Prompted by Martin Belam’s list, and to avoid the utter boredom of reinstalling OSX now that my Mac Mini’s internal hard drive has given up the ghost a day before Christmas, here’s my top ten blog posts of 2007, thanks to Google Analytics.

I don’t get nearly the number of readers that Martin gets, and interestingly my recent appearances on the BBC Internet Blog (and links from it) haven’t altered my blog traffic significantly. In fact, most of the traffic to james.cridland.net has been related to a BBC Backstage gadget I’ve written, bringing feeds of BBC Weather to iGoogle. But, here’s the most-read blogs.

1. Fantastists and lazy journalists
Back in March, I looked at a story that the press failed to adequately check before printing, while I checked on it by, um, typing things into Google. I don’t comment on this story any more, and almost feel wrong even linking to it, but it’s clear that others still find it interesting. I wish Ryan and his family all the best.

2. When a perfectly valid credit card won’t work
Highly confusing, this one. This is just a rant, in January, against a credit card (one I don’t have any more, I think), but has clearly caught some search-engine love.

3. iPlayer on GNU/Linux
Welcome news about the BBC iPlayer, with a screenshot from the Ubuntu box in the kitchen. Oly posted in 12 December, but the third most popular posting of the entire year.

4. Review of the O2 XDA Mini S
A review of one of the most hateful phones I’ve ever had the misfortune to have to own. Curiously, my idea (held within this post) of how wifi should work on mobile phones is entirely how the Apple iPhone works. Interesting, too, how much of what I say is fixed with the iPhone.

5. I move to the BBC
My announcement from May, which many linked to. This posting has the record for the amount of comments on this little blog - 37 comments to one post. I ended up leaving Virgin at the end of June, and starting at the BBC on 9 July.

6. DAB+ in the UK
From March, a posting which appears quite high in a search for “DAB Plus” apparently; berating WorldDMB’s Quentin Howard for saying DAB+ would “never come to the UK”. He was wrong then, and while there are still no plans for any DAB+ broadcasting in the UK, he’s still wrong now.

7. How to auto-fill your iPod and train it for better music
From January. I mean to write a follow-up; but sadly have lost my iTunes library thanks to a failed hard-drive today, including all my information about the songs I like. Sigh. Will have to listen to lots more music, then.

8. Channel 4 and DAB Digital Radio
From March: an enthusiastic post about the (winning) Channel 4 bid for the second DAB multiplex. I wonder how many of the promised services will actually make it on-air? Virgin Radio Viva’s certainly not there… and it had a nice logo, too…

9. The Apple TV versus the Sony PSP
A long blog entry from March, essentially saying that if you allow people to hack your products, they’ll sell more. The Apple TV has, of course, sunk without trace; while the Sony PSP has lived to see another day.

10. iGoogle BBC Weather gadget
The source of most traffic to james.cridland.net these days. Bizarrely, Hereford appears to be the most popular place that people want their weather for.

11. Pandora - available to the US only? Or not
A rant about Pandora (who don’t pay PRS/MCPS and PPL licences) still being available in the UK.

12. talkSPORT nicks my little UK flag
…and I’m happy. This blog posting made me add the flag to all my sites again. Ah.

13. DAB audio quality from Ofcom
94% of people say that DAB audio quality is just as good if not better than FM. Worth a blog post.

14. Sky Anytime
I discover this catchup service on my Sky box. Seems to me that we’ll be much better services by proper IP-delivered catchup services. BBC iPlayer seems to fit the bill rather better these days.

15. The story of last.fm
To coincide with their sale to CBS, I witter on about how they don’t pay any licences to the music collection agencies, and just went ahead and made a business (while PPL, MCPS/PRS just stood around and did nothing). Nothing has changed.

16. DAB Slideshow
A photograph of the UK’s first DAB Slideshow services. The BBC has since added some slideshow services, but I don’t own a radio capable of decoding them.

17. Facebook - goodness, it’s good
I discover Facebook. In May of this year. And it’s quite good.

18. Getting rid of out-of-office replies in Gmail
Quite a few rules to rid yourself, mainly, of out-of-office replies. This post needs updating.

19. Logitech Harmony review
A long-term review of a remote control. No, seriously, it’s in the top 20.

20. Google Charts with PHP
Only posted in December, this is announcing a free mostly-port of some Google JavaScript code (which does the same job in PHP). The power of open-source strikes again.

Might I wish you a happy and safe Christmas.

Photo: Stuart Meldrum. Used under licence.

Photo by Robert Llefi, used under licence

I might as well be honest. I am a Gmail fanboy. I think it’s fabulous.

Whether I’m using it from abroad, or removing out of office replies, or using the mobile application, I appear to have blogged about it quite a lot in the past.

So, why stop now…

A recent addition to my Gmail-chomping armoury is better Gmail plugin for Firefox. Among other things, it automatically makes your session secure (using https://), and has a number of useful “should have been in Gmail all the time” type hacks - like a ‘filter assistant’ which makes it easier to filter emails, or a simple ‘mark as read’ button. Finally, there are some skins, too - tweaking the look of Gmail to make it easier on the eye. If you use Firefox, this is highly recommended.

I don’t use Google Apps, but just a regular Gmail account. As a byproduct of this, I run my own mailserver (to forward my emails over to Gmail and do some rudimentary rewriting), and pipe all my mail through SpamAssassin. As a result, mails with suspected spam are marked [5pam], and automatically filtered away within Gmail. Until recently, this has been a massive improvement to my spam filtering - it’s caught a ton of pieces of spam that the standard Gmail filters were incapable of. (I should mention here that I get 18,000 pieces of spam a month, so any reduction is a good plan).

However, I think about a month ago, I noticed that this was getting less useful: because Gmail has, all of a sudden, got much better at spotting spam. Much better. Instead of my setup catching around 100 additional pieces of spam a day, it’s a lucky day now if it manages to catch three pieces of email that Gmail has unaccountably ‘missed’.

Are you seeing this Gmail improvement?

I’m also, this month, using Google Calendar exclusively to schedule my working week. This is already being a great success; but that’ll be a proper review, I guess, later.

(As a small hello to the lawyers - yes, it’s called Google Mail here, yes, I know. I’m using the name Gmail here since that’s what the rest of the world knows it as, mm’kay?)

A friend of mine registers on all the social networking sites, just to ensure he keeps his online identity blemish-free. I agree with that, and on MySpace I have one friend, Tom, and that’s all. (I’ll reject you, so don’t!)

However, after someone I didn’t consider particularly geeky let me know that she had a Facebook page this afternoon, I thought I’d try it. And goodness. It’s good.

For example, I was asked, when I registered, whether I might like to check my Gmail contacts. I did. It found a bunch of proper friends I had, and handled it in a professional, friendly way.

It’s a social networking site that just works for geeks. I can read my friends’ “notes” (Facebook parlance for blog entries, kind of) via RSS within Google Reader. I saw this and didn’t like the prospect of another blog to update, but - guess what - this blog now gets imported directly into Facebook. And there’s a full developer section, with a full and fearsome API, to allow all manner of interesting things.

And it’s a social networking site that looks great. Really clever bits (like “The next step”, to hand-hold you through what to do next on the site), made to look simple and easy. It’s quick, and it looks nice. It’s both simple, and incredibly feature-rich. It’s really, really, really good.

Compare with MySpace, which apart from looking like a dog’s breakfast and with a user-interface that must give Jakob Nielsen, nightmares, simply works terribly. Example from tonight: when I tried logging in with an incorrect password, the error message was “You have to be logged in to do that!”

If I was staying with Virgin for a little longer, the first thing I’d be doing is using that API to allow Virgin Radio VIPs to interface directly with FaceBook, and both import their ‘notes’ into the Virgin Radio site, or explain how to export their blog postings into FaceBook. I’d not be losing control of our VIPs, but enabling them to bring their FaceBook friends into Virgin Radio, too.

I’m really quite flabbergasted at what a splendid site it is; and I might finally have found a social networking site that I like: because it’s both simple and fully-featured, giving me the tools, as an advanced user, to do what I want to do wth it. Bravo, team.