The top 10 currybetdotnet posts of 2010

Today is the eighth anniversary of my first currybetdotnet blog post, and time for what is now an annual tradition - see 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009. No editorial oversight, no month-by-month recap, just the top ten currybetdotnet blog posts of the year, according to the cold hard metric of page impressions. Which is slightly unfair on articles published later in the year, but then it would look silly if you published a round-up like this in August. Oh, hang on, I did. At the end of the year, the standings were...

10. All your EuroIA slides are belong to us

A popular post built entirely on the content of others delivered at Europe's top IA event. Ironically I wasn't able to include my own EuroIA slides in the list.

9. News apps on the iPad - my first impressions

Obviously the first time I got my hands on one of Apple's new iPads, I was straight into the iTunes store to try out some of the news applications that had launched on day one. And then took some really bad photographs of the screen.

8. The only election graphic you need

The picture says it all.

7. Let a million data structures bloom...

At dConstruct this year, Tom Coates wished death to the semantic web. This was my response - that we shouldn't be working towards the one perfect ontology to rule them on, but be trying to achieve more linked metadata by any and all means possible.

6. BBC News redesign: Watching the feedback in real-time

It is always fascinating to get the feedback from your audience when you re-launch or redesign a well used web product. It is even more fascinating now that the feedback is so much more public, and you can watch reaction to other people's redesigns in real-time.

5. Do journalists need to learn to be programmers? Yes. And no.

I'm not one of those people who subscribe to the view that all journalists should be learning Ruby or PHP. However, there is a lot to be said for acquiring the programmer's skill in spotting opportunities for automation and pattern-matching to help you be more productive with computers.

4. Why I care about the racism of the Daily Express

A disgracefully racist front page from the Daily Express triggered a chain of events on my journey to work that made me very sad about a little black schoolgirl's trust in "the news" to tell the truth.

3. The two-sides of Wikipedia

Within the space of a couple of days I saw both the good and bad side of Wikipedia. Good, because it is often the easiest place to get a factual overview of planning for a sports event. Bad, because the deletionist tendency are unpicking the structure of dbpedia and harming the linked data infrastructure.

2. HTML5 for journalists

A straightforward guide to the new elements in the HTML5 specification that I think journalists are most likely to see cropping up in their web CMS. It has proved very popular, and has been republished by the European Journalism Centre.

1. A thank you to London Underground staff...no thanks to abusive National Express East Anglia

A simple story of the ticket inspectors at Liverpool Street bullying my wife to tears, and trying to take a UX positive out of it because the TFL website allowed us to send a message of thanks to the London Underground member of staff who eventually helped us out. The link got retweeted by @glinner, which melted the currybetdotnet server, and inadvertently inspired the minimal look you see today.

And finally...

Thank you very much for reading during the course of the year. I feel very flattered that the team at journalism.co.uk variously included me as one of their bloggers or tweeters of the year. If you are completely new to the site, then good places to start would be the category pages on digital media, journalism, and The Guardian.

I've now put the blog into lockdown mode with comments off, so I can have my Christmas dinner in peace. I hope you enjoy your break, and I look forward to re-starting the site in January.

Happy Christmas, and I wish you all the best for the new year.