X OF THE YEAR

ABC News has crowned bloggers their "People of the Year."

This means that there are now thousands of blogs that begin with "ABC News has crowned bloggers their 'People of the Year.'"

Time Magazine crowned George W. Bush their "Person of the Year." Probably not as many bloggers happy about that, but hey, at least we can be comforted by the fact that more people get their news from ABC news than from any other news source (a tagline, by the way, not actual fact), and that there're a lot more bloggers than George W.'s.

Of course, it only takes one President to run a country, and even millions of bloggers can't change that.

On the other hand, blogging is probably the closest thing to the democracy in action the internet was originally promised to be, even though there are undoubtedly as many blogs concerned with "celebrity boobs" as with "politicians who are boobs." Go ahead, google 'em and see if I'm wrong.

Maybe "google" should be the verb of the year. For me, "Masterverb" is my 'verb of the year (note the apostrophe), mostly because it's affordable and doesn't take up a lot of processing power.

My free plug in of the year is Elemental Audio Systems' Inspector, a really nice spectral analyzer and level meter that lets you know why the bass sounds so screwed up on your walkman headphones.

My record of the year is "Sorrow" by the Defense Department Chamber Orchestra, the only thing I've ever had a hand in that got played on the radio. It's funny, you can write lines for Jon Stewart, meet Bob Dole and John McCain, stand on the floor at the Republican National Convention (the Philly one, that is, back in 2000), and chill with an insult comic dog, but the highlight of your career can still be listening to NPR in a bar.

My X of the year is Mac OSX, and you can see the blogs below to find out why.