The top six stories of 2009 from Tech Sanity Check

Jason Hiner: There's no way around the fact that 2009 was a tumultuous and challenging year for most businesses, but in the tech world the innovation trains kept running. As always I wrote about a lot of the most interesting new technologies and trends in my blog, Tech Sanity Check.

I'm Jason Hiner, and this week we're going to look at some of this year's top trends by counting down your six most popular articles from Tech Sanity Check in 2009. Stay tuned.

So let's count them down.

Number 6: Techies: The top 10 people you should follow on Twitter

Before Twitter came out with its new feature for Lists of users in the fall, I made a list of the 10 best techies to follow on Twitter back in February. Later in 2009, I also published a directory of 100 tech experts on Twitter.

Number 5: MSI X340 Slim: The best laptop you've never heard of

MSI doesn't do a ton of advertising so the X340 Slim is definitely under the radar. This article explains why it's a great alternative to the MacBook Air, the Dell Adamo, and even most netbooks.

Number 4: Netbooks are dead. Long live the notebook.

In this opinion piece, I argued that the original 7-inch netbooks with squashed screens and tiny keyboards are a dead trend, and that's a good thing. What were once called netbooks are not now just slightly smaller and cheaper laptops, so let's just get rid of the term "netbook" altogether.

Number 3: Windows 7 report card: The hits and misses

One of the biggest tech events of the year was the official launch of the new version of Windows in October. I offered my take on where Windows 7 hit it out of the park and where it missed the mark.

Number 2: Radiation threats: The 10 most potentially hazardous smartphones

Based on research from the Environmental Working Group, I published a list of the 10 smartphones that emit the most radiation and the 10 smartphones with the lowest radiation. It's important to remember that no correlations have been made between cell phone radiation and human disease, but lots of research still needs to done and in the meantime it's good for people to be informed about their phones.

And Number 1: Five super-secret features in Windows 7

The intro to this article goes like this: "I dug around in Windows 7 and discovered some super-secret features. It's possible I was sabotaged, but I've decided to go public with my discoveries." As you can tell, this piece was a parody and was completely done for fun, and most of you got the joke. Unfortunately, I'm still getting serious emails every week from people asking about the hidden Windows 7 feature for turning normal LCDs into touchscreens.

In all seriousness, I'd like to take this opportunity to say thank you to all of you who regularly read my articles and watch these videos. I really appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedule and I hope that the work I do is helpful and useful. If there's something specific you'd like to see me cover in 2010, click the contact link at the top of my blog and drop me a line.

I'm Jason Hiner, and this has been an episode of Tech Sanity Check. For more, you can find the Tech Sanity Check blog at sanity.techrepublic.com, and you find me on Twitter at twitter.com/jasonhiner. Thanks for watching. See you next week.