The "pick of the top of the best of the highlights of 2006" charts just keep flooding in. So let's pick a few.
• Top media acquisitions
Ad Age has a great list of the biggest media deals of 2006. No surprises about number one, but a useful recap.
1 YouTube by Google, $1.65bn
2 Massive by Microsoft, $200m-$400m
3 Atom Films by Viacom, $200m
4 DMarc by Google, $102m
5 Xfire by Viacom, $102m
6 Platform by Comcast, $80m
7 Grouper by Sony, $65m
8 JotSpot by Google, $50m
9 Petfinder by Animal Planet, $35m
10 Wired.com by Conde Nast, $25m
• Excite's top RSS feeds
Excite, the web portal everyone had forgotten about, launched its "mix" tool recently which is a rather nifty customisable RSS news aggregator. Users can add their own feeds or pick from Excite's suggestions, and the most popular five feeds so far this year have been:
1 Boing Boing: Legendary blog-daddy
2 MAKE magazine: The coolest DIY projects ever
3 Unreality TV: Reality TV show blog
4 Office Humour Jokes: Does what it says on the tin
5 Parker's News: Bizarrely, the UK auto site
• Google's top searches
It's a measure of the trend of the year that Bebo and MySpace were the most Googled words of 2006. (I would assume Google has removed 'sex', etc, from this chart.
1 bebo
2 myspace
3 world cup
4 metacafe
5 radioblog
6 wikipedia
7 video
8 rebelde
9 mininova
10 wiki
Though what it says about Google News users that Paris Hilton was the most searched-for subject for 2006, I don't know. If that's you, 'fess up now. Google News top ten searches:
1 paris hilton
2 orlando bloom
3 cancer
4 podcasting
5 hurricane katrina
6 bankruptcy
7 martina hingis
8 autism
9 2006 nfl draft
10 celebrity big brother 2006
• Google News performance
Newsknife is a kiwi firm that tracks the performance of the 4,500 news websites that are used by Google News. This is where the results are presented by relevancy, so the use of keywords in headlines and so on determines their place in search results on various stories. This reflects the US focus of Google News, though Time and GU make it in. Newsknife's top ten twelve for 2006:
1 ABC News
2 New York Times
3 Reuters
4 Washington Post
5 Times Online
6 Forbes
7 Guardian Unlimited
8 Voice of America
9 Christian Science Monitor
10 International Herald Tribune
11 Bloomberg
12 CNN
Any more for any more?!
