A look at the 20 stories in 2006 that touched my life in a positive, non-inappropriate kind of way.

Savvy living stories from awesome people

• Hungry for a month: "how I ate for $1 a day"

• Restaurant that let's you decide how much you pay

• 10 friends live second hand for a year

• Top 10 advantages of low-rent living

• You can learn a lot from a rich girl: guerilla tactics for obliterating debt (followup)

• High school teacher reduces electric bill by two-thirds using "boring" conservation techniques

Consumer tips and protection

• Best Buy: "Sir we need to see your receipt" You: "Um, no you don't"

• Why you should never sign the back of your credit cards

• The Truth About Rich Dad Poor Dad - What Robert Kiyosaki Does Not Want You to Know

• Urban camouflage: how to park anywhere

• There's small print, there's fine print, and then there's mouseprint

• 20 free ways to save energy

Just plain cool

• Children with low self-esteem are more materialistic

• 25 signs that sadly, you've grown up

• What different parts of the world eat in one week

• Ten recurring economic fallacies

• You can't afford to be poor

• Marriage is for white people

• Being hungry makes you smarter

• Don't Misunderestimate Yourself: Why people think their rivals are better than they actually are

I hope you enjoy these stories as much as I have. If you feel cheated because you've actually read all these stories before, you should give me a call. We need to hang out, and if you're kind of cute, maybe have kids together.

18 blogs responsible for top 100 blog posts of 2006: This is why reddit matters

I found all the stories above through reddit, the best social bookmarking community around. I wanted to point that out because it seems that despite the increase of diversity in the blogosphere, a lot of the information is still being channeled through a select group of elite bloggers.

Nielsen BuzzMetrics recently reported that a "small cluster of power bloggers - focused on politics, blogging and humor - were responsible for the top 100 blog posts for 2006." Here are the top 10 posts on the list:

1. 2006 petition against changes in Livejournal's interface (Mother.livejournal.com)

2. Colbert does the White House correspondent's dinner (Crooks and Liars)

3. Keith Olbermann Delivers One Hell Of a Commentary on Rumsfeld (Crooks and Liars)

4. State of the Blogosphere, August 2006 (Sifry's Alerts)

5. Keith Olbermann’s Comment on Bush: Who has left this hole in the ground (Crooks and Liars)

6. Support Denmark : why the forbidden cartoons matter (Michelle Malkin)

7. SNL: If Al Gore were president (Crooks and Liars)

8. Milking it? (EU Referendum)

9. State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 1: on Blogosphere Growth (Sifry's Alerts)

10. State of the Blogosphere, April 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth (Sifry's Alerts)

Crooks and Liars alone is responsible for 4 of the top posts!

If Time magazine is right about the Internet being a "tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter," then shouldn't more individual blogs be on that list?

This is why reddit is so valuable and why I tell people about it every chance I get (case in point: now). The 20 stories I listed above all made the front page of reddit. And none of them were produced by the 18 uber blogs.

Many of the stories I posted are truly grassroots stories that are intensely personal and interesting--and if you weren't reading reddit, you might've missed them.

reddit v. Digg

Digg is also a great news source but it has a tendency to bury some of the more unique stories. All of the stories on my list were submitted to both Digg and reddit. While all those stories made reddit's front page, many of them languished in Digg obscurity. For example:

Compare that with:

Other examples:

• Hungry for a month: "how I ate for $1 a day 26 diggs

• Top 10 advantages of low-rent living 4 diggs

• The Truth About Rich Dad Poor Dad - What Robert Kiyosaki Does Not Want You to Know 10 diggs

• There's small print, there's fine print, and then there's mouseprint 2 diggs

• Children with low self-esteem are more materialistic 11 diggs

I know this is a very unscientifically small sample, but hungryforamonth is clearly one of the top human interest stories of the year. Leaving it off Digg's home page is like asking Michael Jordan to sit out a couple of All Star games. The $1 a day story did make a splash on Digg a bit later as a repost--24 days later. Better late than never, I suppose.

I can't tell you why reddit succeeds where digg has failed. But here's my personal thanks to the reddit team. Please keep that little alien up and running so I can continue to explore all the wonderful complexities of the human experience the blogosphere has to offer.

(Special thanks to Douglas for the additional link suggestions for Violent Acres.)

Photo by myradphotos under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.