2009 year-in-review roundup

Lots of news websites are posting 2009 retrospectives. Here are some that I found interesting or entertaining.

Time magazine has compiled what it calls “The Top 10 of Everything.” Among the topics are the top 10 news stories, heroes, scientific discoveries, medical breakthroughs, apologies, and scandals.
Thankfully Time has included a full list on one page so you can see a summary of its picks.
I also liked Time’s photo essay “Stores That Are No More.” Photographer Brian Ulrich’s images explore the haunted shells of America’s devastated retail landscape. Circuit City and Linens ’N Things are featured among the shuttered retail stores.

The website Good put together an interesting graphic that shows the biggest news stories of the year. It visually shows which stories held the public’s attention the longest and got the most coverage.

Techmeme compiled its list of the “Top 10 objectively biggest tech stories of 2009.” It leads off with the introduction of Google’s Chrome operating system.

TechCrunch posted an article at Seeking Alpha on the biggest tech acquisitions of the year. The biggest – Oracle’s $7.4 billion purchase of Sun Microsystems – is still pending regulatory approval.

On the entertainment front, the Nielsen Co. released a list of the top 10 most popular TV shows, movies, music, books and other media for 2009. Particularly interesting were the top 10 time-shifted TV shows (“Battlestar Galactica” was No. 1) and best-selling non-fiction books (“Act Like A Lady, Think Like A Man: What Men Really Think About Love, Relationships Intimacy, And Commitment” by Steve Harvey was tops).

Netflix revealed the top 10 most rented movies on its service. (“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” was No. 1.)

Flixster users rated the best movies of the year, with “Avatar” coming in first.

TorrentFreak compiled a list of the top 10 most pirated movies of the year. “Star Trek” came in first with nearly 11 million illegal downloads.

Turner Classic Movies released its annual end-of-the-year memorial tribute video to all of the actors and industry professionals who passed away during 2009. It’s posted on GeekTyrant.

Photo:
Certainly one of the top news stories of the year was the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States. Here’s a March 2006 photo of my father-in-law, Albert Eisele, telling then Sen. Obama, D-Ill., a joke outside the Chicago Tribune’s Washington bureau. Eisele, a veteran political reporter, is editor at large with The Hill.