There really is nothing like those end of year lists, much loved by editors and columnists the world over. Lists of just about anything are appearing as the year draws to an end, from box office hits, best-selling books and music to words and sports personalities of the year.
The social media companies have also been revealing key trends and highlights for 2012.
Searching on Google
The UK's top two search terms for 2012 were both sports-related. Euro 2012 (a football tournament in which only one UK team played - not very well) topped the list ahead of 'Olympic tickets'. Other notable results in the UK are Netflix (which launched in the UK in 2012) at number 6 and iPad 3 at number 8. Rather charmingly the UK's top 'what is' search for 2012 is 'What is love?' (compare this to the US's rather less romantic 'What is SOPA?'
Euro 2012 either topped the list of search terms or came second in Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and Ukraine.
Biggest conversations on Twitter
With over 500 million users, Twitter has continued to make big strides in 2012. Twitter has analysed the single events of 2012 that generated the most tweets and retweets. Topping the list is the London Olympics. 150 million tweets were generated overall while Usain Bolt was the most discussed athlete.
Other big conversations centred around the US Presidential election (President Obama's tweet 'Four more years' was one of the year's 'golden tweets'); the MTV music awards; Hurricane Sandy, Euro 2012, Whitney Houston, and SOPA and PIPA.
Information Today Europe
In 2012 we published just over 100 feature articles. Our most read article of 2012 is Well resourced libraries drive academic success by Katherine Allen, which summarises the findings of a research report highlighting how access to scholarly resources impacts research and teaching.
In second place, Bethan Ruddock's Hashtags for information professionals is a great example of the kind of article popular with our readers. It is practical, relevant and written by someone who has really made a professional impact on social media.
Other big hitting articles published this year include: