12.23
The end of 2010 marks about a year in Shanghai for me, and over 100 posts on this blog. As I did at the end of 2009, here’s a list of some of the top posts of the year, according to PostRank and Google Analytics (I’m not sure why they’re so different). As for other people’s “best of” lists, the only one I’ve seen this year is Time’s, and I was especially interested in their Top 10 Buzzwords of 2010 (is it because I live in China, or just because I’m getting older that I recognize so few of them?).
Top six Semantic Argument posts of 2010, in descending order, according to PostRank:
And according to Google Analytics:
Happy holidays (and happy birthday, Adam)! Talk to you in 2011!
11.14
And you don’t even have to be a sausage biscuit. I tweeted about it twice and posted to LinkedIn, but in case you somehow managed to miss that expertly coordinated social media campaign (kidding), Labbrand is hiring brand strategists. As the job posting states, we’d prefer applicants with “China experience” (including language fluency, familiarity with cultural norms, knowledge of local brands, some travel experience within the country, etc.) and brand strategy experience (working at a brand consulting firm or something related). Ten months in Shanghai has taught me that it isn’t easy to find people with expertise on both fronts (although of course they exist), so we’re open to candidates that have one or the other, with the potential and interest to attain both. Please forward any good candidates to me, or to the job posting. Thanks!
12.21
In December in the US, perhaps the only thing that competes with what one of my friends referred to as “the explosive force of an American Christmas” is year-end list building. Or decade-end lists, in this case. A few I’ve noticed so far this year are BuzzSugar’s Top 20 Favorite Movies of the Decade, Time’s Top 10 Everything of 2009, and The Pollywog Blog’s Best and Worst Brand Names of 2009 (don’t be shocked if I have more to say about this last one in a later post).
February 2010 will mark a year since my first few posts on Semantic Argument, but in the spirit of the season, now seems like a better time to do a “year” in review. According to PostRank, here are the top five posts on this blog, in order:
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11.10
When I was a kid I got bored a lot (and whined about it, I’m sure). Presumably to shut me up, my parents kept a box of “activities” for me—little creative projects for kids, torn out of magazines or jotted down on scraps of paper. I specifically remember being 4 or 5, sitting at the top of the stairs at our house in Dartmouth (UK, not MA), and yelling something like “Can I do an activity?!”
I hope this isn’t a window into my childhood that I’ll later regret publishing.
Anyway, I can’t remember what the activities were now, but I still have that insatiable urge to make things. Combined with a really short attention span, this urge sometimes draws me to useless little projects, so I’ve started creating a list when I hear such projects mentioned. In essence, I’m making my own box of activities. Can’t rely on Mom and Dad’s ideas forever, y’know.
So far I’ve mentioned two such activities on Semantic Argument:
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06.26
I have several complaints about the recently announced expansion of the best picture nominees from five to ten.
- Confusion. Our short term memory only allows us to consider about five to nine items at once, making ten too many by at least one. It’s relatively easy to think of five things and choose your favorite. Ten requires you to do something like write them down and assign scores to each. Is the Academy unaware of integers between five and ten?
- Faulty logic. One of the main reasons cited for the change is that the Academy has been perceived as “elitist” in recent years for ignoring crowd favorites. But isn’t this the point of a professional critique—to choose the elite? Crowd favorites can easily be determined by looking at the box office returns, or the number of tickets sold—or by letting anyone vote instead of just Academy members.
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04.20
Are you a fireman, astronaut, or ballerina? Odds are against it, but if you have kids who look up to you, you may have sometimes wished you chose to do something a little more…inspiring. Thanks to a soon-to-be-published book by the founders of Taproot Foundation, your workaday career may have a shot at capturing your kid’s imagination after all.
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