The year that was — in Crikey website traffic:

  1. Why power generators are terrified of solar | Giles Parkinson
  2. Nerf guns at 10 paces: Hasbro faces boycott after siccing lawyers onto fan site | Andrew Crook
  3. The Boston fishing party and Australians’ rights online | Bernard Keane
  4. Did I mention Juliar has been bullying the mining industry? | First Dog on the Moon
  5. The flight from Fairfax: who’s leaving the building?
  6. Jill Meagher case: Bolt, Twitter users warned on comment | Matthew Knott
  7. Best man left bleeding after being hit in head by flying d-ldo | Richard Farmer
  8. … then where will we be? | First Dog on the Moon
  9. ALP spill: day 2 — Rudd will challenge | Amber Jamieson
  10. Newman v gays: where else but Queensland? | Drew Sheldrick

What do we learn? Stories take on a life of their own when they get picked up on Reddit (the first two). Bernard Keane’s year-long series on privacy and online censorship holds intense interest (it helps when the rest of the media doesn’t care). The long list of staff culled at Fairfax is one everyone wanted to read — and many wanted to be on. You probably didn’t even remember Kevin Rudd challenged Julia Gillard for the prime ministership in February, such were the political storms that came after. You loved First Dog on the Moon’s treatments — especially when he wins a Walkley for it. And putting the word “d-ldo” in headlines is bound to drag in the global Google crowd.

And so we end the year the way we started: Gillard is the prime minister but still on the nose; Barack Obama is the US president but still with a daunting agenda to tackle; Malcolm Turnbull is still the most shaggable man in Canberra (really, folks?); everyone has “questions to answer” (including us, probably) but there’s few very good answers; there were important societal shifts in 2012 — Bernard Keane offers an essay-length take today — but you have to look hard for them.

And that’s about as philosophical as we’re going to get on this Christmas Eve, our final edition of 2012. There’s eggnog calling. It’s your engagement — the good, the bad and the ugly — that made us tick in 2012. Come back for more from January 7.