Friday Five: top 5 top 10 lists of the moment

‘Tis the season for year-end lists.

Bloggers everywhere are compiling their annual best-of lists, expressing their take on the year’s music, movies, books, blogs, communications faux pas, or any other topic that strikes their fancy. Never one to ignore a trend, but also never an early adopter, I give you five lists of 10s that recently jumped out at me from the RSS.

  1. Neilsen’s top 10 social networks, based on traffic. (MySpace is tops, followed by Facebook.)
  2. The year’s 10 best new and improved apps to make life and work more productive, according to Lifehacker. The blog also gives readers a chance to weigh in with their own picks.
  3. Via Adlab, 10 forces that shape headline writing. Important tips for writers who are still trying to come to terms with the fact that we’re now writing to catch the attention of machines as well as the attention of actual humans.
  4. Before you purchase that Powerball ticket, read CNET’s 10 reasons why you’d miss working. It may make you reconsider your purchase. Or not.
  5. And finally, Web Worker Daily offers its picks for the top 10 books for web workers in 2007. Glad to see a couple of my favorites from the past year — Lois Kelly‘s Beyond Buzz and Gina Trapani’s Lifehacker (which originated from a wonderful blog) — made the list.

Coming soon: a little year-end list of my own.

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Now playing: The Rakes – Little Superstitions
via FoxyTunes

Eight trends to watch in ’08

Consumer trend research firm Trendwatching offers 8 important consumer trends for 2008:

t-lotsoftrends.png

Lots of interesting information here, and nothing — aside from the clever wording — that is too far out on the limb. Take, for example, the trend of “online oxygen.” Will 2008 be the year we’ll “need a thousand pages/screens to highlight every noteworthy online sub-trend and Big Idea to watch,” as Trendwatching suggests? That’s not too hard to believe, given the current state of online info-glut.

If the online summary isn’t enough to slake your hankering for trend info, you can purchase the whole enchilada for a mere $699.

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Now playing: The National – Brainy
via FoxyTunes