thinks

The week and the year are winding down. In case you missed any of these, here are some of the most popular posts this year (based on traffic).

• 2007 Predictions — Recent, but popular.
• Do what you love — Also recent, also popular.
• Why meme marketing might not be all it’s cracked up to be — I may need to reconsider this one. What do you think?
• The 20th Century is dead — The end of the Enron trial signaled changes we’d finally closed the book on a sorry saga in U.S. business.
• Pay attention — Thoughts about Consumer 2.0
• MeCommerce — Enabling Consumer 2.0
• 4 steps to improved sales — Enabling any consumer.

Why seven? I dunno. These felt like the right combination for me of popular with readers as well as representing items I feel comfortable pointing out. Let me know what you think about any or all of the above. Enjoy!

So, yesterday, I posted a brief thing about Seth Godin and the Z List. I’ve listed the original links below, too, along with a couple of added folks. As I wrote some time back, sometimes you’re an aggregator, sometimes a creator. In a list like this, the beauty is that it’s not an either/or situation. The sites I’ve added, beginning with Anne 2.0 near the end, I both promote and endorse, fully. Great reads, all. The rest I’ll work my way through over time. Even better, you can do the work too and find the best among these for yourself. List your favorites or others I might have missed in the comments. Enjoy the list!

Creative Think
Soloride
Movie Marketing Madness
Blog Till You Drop!
Get Shouty!
One Reader at a Time
Critical Fluff
The New PR
Own Your Brand!
OTOInsights
bizandbuzz
Work, in Plain English
Buzz Canuck
New Millenium PR
Pardon My French
Troy Worman’s Blog
The Instigator Blog
AENDirect
Diva Marketing
Marketing Hipster
The Marketing Minute
Funny Business
The Frager Factor
Mindblob
Open The Dialogue
Word Sell
Note to CMO:
That’s Great Marketing!
Shotgun Marketing Blog
BrandSizzle
bizsolutionsplus
Customers Rock!
Being Peter Kim
Pow! Right Between The Eyes! Andy Nulman’s Blog About Surprise
Billions With Zero Knowledge
Working at Home on the Internet
MapleLeaf 2.0
darrenbarefoot.com
Two Hat Marketing
The Engaging Brand
The Branding Blog
CrapHammer
Drew’s Marketing Minute
Golden Practices
Viaspire
Tell Ten Friends
Flooring the Consumer
Kinetic Ideas
Unconventional Thinking
Buzzoodle
Conversation Agent
The Copywriting Maven
Hee-Haw Marketing
Scott Burkett’s Pothole on the Infobahn
Multi-Cult Classics
Logic + Emotion
Branding & Marketing
Popcorn n Roses
On Influence & Automation
Bullshitobserver
Servant of Chaos
converstations
eSoup
Presentation Zen
Dmitry Linkov
aialone
John Wagner
Nick Rice
CKs Blog
Design Sojourn
Frozen Puck
The Sartorialist
Small Surfaces
Africa Unchained
Perspective
gDiapers
Marketing Nirvana
Bob Sutton
¡Hola! Oi! Hi!
Shut Up and Drink the Kool-Aid!
Women, Art, Life: Weaving It All Together
Community Guy
Social Media on the fly
Jeremy Latham’s Blog
SMogger Social Media Blog
Masey.com
Anne 2.0
Web Worker Daily
Occam’s Razor
Robbin Steif

Thanks, Anne. And Ellen. I really wanted to put a different spin on this, but Robbin Steif beat me to it. Feel free to play by her rules here, too, and post things we don’t know about you in the comments.

All the same, here are Five Things You Didn’t Know About Me (makes you wonder how you’ve made it this far without this, huh?)

1. I had a mullet in the ’80s. I think what’s happened to my hair since represents my penance.
2. I moved from New Jersey to Chicago, Chicago to Dallas, and Dallas to Phoenix in the span of 18 months all for a girl I’d known less than 6 months. We’ve been married for 13 years now. When you know, you know.
3. I cry like a baby at the beginning of “It’s a Wonderful Life” just knowing what’s coming at the end. I need counseling, clearly.
4. I once performed professionally as part of a choral group for audiences as large as 1,000 people on a tour of Italy. I think I spent every dollar I made on cheap Italian table wine and expensive Italian young women (I’d gotten rid of the mullet by then). While it’s a great memory, I wouldn’t trade places with the young man I was for all the money in the world.
5. I left college without a degree during my senior year to work professionally as a musician and recording engineer (see item 4). This year, almost two decades later, I finally completed my college degree.

I’m supposed to tag five folks to play along. However, I thought I’d hit two who come to mind that:

1. Haven’t gotten onboard already; and
2. Are off-topic from my typical links (expand your mind, and all that)

They are metsgrrl (who’s one of my favorite writers writing about my favorite pastime [metsgrrl respectfully declined on the grounds of her anonymity, which I can appreciate. Read her blog anyway. She’s terrific, and yes, that is a Tom Seaver reference]) and Carolyn. I’ll just have to save the rest in reserve…

OK, so I’ll admit Anne’s writing is sometimes “off-topic” to what I typically address; however, Anne Zelenka is one of the finest writers in the blogosphere. And, frankly, as Anne writes beautifully in her latest (long-awaited) post, “off-topic” is what makes life most interesting.

We, as marketers or e-commerce professionals, tend to think in terms of target consumers and target markets. We segment demographically, psychographically, and ethnographically. We covet cohorts. The problem is that those attempt to distill people solely into various “on-topic” groups. We ignore the “off-topic,” assuming it’s nothing more than outliers in the data. Even those who focus on personalization think of it in terms of behaviorially-targeted or product-focused segments. And, admittedly, marketers ignore data at their own peril. Personas and scenario-based design certainly offer a step in the right direction towards addressing customers as individuals. Anne’s singular point of view and clear voice remind me, though, that individuals are much more than a collection of facts and figures. Think about your customers the right way. Think about them as people.

Thanks for coming back, Anne. I’m thrilled you’re back.

By the way, I found the link to Raw, where else, on Anne 2.0. As ever, a great read.

Inspired by Michael Arrington over at Techcrunch, (which is really my polite way of saying I totally ripped off his idea), I thought I’d give a quick rundown of the sites and services that I started using extensively in the last year, and would rather not live without. I decided to limit it to my top 5, and checked my history file just to see if anything surprising popped up. Here’s the honors list:

1. del.icio.us — I can’t imagine how I lived prior to having this. Years ago, I wrote a Perl script to scan and merge my bookmarks files on all my computers so I could post it to my website. del.icio.us does it so much better and so much easier. It meets my ultimate requirement for software (or just about any other product): it does exactly what I’d expect it to do with almost no effort on my part.
2. MyBlogLog — Another great feature that now replaces an old Perl script (actually since retired for a PHP version. Still, you get the point). Wonderful service, and one I highly recommend.
3. WordPress — OK, this is one that’s only recently entered my life, but works so much better than Blogger for me. As big a fan as I am of Google as a company, they might want to take a look at what the Open Source crowd is offering these days.
4. tech.memeorandum — Tells me what I want to know, when I need to know it. It’s replaced Cnet, Engadget, Gizmodo, and Google News’ tech page as the first thing I check. Beat out Digg, which I also like a whole bunch, by a whisker to gain this spot.
5. LinkedIn — I’m becoming more reliant on LinkedIn all the time. It keeps me connected to any number of people, and has helped me locate others I didn’t know I needed to know. Technology is only one part of the job; people is the other, larger part. Technology that helps me manage the people part more effectively makes my life much simpler. I know it’s not as sexy as MySpace in the whole social software realm, but it works for the world I live in so very, very well. I’ve actually been using LinkedIn for more than a year, but as with all network effect kinds of things, it’s taken some time to achieve critical mass in my world.

The nice thing about writing this post is that I get to make the rules for it. So I’m sneaking in a couple of “honorable mentions,” which are the sites I use a lot, but aren’t necessarily new to me (or, frankly, almost anyone else). Without further ado, I’ve got to give props to both Google and Yahoo, both of which manage to innovate (or acquire innovators and integrate them) succesfully. Google Maps, Flickr (which Yahoo bought), Pixoria (the Konfabulator people, which Yahoo bought), del.icio.us (which Yahoo bought… I’m seeing a trend here), etc., continue to provide useful tools that increasingly shape how I get things done.

2006 ought to be fun…