The year has come to a close, and 2008 will go down as a great year, especially if you enjoy financial crises. But it was a fine year for the World Wide Web. I’m sure you don’t care, but I’m going to name a few of my favorite things from the web in 2008.

Favorite News Site: Memeorandum. This was my personal favorite throughout the Presidential campaign. Set up exactly like TechMeme, it displayed the most blogged stories that often not widely covered by the mainstream news networks. I was down.

Favorite Tech Blog (TechMeme not included): VentureBeat. I’ll admit I read TechCrunch more often, but Venturebeat’s writing staff (including MG Siegler, Eric Eldon, Tam Vo, and Anthony Ha) brought the best form this year. Excellent writing, great stories and, more importantly, some of the best and most unique takes on widely covered stories.

Favorite Social Site: Tough call, but I’ve got to go with FriendFeed. I used Facebook much more because my less tech-savvy friends all use it, but if they were all on FriendFeed, life would have been great. Basically, I use Facebook for the news feed, but FriendFeed just does it better. More options, better ability to fine-tune to your needs, and much less spammy.

Best Marketing That I Fell For: Amazon’s email marketing. Amazon really seems to know what I want, and their email marketing is always full of hot, hot deals. I can’t resist it, and I’ve fallen victim to it a number of times. A good runner up here would be site retargeted banner ads. These also brand my lizard brain quite effectively.

Favorite Electronic Device: iMac. I got the 24″ iMac in March, and I love it. I love the keyboard, I love the display, I love the OS. It’s awesome, it’s exactly what I need for daily use, and the damn thing has never, ever crashed on me. Not even once.

Most Addictive Site: Digg. I know a lot of people complain about Digg, but I always have a good time when I’m on there, whether I’m burying XKCD submissions or trolling for comments.

Worst Site of the Year: Any blog or MySpace profile with music playing. I see the “red mist” when this happens. Who is dumb enough to continue doing this? Please stop.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 31st, 2008 at 7:45 pmand is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.