After a nearly month-long blogging and twittering hiatus we’re back, fired up about the whole new year of possibilities that lies ahead. What better way to begin than a look at ten Top 10 lists for 2008 and 2009.

The Top 10 Everything of 2008
In a hurry? Read no further and start here with a no-holds-barred survey of the best of the best from Time magazine.

Top 10 Games Of The Year
Everything you want to know about Fallout, the World of Goo, Little Big Planet and more, as channeled by Gamasutra.

Top 10 Bushisms of 2008
“I’ll be long gone before some smart person ever figures out what happened inside this Oval Office.” –Washington, D.C., May 12, 2008  Did he really say that?

10 Best American Movies of All Time
This one looks back farther than the other top-10 lists here but hits many of the high notes. Bring it with you to the video store next time.

Top 10 New Restaurants in New York
Sorry, this only about restaurants in New York and I plan to eat my way through them this year (with July and August off for vacation). Care to join me?

FBI Top 10 Most Wanted
If you see one of these dudes on the street (and they are all dudes) and play your cards right you could retire.

Top 10 Spammers
Talk about the most wanted. Read two of what these people are sending and you’ll be longer lasting, taller, bigger, better, happier. Guaranteed. And if you believe that I have a bridge you’ll be interested in.

Top 10 iPhone Applications
OK, so the iPhone didn’t change the world, but it sure showed us what a phone can do besides making boring old voice calls.

Top 10 Videos of 2008
I don’t have to tell you user created (and non-user created) video is booming. Fortunately the editors at Wired work long hours to help us stay ahead of the curve — and save us countless hours viewing Numa Numa.

Top 10 Shirts to Get Arrested In
Last but not least here are 10 examples of what not to wear in the hoosegow. Rembember, your results may vary and do not practice this without adult supervision.

Excellent interview: Guy Kawasaki tells Robert Scobel why Twitter is more important than his cell phone, rants about bailing out banks and the auto industry, differentiates the good and bad kind of asshole bosses, talks about making the competition crazy and remembers what it was like working at Apple back in the day. Oh yeah, there’s his new book Reality Check too…

While waiting for the coffee to brew this morning I glanced at Twitter and the first post on my screen read “Wordpress 2.7 “Coltrane” released…” (props to ijafri for being first on my radar with the news). As the song playing in an endless loop in nearly every store in New York says, “It’s starting to look a lot like Christmas.”

Seriously, references to obnoxious holiday music aside, I’ve been waiting for v2.7 ever since I met the founding developer of WordPress Matthew Mullenweg who tipped his hand to what was in store and I’m excited it’s finally here.

The most obvious change is the redesigned Dashboard, which is almost endlessly customizable to your way of seeing and doing things. In the process, this reduces the number of clicks needed to do anything: post, edit, illustrate, prioritize, upgrade, moderate comments or assassinate comment spam… one click and it’s done right from the Dashboard. Nearly every other screen can also be customized to your liking, too. How cool is that? Here’s a video that shows what I’m talking about:

You can find out more about version 2.7 from Matt’s post on the WordPress.org blog.

If you’re running WordPress give me a shout about upgrading. And if you choose to do it yourself please make a backup of the database and all the files before you go for it. Though WP code has been thoroughly vetted by our global user community some elements of your site, particularly if its older or you haven’t upgraded in a while, may not be fully compatible. We can address these issues pretty easily but it will be a lot less stressful if we’re not working under the influence of a broken site.

We were working on a new product idea for kids 3 to 7 years old the other day and began envisioning one version built specifically for the iPhone. But is the iPhone a platform that’s viable for children at the younger end of this age range, we wondered?

As this video and others of the same ilk demonstrate, kids *love* the iPhone and even some 2 year olds have no problem finding their way around:

For more videos of kids using the iPhone click here.

The Pew Internet Project released a data memo this morning on Adults and Video Games. Among their main findings:

More than half - 53% - of all American adults play video games of some kind, whether on a computer, on a gaming console, on a cell phone or other handheld device, on a portable gaming device, or online.

Age is the biggest demographic factor in game play by adults. Younger adults are significantly more likely than any other game group to play games, and as age increases game play decreases. Independent of all other factors, younger adults are still more likely to play games.

Among older adults 65+ who play video games, nearly a third play games everyday, a significantly larger percentage than all younger players, of whom about 20% play everyday.

Age is also a factor in determining an individual’s preferred game-playing device. Gaming consoles are the most popular for young adults: 75% of 18-29 year old gamers play on consoles, compared with 68% who use computers, the second most popular device for this age group.

Out of all the gaming devices, computers are the most popular among the total adult gaming population, with 73% of adult gamers using computers to play games, compared with 53% console users, 35% who using cell phones, and 25% using portable gaming devices.

The full text of the  memo is available as a PDF file here:
http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Adult_gaming_memo.pdf

I received an email this morning from a friend who paraphrased Monty Python’s Blue Parrot sketch to describe the financial meltdown:

This financial system is no more! It has ceased to be! ‘It’s expired and gone to meet its maker! ‘It’s a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If you hadn’t nailed ‘it to the tax payer’s perch it’d be pushing up the daisies! ‘Its metabolic processes are now ‘istory! ‘It’s off the twig! It’s kicked the bucket, it’s shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir indivisible!! THIS IS AN EX-FINANCIAL SYSTEM!!

It may be an ex-financial system for now but as with all cycles — natural or man-made — I’m confident of a turn-around. Soon I hope, at some point for sure. In that spirit let me turn the paraphrase around and back to the original. Enjoy, happy turkey (or tofurkey) to all and long live the parrot!

Was the meltdown of the financial system predicted by events in the online virtual world Second Life more than a year ago?

Alan Greenspan, former head of the Federal Reserve, admitted last month that lending institutions could not always be trusted to regulate themselves. Really? Then maybe the 2007 collapse of Second Life’s virtual bank Ginko Financial can be instructive. In a post for MSNBC.com Jeremy Hsu writes,

Virtual economies in games such as Second Life and EVE Online may seem trivial, but they actually can provide real-life lessons on the patterns of free markets and unfettered capitalism. Researchers and self-described virtual economists have observed how virtual entrepreneurs establish themselves and compete, as well as how a lack of self-regulation can lead to dramatic banking failures, scams and even corporate espionage.

“I don’t view ‘Second Life’ as a game,” said Robert Bloomfield, an accounting researcher at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. “I view it as a market space.”

Should we have seen it coming? Reuters reported on 2L’s unregulated banking in 2006 and Wired magazine reported a run on the virtual banks of Second Life was possible months before it happened. And a panel discussion a year ago about the virtual financial crisis and “take over” of Geko Financial in Second Life seems to be particularly prescient. In that incident, Lindon Labs effectively shut down Second Life’s unregulated in-world banking system with predictable consequences:

The end came when panicked investors began withdrawing their virtual money, known as Linden dollars in the game and exchangeable for U.S. dollars at a rate of roughly 250 Linden dollars to one U.S. dollar. Ginko did not have enough reserves to pay up. When the bank finally announced it was finished, an equivalent of $750,000 in real-world U.S. dollars went up in smoke. The collapse not only wiped out time spent earning Linden dollars in the game, but also hit the wallets of players who had legally paid U.S. dollars to buy Linden dollars. 

“The ‘Second Life’ financial markets have pretty much been unregulated,” Bloomfield told LiveScience. “There are accusations that people are doing everything from questionable behavior to outright fraud.” (Jeremy Hsu’s report for MSNBC continues here.)

Questionable behavior and outright fraud? I’m not an economist by a long shot but those words do ring true about now. And though virtual worlds are, well, virtual, by providing a portal to human behavior they can deliver real value in unexpected ways… if we pay attention.