in 2005 than in 2004.")

Over at BlogPulse, on the other hand, there's a list worth looking at. The blog monitoring service has compiled a series of lists based on actual metrics, such as the top blogs of 2005, the top posts, top media sources, and top Wikipedia references. "BlogPulse scoured a year's worth of blog posts, links and trends to summarize and illustrate the year in blogging-what, why and how and in what order," according to the site.

BlogPulse 2005 Year in Review

Another good one comes from Wired, a listing of outrageous statements during the past year (Sony BMG President Thomas Hesse, for example, said, ""Most people don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?").

2005 Foot in Mouth Awards

Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.

As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.