My most-visited posts of the last twelve months.

Inspired by Alan Wolk (who was inspired by BBH Labs ), here are my top ten posts of the year (at least by number of pageviews):

1. Why Did Tropicana Redesign? : Yet another voice in the debate on Tropicana’s redesign (which was pulled off the shelf after the post). I argued the other side … That maybe it wasn’t so bad (minus the usability issue). I still stand by my generic point, but clearly the usability issues won out.
2. Steve Eisman and Betting on Collapse : To be honest most of these top posts were because of Google (and who says that all traffic comes from Twitter?). The post is mostly a giant link to Michael Lewis’s portfolio piece from last year .
3. T-Mobile Class Action Lawsuit : I think the title pretty much explains it.
4. Abandoned Detroit : Pictures of Detroit’s decline .
5. A Rant on Branding : With all the Pepsi/Tropicana excitement I needed to get out a full-on rant about why rebranding isn’t really that important (and why it’s really about a giant media buy).
6. Rating Systems and Personal Rules : This post can be summed up in just a few words: Everyone has a different definition of five stars.
7. Ekin: Nike Brand Evangelists : Ekin is Nike backwards and apparently it’s also the name the company gives its “official storytellers.”
8. Diverselessness : Is the web actually a diverse place? Discuss.
9. Neuroscience and the Creativity of Connections : A link and a few quotes from my favorite article of 2009 on neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran .
10. Apple’s Television Advertising Barrage : My answer to all the folks who hold up Apple as an example of product as marketing. (Basically, they spend a shitload on television advertising.)

Great. Will try and do a better year-end wrap-up with top links of the year in the next two days.

by Iconwerk

by Nebojsa Cvetkovic

If Star Wars had Facebook | The Movie Blog

Was reading this article about Google’s move into local search and how it’s peaked regulator’s interest and one quote in particular jumped out:

“This is not in the ‘don’t be evil’ bucket,” said one industry source, who like most asked not to be named for fear of repercussions for publicly criticizing Google. “They’re giving preferential treatment to their own content.”

Really? “Asked not to be named for fear of repercussions.” We are talking about a bunch of nerds, aren’t we? But then I thought about it, and I’ve done the same. Self-censored myself for some fear that big bad Google will come knocking, cutting out my knees in the form of PageRank . This is scary.

via rafer

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A very interesting Palin insight by way of The Washington Independent (by way of Ezra Klein ). Anyway, the author, David Weigel, argues that Sarah Palin has created an amazing situation for herself , one in which the media reports her press releases as if they’re fact:

I think what Palin’s doing here is incredibly savvy. She knows that anything that goes out under her name will be accepted as fact by conservatives—“Going Rogue” was a 400-page exercise in score-settling that identified, for Palin fans, everyone who ever did her wrong. And she knows that liberals despise her and will pick apart everything that goes out under her name. It was liberals, after all, who obsessed over the “death panel” claim, because for whatever reason they thought it was vitally important to prove that Palin was misleading people about what was in the health care bill.

It’s hard not to be amazed by what Palin has achieved (and the way she’s been able to manipulate the media to achieve that). Both Weigel and Klein make interesting cases for how she’s managed to achieve this.

via rc3.org

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The Economist has a very good (and fairly long) piece on immigration in the United States . It’s quite interesting to read something positive about America for a change, though the article ends with a strong warning that the country must be careful to keep the borders open.

I especially liked this retort to the argument that today’s immigrants (especially Hispanics) are not becoming American>

As Mr Krikorian concedes, the fear that new immigrants are disagreeably different is not new. In 17th-century Massachusetts, one group of English Protestants (the Puritans) banished another group of English Protestants (the Quakers) and even hanged some of those who returned. Benjamin Franklin doubted that German immigrants would ever assimilate. “Why should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our settlements?” he asked, adding that they “will never adopt our Language or Customs”. Today, there are 50m German-Americans, hardly any of whom speak German. Indeed, they have intermingled and intermarried so much that they are barely noticeable as a separate group.

Reminds me of something I read about how quickly immigrants lose their language. As I remember it (looking for source now) it’s something like 1.5 generations until it’s gone (and the family is basically fully assimilated).

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