I’ve done this a few times in the past, and this year I’m feeling the need to review all I wrote in 2011, and highlight the best posts (at least, by my own measure). Even though my writing in the past year withered to an average of two or three posts a week, I still managed to get some meaningful ideas out there, and I intend to redouble my efforts in 2012. Herewith, my list of favorites from the past year, in order of appearance:
Predictions 2011 The first substantive post of 2011, by my own reckoning last month, I did pretty well.
What Everyone Seems to Miss In Facebook’s Private or Public Debate… I make the point that a company with this much data should be accountable to the public.
The InterDependent Web In which I expand on my concepts of the Dependent and Independent Web.
File Under: Metaservices, The Rise Of In this piece I outline a vision for an app world that works,well, like the web should work. One of the top tweeted stories of the year.
Google, Social, and Facebook: One Ring Does Not Rule Them All I forgot I wrote this, but given how Google subsequently dropped Twitter and forced Google+ to the top of its results, re-reading it makes me sad. I wish Google would take my advice.
Do We Trust The Government With The Internet? Surprisingly, I argue that we should.
The Rise of Digital Plumage In which I talk about my concept of instrumenting our digital identities with as much care as we instrument our physical bodies.
The Internet Interest Bubble I’ve been always in the camp of “we’re not in another bubble,” but in this piece, I argue we do have perhaps too much interest in the whole story, at least, too much interest in rather shallow parts of the story.
KSJO 92.3 – Good Product, Bad Marketing. A Case Study One of my favorite anecdotes of the year.
Pandora’s Facebook Box Musings on my desire to use some other service to rethink my Facebook profile.
A Report Card on Web 2 and the App Economy It wasn’t a good score.
Why Color Matters: Augmented Reality And Nuanced Social Graphs May Finally Come of Age Got a ton of comments, but I was wrong about Color. I stand by the principles of the post, however.
A Funny Coincidence, or a Glimpse of the Future? A coincidental glimpse of the future, alas.
Plato On Facebook Change always augurs complaint.
Set The Data Free, And Value Will Follow “Every major (and even every minor) player realizes that “data is the next Intel inside,” and has, for the most part, taken a hoarder’s approach to the stuff.”
Web 2 Map: The Data Layer – Visualizing the Big Players in the Internet Economy A reminder of how much work I did each year getting Web 2 together.
We (Will) Live In A Small Big Town In which I dream of a world where corporations are listening, but not lurking.
What We Hath Wrought: The Book It becomes real, at least, to me!
The World Is An Internet Startup Now One of the most shared pieces I wrote last year.
Time For A New Software Economy As opposed to an app economy.
Google+: If, And, Then….Implications for Twitter and Tumblr Initial reactions to the new service.
“The Information” by James Gleick I read and reviewed a fair number of books this past year, but this one stands out.
Looky Here, It’s Me, In an Ad, On Facebook! Is This Legal? Allowed? Who Knows?! Turns out, it was not allowed. But now Facebook allows it on their own ad network (more on that soon).
Twitter and the Ultimate Algorithm: Signal Over Noise (With Major Business Model Implications) Not surprisingly, one of the most tweeted stories of the year.
We Need An Identity Re-Aggregator (That We Control) This was one of my major issues of the year. It ain’t going away.
The Future of Twitter Ads I found myself writing more and more about Twitter as the year went on.
Facebook As Storyteller On Timeline and industry journalism.
Google = Google+ One of the most shared stories of the year on all counts. In which I argue that Google+ is way more than a new social network. It’s a play for the soul of Google, its brand.
I Wish “Tapestry” Existed It’s too hard to innovate in the area of metaservices for apps.
Only Connect: Facebook, From The Eyes of an Old Newbie Highly read piece on my re-entry to Facebook. I should write a followup on my experience so far.
Government By Numbers: Some Interesting Insights Tons of data on government as a percentage of GDP, etc.
Brands as Publishers One of my chestnuts.
You Are The Platform Summary of one of the most important themes to emerge from the Web 2 Summit last year.
The Problem and the Opportunity Of Mobile Advertising A story of where we are and where we might go.
The World In One Generation: Population Trends This blew up on StumbleUpon. Go figure.
“We need some angry nerds” SOPA rears its head.
The Internet Big Five Part of my book work (as are others above, come to think of it), and increasingly part of this site going forward.
On This Whole “Web Is Dead” Meme It’s not dead.
2011 Predictions: How Did I Do? Not bad.
Well, there ya go. A fair number of “favorite posts” for what was a pretty light year of writing. Looking forward to 2012….