Most popular posts of 2012

Is it that time of year already? Yes, it is. This is the first in a series of posts looking back at what I’ve done and how people reacted, being a list of the most-read posts on this website from 2012.

Like last year, there’s not a lot to choose from because most of my writing is done elsewhere these days. Indeed, there are very few posts apart from the Weekly Wrap posts and the Conversations podcast that contains the radio and TV spots I do. That means some rather mundane pieces of writing, such as the Weekly Wrap, end up on the list. I intend to change this in 2013.

  1. Twitter screwed up TweetDeck, so here’s the old version, being a place to download the old Adobe AIR version of the popular Twitter client, the last one before Twitter screwed it up.
  2. Weekly Wrap 101: Codeine and counter-surveillance. I’ve no idea why this routine post proved more popular than usual.
  3. Two casually racist encounters concerning Auburn, the first item on the list that’s something like the essay-style blog posts I used to do.
  4. Flame gets me talking cyberwar worms on The Project, containing video of my first appearance on the Channel TEN program, The Project.
  5. cPanel’s new EULA: more software industry arrogance?, in which I complain that it’s a bit rich to present a new end-user license agreement at the moment new software is being installed on a production server.
  6. Insulted, ASIO? That’s not really the problem, surely?, an essay that continued my thoughts from that week’s Patch Monday podcast.
  7. Separated at birth: Bob Katter and Ben Grubb?, which is reasonably self-explanatory.
  8. Talking new internet domains on ABC RN Sunday Extra, which is also self-explanatory.
  9. Weekly Wrap 118: Planes, pains and delays
  10. Twitter Discourse 1: Fuck off, swearing is my birthright. I never did get around to writing Twitter Discourse 2.

And here are the 10 most-read posts of 2012 that weren’t written in 2012.

  1. Right, Google, you stupid cunts, this is simply not on! So far in 2012 there’s been more than 115,000 view of this story, which was originally written in August 2011, but I know that a good proportion of these were bots trying to post spam comments.
  2. Most popular posts of 2009, which is a tad meta.
  3. MOAR PANELZ: Board with Security?, which I find rather odd given that this is a completely ordinary piece announcing a forthcoming event.
  4. The Great Firewall of China: how it works, how to bypass it, from August 2008.
  5. Jim Wallace’s pro-censorship lies and distortions, from January 2009.
  6. Fisting Twitter and the birth of “trend fisting”, which was all about the night I fisted Twitter. I’m saddened that the term “trend fisting” never took off.
  7. Conroy’s speech to ALIA Information Online 2009, which is exactly what it says.
  8. Exhausted by the Future of Media, which is a routine status update and certainly not worth this level of readership.
  9. Vodafone only half-useful, a piece from September 2006 documenting yet another aspect of Vodafone’s incompetence.
  10. My new hero: Hideki Moronuki, my trolling of the anti-whaling forces from January 2008.

If you’d like to compare this with previous years, try these: