It's the most wonderful time of the year. No, I'm not talking about the holidays. I'm talking about all the top 10 lists that come out this time of year. Everything from books to movies to photos are gathered together in an attempt to sum up what you may have missed or forgotten about from the previous months. 

We're not alone in this time-honored tradition. It's fun to see what blog entries you clicked on the most this past year. Please behold, below, our "Top 10 Blog Entries of 2012." The order is based on the number of page views from January 1 to December 20, as calculated by Google Analytics. (Everyone really, really wanted to know about food and beverage trends for next year. It was by far our most popular story.) 

1. 17 F&B Trends for 2013
2. Meeting Planner Ranked Best Job
3. Are You Designing Connectivity, or Just Planning Meetings?
4. 7 Tech Trends That Will Change Your Meetings
5. 10 Small Meeting Trends
6. One Industry. One Voice. Start Here.
7. Free Headshots for WEC 2012 Attendees
8. Don't Talk to Audiences, Talk With Them
9. Congratulations to MPI's Newest CMPs
10. Why You Should Care About the Fiscal Cliff

What were some of your favorite blog entries we published this past year? Please let us know in the comments.

Does leisure-blogging in the workplace help or hurt productivity over the long term? According to Anindya Ghose, NYU Stern Associate Professor of Information, Operations and Management Sciences, and his colleagues Yan Huang and Param Vir Singh from Carnegie Mellon University, blogging helps. 

When organizations have lax rules on leisure blogging, it positively affects the writing and sharing of work-related blog posts and creates opportunities for strengthening employee networks. Their new paper is titled “A Structural Model of Employee Behavioral Dynamics in Enterprise Social Media.”

The authors looked at bloggers in Fortune 500 IT consulting and services companies that permitted both leisure- and work-related blogging and studied work environments where the company prohibits leisurely blogging. They found that when organizations put restrictions on leisure blogging, online work-related knowledge sharing decreases. The authors believe this happens because creating social media content at work not only helps employees to educate those seeking information, but also helps them build social relationships in the workplace. An employee can attract fellow employees to his blog with an entertaining or leisure post and, because work-related posts are on the same page, there is a spillover effect with people reading work-related articles.

“Social media technologies such as corporate blogging have the potential to be of enormous value to firms. In addition to bringing together employees at a lower cost, when used effectively, these technologies can encourage knowledge sharing and can enhance and increase firm productivity over the long-term,” Ghose said. “Companies should not prohibit non-work related blogging because of its positive effects on long-term employee productivity. In addition, companies adopting social media technologies for internal use should invest in displaying reputation metrics for content contributors and make them prominent on the enterprise-wide blogging forums to create incentives for employees to contribute content.”

(Story materials provided by NYU.)

Mobile is the future of communication—it's the officially the 7th mass media. 

Mass media began with print 500 years ago, then recordings in the 1890s, cinema in the 1910s, followed by radio, television, the Internet and now mobile. If you're still living in denial that mobile is just a fad, you're living a dream.

If that wasn't clear already, it was made clear by opening keynote speaker Tomi Ahonen today at DigitalNow 2011 in Orlando. 

5.9 billion (that's billion, with a capital "B") people in the world are currently using mobile technology devices to communicate (SMS and MMS being the lead drivers). Ahonen put that into perspective telling the more than 300 association executives in the audience that the 5.9 billion mobile users is more than worldwide users of television, the internet and voice communications combined (a combined 4.9 billion users).

Another crazy stat: there are only 4.2 billion people in the world who regularly use a toothbrush, but the average mobile device user communicates via mobile more than 150 times a day and looks at their mobile device every 6.5 minutes on average.

Mobile is here and here to stay, Ahonen says, and it has myriad possibilities whether you need to communicate simple messages, event news or changes, business news, deals for clients, or heavy hitting content. The possibilities are endless.

I have a one-on-one interview scheduled with Ahonen later today and will be asking him more on this topic and I'll be posting the video to our website following. Check back later for the video and for regular updates from DigitalNow 2011 all day today through Saturday.

At the recent Imagining the Future of Leadership Symposium in Cambridge, Mass., leaders of the Harvard Business School put forth their Top 10 list. What's on it? Personal arrogance, acting too fast and being certain, just to name a few. 

This video features the leaders listed below explaining their contribution to the list.

Bill George, Professor, Harvard Business School and former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Medtronic 

Evan Wittenberg, Head of Global Leadership Development, Google, Inc. 

Dr. Ellen Langer, Professor, Harvard University 

Andrew Pettigrew, Professor, Sïad Business School, University of Oxford 

Gianpiero Petriglieri, Affiliate Professor of Organizational Behavior, INSEAD 

Carl Sloane, Professor Emeritus, Harvard Business School 

Jonathan Doochin, Leadership Institute at Harvard College 

Scott Snook, Associate Professor, Harvard Business School and retired Colonel, US Army Corps of Engineers 

Daisy Wademan Dowling, Executive Director, Leadership Development at Morgan Stanley

Want to be my friend? Ask me for a favor.

It might sound weird, but according to happiness expert Gretchen Rubin (someone I follow regularly online), that's an important part of creating a bond between people.

"Ask for help, for advice, for suggestions. Asking for a favor is a sign of intimacy and trust. It shows that you feel comfortable being indebted to someone," Rubin said in a recent blog post on her blog The Happiness Project. "I remember a friend at work telling me, 'I never liked that guy until he told me he needed to borrow $50 from me. Then I realized he must consider me a friend, and presto! I started liking him.'"

Rubin says that often times providing support to others is just as important as getting support, so asking for a favor and hearing a "yes"can be beneficial to a relationship for both parties.

Rubin's favorite favor to ask for? Help.

"So often, I can just solve a problem by asking for help—which is almost always freely and cheerfully given," she says.

For more on Gretchen Rubin, check out our January 2009 issue's profile of the "Queen of Happiness."

Tired of airline fees? I sure am. Every time I fly, it's usually just one fee after another. For business or personal travelers that can get old really fast.

For attendees at our conferences, meetings and events it can get down right expensive and budget limiting. It's getting to the point where it's actually keeping people from attending all together!

So is there a cure for this all-to-common pain? A cure, no. But there are some tips and tricks you can use and share with others that will help you get closer to a remedy.

Here you go . . .

Fly the Poor Man's First Class: The slowest days of the week to fly (and usually also the cheapest) are Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturdays, which is when it's more likely that the middle seat next to you will be empty so you'll have more room than if you'd upgraded. I have a personal record of 13 straight flights with no one sitting next to me! It's great when you have some work to do on the plane. And on that note, some planes now have WiFi service—something I have to be honest I was a bit leery of at first. But, at rates starting at only $4.95 for the entire flight on most American flights, it's a great service when you're in a pinch and the connection speed is just as good as you would expect on the ground. 

Do you have any personal tips? Send them my way at dbasler@mpiweb.org and we'll add them to the list.

The 2012 Olympic Games are right around the corner and London is calling. Millions are being spent on new construction, renovations, and improvements throughout the city and beyond, but what will happen to those soon-to-be iconic structures once the athletes and spectators retreat at the conclusion of the Games?

Well, the stadium that will house the opening and closing ceremonies was once considered an ideal place to hold future track and field events. The plan was to convert the 80,000-seat arena into a 20-25,000-seat stadium once the Games were over. That plan has changed though now that track and field sport organizers have realized that the £2million price tag for annual maintenance would be a slow killer.

So, the future of the stadium is now up for the highest bidder. Who's in the running? Check out this story from the BBC.

And for more on London and the Olympics check out Rowland Stietler's case study "The City with the Thorn in it's Side" in the August issue of One+.

China is officially #1. The #1 producer of greenhouse gases and the world's largest energy consumer that is. 

The Asian powerhouse overtook the United States in both categories earlier this year, but China is starting also to think outside the box when it comes to reduce their pollution. 

Their newest plan? The "Straddling Bus"—a space-age vehicle straight out of the Jetsons (only it doesn't fly). The Chinese government is seriously looking into the production of these vehicles in an effort to "go green" and relieve congestion on roads in packed cities such as Beijing. I visited Beijing in April of 2009 and I can confirm that traffic is a major issue—so much so that residents are only permitted to drive on designated days that correspond with their license plate number (odd numbers on certain days and even numbers on the others).

The "Straddling Bus" is being developed by Shenzhen Huashi Future Parking Equipment company, who is currently calling it the "3D Express Coach" or "Three-Dimensional Fast Bus."So how will it work? The bus will allow cars less than 2 meters high to travel underneath the upper level of the Bus. The upper level will be carrying passengers. The bus itself will be six meters wide and will be powered by a combination of electricity and solar energy and will be able to travel at speeds up to 60 km/hour carrying as many as 1,400 passengers at a time.

The crowded streets of Beijing will be the testing grounds for the Bus with the first 115 miles of track set for construction in the city's Mentougou district starting later this year. And the transport of the future doesn't cost as much as you might think. The price tag for this modern wonder is only 500 million yuan (about US$73million) and Huashi Future Parking Equipment boasts that construction will be completed in only a year.

For those of you who don't know already, I am in the midst of marathon training in preparation for the White Rock Half Marathon in Dallas in November. That said, I decided to run from the VCC this morning out through Stanley Park to get some views of Vancouver from across the water. It was a great 4.25 mile (6.8 km) run on a very nice path. 

The photo above was one of the first stops I made along the way. It's a sculpture outside the Westin. As an art lover it caught my eye, but upon closer review I noticed it was aptly named "Meeting." Thought it was a good start to my run.

At around 6 a.m. the sun was just coming up over the water, the first float planes were taking off, the Canada geese were calling out to each other, and the views were of course breathtaking. I thought I'd share with you some more of what I saw along the way. I have uploaded a slideshow to Flickr of what I saw along the way and some history too. Enjoy and maybe I'll see you on the path in the mornings.

P.S. Vancouver is rich in history . . . the path out to Stanley Park is filled with historical markers that tell you about the area's heritage in fishing, boating, forestry, agriculture, shipping, cruising, naval training, etc. It's a fascinating look at the community we will call home for the next week at WEC 2010! Thanks Vancouver!