My top blog posts for 2008

by David Spark on January 2, 2009

On television, when they make a best of the year clip show, it’s just a lame ploy to get more viewers with some old content. Who says the blogosphere can’t learn something from television? Here’s my lame ploy. :)

In no particular order, here are my top ten blog posts (or sometimes clusters on a given topic) for 2008.

  1. I just sent 325 personal video holiday greetings-How I did it and I just sent 325 personal video holiday greetings-The Response. I started this experiment in 2007 and wrote about it in 2008. I repeated the experiment again this year with an update entitled, “I just sent 555 personalized video holiday greeting cards-How I did it.”
  2. Twelve great tales of de-friending. This was a post I wrote for Mashable that was probably my most read post of the year. I followed it up with a couple more posts, The awkwardness of de-friending and When technology tells us we have no friends. ABC Radio caught the story and I was interviewed by Curtis Sliwa on the subject.
  3. Biggest mistakes by social media gurus. Another popular post for Mashable that brought the social media elite back to earth when they admitted their foibles. Joseph Jaffe interviewed me on the subject for his JaffeJuice podcast.
  4. Sixteen great Twitter moments. Another successful post I wrote for Mashable. The idea to write the post came to me when Twitter saved me $150.
  5. Any problems you’re hiding will eventually blow up in your face – Be the Voice podcast. One of my first “Be the Voice” interviews with industry analyst Charlene Li.
  6. The Social Media Fallacy. A SlideShare presentation that busts the myth of social media. It’s not about the Twitter and Facebook and other social media tools, it’s about creating the content that people want to share.
  7. I’ve annoyed a journalist. Amusing live video streaming incident that blew up privately, and way out of proportion. Both of us involved agreed to conceal the identity of the other and we’ve patched things up.
  8. VIDEO: Interview with George Carlin’s last opening act, Rob Paravonian. Rob’s an old friend of mine from my Chicago stand up comedy days. We had scheduled a dinner in San Francisco, and then days before he arrived, George Carlin died. I interviewed him about working with Carlin as his opening act.
  9. Side-by-side comparison: Flip Video Ultra vs. Flip Mino. I’m a huge fan of the Flip. Ironically, the new Mino (at the time, now there’s the Mino HD) appeared to deliver poorer quality than the older version, the Flip Ultra. I heard an inside story that the videos in this post caused the engineers at Pure Digital to redesign the Flip Mino.
  10. My podcast listening lineup. I’m a huge consumer of podcasts, and people always ask what I’m listening to, so I thought I’d put it together in this post.
  11. The worst product demonstration I’ve ever seen. It’s always amazing when negative stories do so well. Had I written “The best product demonstration I’ve ever seen,” I don’t think anyone would have read it.
  12. Who’s funnier? David Spark or David Sparks?. I stumbled across this similarly named comedian and Jerry Seinfeld look alike and asked readers to put their “Last Comic Standing” vote for who’s the funniest.
  13. How to deal with rough crowds: A stand-up comic’s advice for Sarah Lacy. The Sarah Lacy/Mark Zuckerberg incident at SXSW was a seminal Twitter moment. The bloggersphere was on fire. I took a different stand, and offered some advice from my years as a stand up on how to deal with rough crowds.

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