Best of the Net 2006

I started writing a best of 2006 about a week ago, however I’ve had to break that down into several posts because it got far too large and I didn’t feel that I would be doing each topic justice, if I bulked all of them into one post. So for the first topic of conversation I’ll talk about the best of the Net for 2006. This is mainly about design on the net, internet applications, websites that caught my attention on the net for one reason or another. So without further adieu here’s the Squeaky Kode Trophies for the year of 2006.

Addictive Site of the Year

Advertising/Design Goodness. This is the one of those sites that even though I might have 500 unread items in my feed reader, I’ll most definitely jump to this site and have a look and see what’s new. The reason is pretty simple really, it provides me with inspiration every single time. Although I hate adverts, I absolutely LOVE good ads. A good ad will go a long way with me to be honest, and this site brings the very best of the advertising world right to your feed reader, generally speaking every day.

Best Advert of 2006

Sony Bravia Paint. On a similar note to the topic above, I couldn’t really not mention the new Sony Bravia advert. How do you top the supreme bouncy balls advert of last year? I’ll tell you how, using a hell of a lot of paint. You’d think this was probably the only advert I’d seen that was special, and I’ve got to say that it definitely had some stiff competition from the Citroen Mutations advert.

Best Designed Site of the Year

UXmag came out of nowhere as far as I’m concerned. Very very slick sight, it combined that attention to detail that Subtraction has and ran it all of a Textpattern install. What I love about it is the attention to detail, the fact that it resizes according to the size of the browser without really loosing any of it’s design intent. I think that’s an absolutely fabulous design for a news portal. I also really enjoyed seeing what Phu’s been doing with his site as well. Honourable mentions include Dave Shea’s new redesign, although his previous design was pretty timeless, the orange and blues really worked very well. Of course Shaun Inman also did a bit of a redesign job which I thought was an interesting concept . Watching Michael sort out his site for several months was fun, so the ‘new’ trend of a live redesign seems to be making a bit of a come back (Mike was ahead of that trend it would seem).

Best Internet Application

Up until last year, I’ve got to say that I only every used personally hosted services, however this year I’ve expanded to several other services that I’ve found to be crucial in how I enjoy the internet. The first on the list was Ma.gnolia. You’re probably using another social bookmarking service out there, I decided on this one because it was well designed. I know sounds fickle, but I’m a fickle designer that likes to be surrounded by nice things.

It’s taken me a long while but I finally bit the bug as well and got myself an pro account as well. I’ve got to say that I don’t use it as much as I should do but that will be changing in the not to distant future.

For my feed reading I’ve jumped on the Newsgator bandwagon. I’ve got a lot to write about with respect to FOFRedux and will hopefully go to using that application in the not too distant future sometime next year, but in the meanwhile I’ve found the Newsgator service to be exactly what I was looking for.

So I guess it’s not so much that I had a specific internet application, but rather the fact that I actually decided to use several of the plethora of applications out there for use in the first place.

Best Internet Related Software

Firefox 2. Yeah, what did you expect? If you haven’t tried this little browser yet, make your peace with the other browser you’re using and head on over to take back the internet your way. My favourite feature of the new ‘version’ (sorry it should have been 1.6, but I can understand it for marketing purposes) is the dictionary in the text fields, restore session and automatically restart after an update. The icons are also pretty cool I thought as well.

Best Firefox Plugin

Firebug. Yeah well, I created this particular category because FIrebug really blew my mind as I honestly thought that there was no way you could top the Web Developer Plugin which I can’t do anything without, and then comes this exceptional plugin that serious makes my life a lot more easy and lays everything in front of me in a clear manner that was otherwise obscured.

Blogging Networks Politics

While I know it wasn’t fun for any of the 9rulers out there to see our network’s name dragged into the mud, it made for interesting reading to be included in the internet gossip pages. One thing I will comment on however was the fact that Blogging Networks in general felt as though they were soo much less important this year than in previous years. Yeah I’m including the venture capital funding that b5media received. I might be feeling that way due to the fact that networks and the interaction I was having with the people in the network was less this year than in previous years.

If you think I’ve missed something pretty fundamental just drop a comment and I’ll be sure to add it into the list or create a whole new category for it.