While wandering the net this year I've encountered an abundance of great writing, media and commentary. Some of this material has made enough of an impression on me that it remains with me in my day to day thoughts. What follows are some personal highlights from content published this past year.

[bruce sterling - man of many decals / photo: brianfit]

Culture / Politics

While most of the techno-chatter emanating from South by Southwest this year was about Twitter, it was Bruce Sterling's closing talk that left a real impression on me.

This fall, Naomi Wolf delivered a fantastic lecture, The End of America: Letter of Warning To A Young Patriot, which meticulously outlined the erosion of civil liberties in post-9/11 America.

I've been too busy reading about database aesthetics to get to Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine yet, but I certainly enjoyed the short film Alfonso Cuarón created to promote the book.

Aside from Left, Right & Center, techPresident is probably my favourite source of analysis on the buildup to the 2008 American presidential election. This site continues to yield nuanced, non-partisan discussion and commentary on the various Republican and Democratic hopefuls through the lens of mobile technology, social media and web presence.

Online Culture / Social Media

My favourite text on the ascent of Facebook was penned by Ian Bogost of Persuasive Games. His essay, A Professor's Impressions of Facebook, was a thoughtful meditation on strong and weak ties and how they are qualified through social networking.

Once Brad Fitzpatrick initiated the conversation about interoperability, many great posts on the topic followed throughout the rest of the year. My personal favourite is probably Jyri Engeström's Opening up the Social Graph.

Mark Marino just published Writing in the Margins, a concise text on the connections between annotation-oriented social bookmarking and proto-hypertext authors such as Borges, Calvino and Joyce.

[joel sanders, karen van lengen and ben rubin / mix house]

Architecture / Urbanism

Undoubtedly my favourite text on urban space penned this year was Geoff Manaugh's Greater Los Angeles, in which he absolutely nails the absurd quality of everyday life in Southern California. This text is a piece of standout writing, even by BLDGBLOG standards.

Bryan Finoki conducted an illuminating interview with "military urbanism" theorist Stephen Graham. This two-part discussion addresses the city after terrorism and considers the influence of globalization and "defense" and "control" architecture on urban space.

The discussion at Digital Urban continues to blur the line between architecture, gaming and digital representation. It is not so much a matter of identifying a single post as stating that this blog is right in the thick of an emerging field.

Gaming / Simulation

Gamasutra has recently begun a series of posts documenting early gaming platforms. I'm generally not that nostalgic of a creature but I was completely enthralled by their history of the Commodore 64. I cut my teeth on the C64 and I really enjoyed this reference.

This past fall Mike Danziger launched Visual Methods, a blog to document his research on "information visualization for the people" at MIT. His text Visualizing Halo 3 is an exploration of Bungie's gameplay-analytics visualizations for the multiplayer version of the popular first person shooter. Mike's review of these tools was quite lucid and left me wondering why there isn't more writing like this coming from within the gaming community.

Joe McNeilly wrote a provocative feminist reading of Portal, part of an add-on pack for Valve's Half-Life 2. It was also quite hilarious to watch the (male-centric) digg community respond to this very popular review.

[philipp steinweber & andreas koller / similar diversity]

Art / Aesthetics

Paul Prudence's dataisnature is a key reference for the world of software art. That said, it was really refreshing to read about his experience encountering László Moholy-Nagy's Light Space Modulator.

Alex Munt delivered the most lucid readings of "Lynchian space" that I've encountered in a while with his short essay Inland Empire: The Cinema in Trouble?

Mitchell Whiteslaw conducted a sprawling interview with Mark Fell last month. Fell is one half of SND, one of my favourite musical projects from the Mille Plateaux years.

It has been super-fascinating to watch Marius Watz steer his Generator.x project towards the intersection of generative art and digital fabrication. I particularly enjoyed his rundown of the Project to Surface show in NYC this summer. I'm looking forward to seeing what comes of the Beyond the Screen workshop & expo at Club Transmediale in several weeks.

Ongoing Projects

I'm an enthusiastic participant in Burak Arikan's Meta-Markets project. I think this economic simulation, which facilitates the exchange of units of social media, is the most engaging web project I've encountered this year.

The CONT3XT.NET bookmark driven curatorial experiment TAGallery continues to impress me [see previous post for some commentary on the project].

For pure fun, ffffound! is something I use and explore every day.

Curating this kind of a "best of" list is somewhat of a doomed endeavour. I've attempted to pull together a lot of my favourite material from the year and no doubt forgot just as many engaging posts and projects as I included. If nothing else, hopefully some of these links are new to you folks.