Following in the footsteps of the 2009 and 2010 year in reviews I wanted to continue the year end ritual. I am surprised by how much has stayed consistent (top artists, quietest online search month) but there were a few new trends I didn’t expect.
Top 10 Google Queries
1. northlands park, edmonton
2. alberta downs race track, lacombe, ab
3. evergreen park, grande prairie
4. Rocky Mountain Turf Club, Lethbridge, Alberta
5. peggy’s footwerks
6. google analytics
7. peggysfootwerks
8. made in frame
9. peggys footwerks
10. peggy’sfootwerks
The top four results are work related for the Horse Racing Alberta website I managed. I have no idea why they were ranked so high amongst everything else. I also can’t explain why I needed to search for “northlands park, edmonton” as frequently as I did.
The rest of the search results were all related to a side business and seeing how high Peggy’s Footwerks was ranking on Google. In the end I was able to add the site to Google and have it hit on keywords so I no longer receive phone calls asking “why they can’t find the site in Google”.
I used my personal Gmail account to look at my Web History so the results are from searching while logged in with that account. My busiest month for searching was in August with 1,667 queries recorded, and my least active month was in June with 864. These numbers are up from last year but June returned as my least active search month, which is a bizarre trend.
Top 10 sites
1. en.wikipedia.org
2. www.google.com
3. www.imdb.com
4. answers.yahoo.com
5. www.amazon.com
6. www.ehow.com
7. androidforums.com
8. forum.xda-developers.com
9. market.android.com
10. twitter.com
Wikipedia dominates my top sites again. I honestly don’t think I go there that often but I guess every article about someone or something leads me to Wikipedia so I imagine that adds up over time. I like that Android sites appeared in this list, even though before September the notion of leaving iOS seemed crazy to me.
Top 10 Artists
1. The White Stripes (695 plays)
2. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard (631 plays)
3. The Beatles (542 plays)
4. Tegan and Sara (541 plays)
5. Michael Giacchino 482 plays)
6. U2 (411 plays)
7. Coldplay (357 plays)
8. Daft Punk (338 plays)
9. Rob Costlow (335 plays)
10. Ludovico Einaudi (329 plays)
Standard affair with this list: White Stripes, soundtrack or orchestral…plus a few other bands thrown in for good measure. Rob Costlow was a newcomer this year, but Daft Punk is stuck in there solely for the Tron Legacy soundtrack. I listened to the soundtrack for months before I saw the movie, and when I saw the movie all I focused on was the music.
What I don’t understand is how I listen to The Beatles that much. I like their music but I rarely say “Yes, I want to listen to all of The White Album”, but somehow they claimed the third most listened to artist this year. Sadly, there was no Bear McCreary. Battlestar Galactica is getting a lot of play time, especially the Solo Piano albums, but McCreary didn’t perform those songs so any plays for that were credited to Joohyun Park.
Top 10 Tracks
1. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – A Dark Knight (29 plays)
2. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – Bank Robbery (Prologue) (27 plays)
3. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – Buyer Beware (26 plays)
3. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – Halfway to Hong Kong (26 plays)
5. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – Decent Men In An Indecent Time (25 plays)
6. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – A Watchful Guardian (24 plays)
7. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – You’re Gonna Love Me (23 plays)
8. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – Chance (22 plays)
9. The White Stripes – Astro (21 plays)
9. Rob Costlow – Bliss (21 plays)
9. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – You Complete Me (21 plays)
9. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – We Are Tonight’s Entertainment (21 plays)
9. Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – The Ferries (21 plays)
There are 13 songs listed here because of the five way tie for ninth spot. Last year “Inception” lead the way in music, and this year it was “The Dark Knight”. Odds are good that next year Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard will lead the way with “The Dark Knight Rises”.
With regards to air travel 2011 was the lowest in recent years with a pretty painless extended weekend trip to San Diego amassing 3200 miles covered. I drove my VW Jetta TDI over 13,000 kilometers and filled up the vehicle 17 times (the same number last year). I have gone two calendar years in a row without completing a police report, and I received no speeding tickets or anything incriminating like that against me.
My decline in blogging continued this year. Including this post there have been 23 entries made in 2011. The majority of those were reviewing my experience with Telus TV and my switch to Android. There hasn’t been much to report on, or anything worth updating about, which is apparent because I made a third less tweets this year with 188. I also made 41 posts on Tumblr. As expected there were no Facebook status updates either.
I like social networking but I also don’t want to bother people with hourly updates or useless tweets containing song lyrics or writing about how much food I ate. I think my decrease in Tweets was related to not posting every time I updated my Project 365. If people want to see the photos they know how to find them, and spamming them doesn’t do anything more than get a few more image views.
I sent roughly 407 emails from my @gmail.com and @seangursky.com email accounts and 52 from my @hotmail.com address. My @gmail.com and @seangursky.com usage increased a bit compared to last year but @hotmail.com dropped a bit. What I did write from @hotmail.com was mostly Kijiji related, so maybe the shift is related to using Gmail for more communication.
I made one order with amazon.ca, two with amazon.com, one with monoprice.com and none with Deal Extreme or amazon.co.uk.
Rough calculations are that I took nearly 5,200 photos with my Canon 5D this year. There was a few week period where the camera was in for repair but any photos I took with the iPhone or backup Pentax Optio were inconsequential. 5,200 is fewer photos than I took last year (7,850) but there was no two week long vacation to soak up a thousand odd photos.
All in all 2011 seems pretty quiet. Even when we tell people what we were up to the usual answer is “house stuff”. You add in a few months of Ice Dragons summer hockey, a couple trips to the cabin at Lac la Biche and you have the year in review.
2011 is in the books, I have a few things I’m looking forward to in 2012 and I’m sure the numbers will reflect that (I predict exceeding 9,000 photos taken) but we’ll see how it all shakes down in 366 days.
