The Top Stories of 2009

The seventh most popular word on my list for 2009 of the most commonly used new words is 'hashtag'. 

The hashtag - '#' - is used to preface a word on twitter so you can show it's really relevant to that subject, rather than loosely related to it.

For example, searching for #lost should find things that are more likely about Lost, the TV Show, than people just tweeting "I lost my wallet", you would hope.

So I might talk about banks as '#banks'.  This creates an index category where, whenever anyone tweets about #banks, it will all be in a searchable list like so:

So what were the top hashtag subjects of 2009?

Well, here's the official list from Twitter:

... and you can see that there's a whole range of things in there from Susan Boyle to Harry Potter. Mashable then did a very nice analysis of these tags to come up with a view as to what these tweets tell us about our lives today.

Meanwhile, if you were wondering, here are the most searched for terms on Google from young users:

I do wonder why under seven-year olds are searching for 'porn', but there you go.

Meantime, being a banking oriented person, the top stories in 2009 related to banking according to Google includes:

• World markets stung by banking worries
• Man latest to plead guilty in federal probe of Swiss banking giant UBS
• House banking panel votes to regulate derivatives
• Bank of America to repay bailout
• World stocks hit by banking fears, Barclays slumps

Hmmm ... seems about right to me.

Finally, my favourite story of 2009 has to be this one:

The Mystery of Ireland's Worst Driver

Details of how police in the Irish Republic finally caught up
with the country's most reckless driver have emerged, the Irish Times
reports.

He had been wanted from counties Cork to Cavan after racking up scores of speeding tickets and parking fines.

However, each time the serial offender was stopped he managed to evade justice by giving a different address.

But then his cover was blown.

It
was discovered that the man every member of the Irish police's rank and
file had been looking for - a Mr Prawo Jazdy - wasn't exactly the sort
of prized villain whose apprehension leads to an officer winning an
award.

In fact he wasn't even human.

Prawo Jazdy is actually the Polish for driving licence and not the first and surname on the licence.