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As we come to the end of another year, many of us will reflect back on things we’ve experienced, lessons learned, and just everything the last 12 months brought us. 2011 has been an incredible year filled with tons of important world events as well as a lot of interesting celebrity events and gossip. Sadly, but not surprisingly, “interesting” squashes “important” online, putting celebrity news and gossip far ahead of important world events when we measure our digital voice online. Frugal Dad put together the following infographic, showing what the world found compelling enough to search for, share and talk about on Google, Facebook, and Twitter.

Source: http://frugaldad.com

What was the single most important piece of news you shared this year (online or off)?

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This morning, I received an email about a new site. I’m familiar with Digg, Mixx, and all the sites like them, so when I was asked to review FlameUp.com, I figured the least I could do is go look.

Getting started
I headed over and signed up last week. The signup was pretty simple, but even before signing up, I found what I feared – an incredibly negative atmosphere – but that means something is working. FlameUp is a Digg-like site, but instead of submitting entertaing, inspirational, or shocking articles, users submit rants about whatever gets them all heated up. If other users agree with that rant, they “flame up” the rant. If they disagree, “cooling down” the rant is the action taken. The dynamic of the site can be a little intimidating, which may explain the large number of users who are afraid to identify themselves by more than an anonymous moniker. Remembering that these rants are largely opinion, I chose to rant about something fairly mild. It’s a week later, and I’ve found my rant on the receiving end of four equally mild responses and one stupid one.

Longevity?
One thing I always ask myself before I invest any real time using a site is how long that site will be around. This one I’m not sure about, but I can tell you that I’ve only seen this tried once before and that site was horrible. FlameUp.com has, at the very least, put forth the time and effort and brought a site that not only looks good, but is (mostly) intuitive. That said…

A little feedback
One bug I noticed is that the Privacy Settings page doesn’t save my settings. That’s a Q/A oversight, I guess, but being unfamiliar with the site, I submitted my settings twice before I realized that it was the site that wasn’t saving them correctly.

One thing I didn’t like is that I the ability to browse categories was not obvious to me right away, as it should be. I think they should be prominently displayed, like they are on Digg. What if I just want to read rants about Politics. I really REALLY don’t, but you get my point.

I’ve bookmarked the site and I’ll check back again later, but I try to see the cup half full, so I probably won’t be a regular.