Friday Five: Best of the “best ofs” edition

It’s that time of year again. Time for the bloggers of the world to unite and create their annual “best of 2010” post.

I’m not one to completely miss out on a trend (although I do tend to chase after them just as they disappear over the horizon). But I do tend to get lazy about blogging by the time Friday rolls around. So, rather than creating an original list, I give you a rehash. Here it is:

The Higher Ed Marketing Blog 2010 list of the five best “best of” lists of 2010

1. Mashable’s 10 most innovative viral videos of 2010 tops my list because it shows that even ad agencies sometimes get it right. Thanks to Eduardo Merille (@emerille) for sharing.

2. Ad Age’s compilation of 10 campaigns creativity loved gets my pick because they thought to include Arcade Fire’s wonderful multi-window video experience for The Wilderness Downtown (best viewed in Chrome). A hat tip to @create20, a.k.a. Fritz McDonald, for sharing this one.

3. ReadWriteWeb’s top 10 Internet of things developments for the year is a great look at how ubiquitous our connectedness is becoming, from the smart grid to running shoes.

4. In a nod to old media, I give props to The New York Times Magazine for putting together a stellar web interface for their year’s best ideas feature. My faves: A guitar that stays in tune, emotional spell-check and of course, the mega-lobster, which measures more than half a meter in length.

5. The Onion 20: The People Who Mattered in 2010 is pretty darn funny, as you would expect. My favorite entry is Glenn Beck – The Lone Voice Of Reason In An Age Of Hysteria.

Happy weekend, all, and congratulations to those college students who will graduate tomorrow. Welcome to the working world. Please don’t steal my job.

Delicious’ demise: Goodbye, online clipping service

Today’s news that Yahoo is shutting down the social bookmarking site Delicious puts our department in a quandary. Since 2008, we’ve been using Delicious as an online clipping service of sorts. I wrote about this in April 2008, thinking we were mighty clever to employ this as a means to track media coverage. Our approach was even written up and lauded in a book about social media metrics.

But now, Delicious is headed for the trash heap. Whether you use the service for work or for personal sharing and bookmarking, this means you’ve got to make a change.

Fortunately, Mozilla developer Christian Heilman shared a tip for pulling your Delicious bookmarks into a spreadsheet. Here’s what he posted on TechCrunch:

You can do a CURL on the command line: https://{your username}:{your password}@api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all > bookmarks.xml to get the bookmarks as bookmarks.xml – then you can put them in a spreadsheet.

We haven’t had a chance to try this yet but we will, and will post whether or not we succeeded.

And then we’ll have to figure out what to do with our online clips. Ideas are welcomed.