These aren't all new websites or tech tools that launched this year. But they're some of my favorite things I stumbled across online in 2010. In no particular order...

1. WikiLeaks

WikiLeaks -- the organization; its implications for journalism and free speech; the light it has shed on governments, corporations, and the Internet -- is undoubtedly one of the most important stories of 2010. And it has been strangely surreal to be tech-blogging as events have unfolded in recent weeks. WikiLeaks demonstrates how information and Internet technologies -- digital, distributed -- challenge those in power. But WikiLeaks doesn't simply shed a light on government secrets; it also points to the ways in which traditional news media has for a long time failed in its critical duties. (Prediction for 2011: Crackdown. Numerous copycats. Corporate secrets revealed.)

2. Ngram Viewer

Google has received a lot of flak for its attempts to digitize millions of texts. But it's just released a new tool that highlights some of the interesting possibilities that will come from having this sort of digital database of literature. The Ngram Viewer is a visualization tool for some some 5.2 million of the digitized books. You can search for words and phrases and compare their occurrence over time. In addition to the tool, Google's also making the raw data available. Dan Cohen calls the viewer a "gateway drug to the digital humanities," and I hope that gateway drug lures students, scholars, and companies like Google to take this work seriously.

3. Khan Academy

I had the opportunity to meet Salman Khan in November and talk to him about his vision for reshaping education. Khan Academy is an interesting example of the ways in which technology deliver open educational resources to a global audience.

4. LookBackMaps

I meet a lot of really smart entrepreneurs and engineers who are building a lot of really cool tools. But Jon Voss was the only person I met this year who a) said he was building a time machine and b) made me believe him. Voss's project is LookBackMaps, a way of linking past and present via geo-coded historical photographs, maps, and augmented reality. LookBackMaps offers both a web and mobile app that lets you see what a place used to look like by viewing its historical photographs. Much like the Ngram Viewer, this project points to the opportunities for open data, scholarship and preservation.

5. Ushahidi

"Location" was one of the year's buzzwords in the tech world. But I'd argue some of the most interesting developments weren't how people checked in via Foursquare and the like. Rather, they were the ways in which people used mobile phones and mapping to report other things. Ushahidi is not a new tool. The open source crisis-mapping platform was developed in the aftermath of Kenya's disputed presidential election in 2007. Ushahidi means "testimony" in Swahili, pointing to the projects roots in citizen journalism. Ushahidi enables people to contribute reports in crisis situations either via SMS or Internet. This information is mapped, creating real-time visualizations. Ushahidi was used as part of the response efforts to the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, as well as to numerous other disasters.

6. "It Gets Better" campaign

I tend to be pretty cynical about celebrity campaigns, but Dan Savage's "It Gets Better" video project transcended much of that, in no small part because it's made up of over 5000 user-submitted videos. Yes, there were celebrities who filmed a speech, telling LGBT youth that there is much to look forward to as a gay adult. Ellen DeGeneres. Tim Gunn. Neil Patrick Harris. But there were others who spoke out too: staff at Google, at Facebook. The most moving, I think, was the testimony of Forth Worth city councilman Joel Burns. There are far too many suicides among LGBT youth, and while yes, there are limitations to what a YouTube video can do, I think the response showed that there is support, a community, a future.

7. The Hitler/Downfall meme

I doubt that many people had seen or even heard of the Academy Award nominated film Downfall before this year. But thanks to the beauty of subtitles, one of the film's final scenes was twisted as Hitler has a meltdown over discovering something other than the impending collapse of the Nazi regime: that he's been banned on XBox, lack of Flash on the iPad, problems with the iPhone 4 reception, and so on. I know, I know. Hitler isn't funny -- except when his melodramatic response is. The videos weren't new this year, but the production company behind Downfall started demanding DMCA takedowns in April, which just seemed to give more attention to the meme that had been making some of us chuckle for quite some time. Nevertheless -- and this is a good lesson to keep in mind for 2011, I predict -- this sort of creative work is legal under fair use, most would agree. And YouTube, for its part, no longer pulls the videos.

8. Girl Talk's All Day

There are voices -- powerful voices -- in the music industry that contend that the advent of digital technology has done more harm than good. Eek! "Filesharing and sniping" as Bono argued in a New Years NYT op-ed, has hurt the creators of art. Unleashing its fury via lawsuits and seizures, record labels have been as vocal as ever that they suffer heavy losses due to filesharing. Maybe. But the creators of art? Are they hurt? That's a tougher argument to make. Case in point, on oh so many levels, Gregg Michael Gillis -- Girl Talk. Gillis is completely reliant on "sniping" digital music for his art, as he uses dozens of unlicensed samples to build new songs. Girl Talk released its latest album All Day this year, making it available as a free download. As always, Girl Talk's work is pretty mindblowing, containing samples from almost 400 songs. (There have been a number of cool visualization tools developed to help you track all the pieces that go into each track.) Listening to Girl Talk, you'd be hard pressed to argue that creativity or creators are damaged by what he's done. But there's a U2 sample in there somewhere, so perhaps Bono is flinching.

9. OK Go

Like Girl Talk, OK Go have been on the front-lines as artists challenging the record labels' pronouncements about the demise of the music industry at the hands of the Internet. OK Go broke with EMI this year after the label, in a sign that it really doesn't "get it" -- tried to prevent the sharing of the band's YouTube videos. In addition to doing what the band does best -- make these awesome viral videos -- lead singer Damian Kulash has penned a number of really interesting op-ed pieces in The New York Times and Wall Street Journal, in which he has articulated better than anyone, I'd argue, the case for changing how we think about music and music business beyond simply record sales. "This isn't so revolutionary an idea. Pop music has always been a bigger canvas than beats, chords and lyrics alone. In his early days, Elvis's hips were as famous as his voice, and Jimi Hendrix's lighter fluid is as memorable as any of his riffs, but back then the only yardstick to quantify success was the Billboard charts. Now we are untethered from the studio recording as our singular medium, and we measure in Facebook fans, website hits, and—lucky for me—YouTube views." (Prediction for 2011: I get to interview Kulash. OK, that's more wish than prediction.)

10. Echo Bazaar

2010 was a big year for social games. With some 56 million Farmville players, for example, and estimates of 1 in 5 Americans playing some sort of social game, they were a large part of the reason that Facebook was able to dominate the Web this year. Despite (or perhaps because of) their popularity, social games have been criticized as having not-so-great game mechanics and not-so-great storyline or character development. It's certainly the latter that drew me to Echo Bazaar, and its rich, complex and innovative narrative structure kept me interested in playing it throughout the year. To be sure, Echo Bazaar privileges the storytelling over flashy animations but the steampunk look of the site shouldn't be dismissed.

11. The Wilderness Downtown

"We Used to Wait" likely makes my Top 10 Favorite Songs list, and Arcade Fire's whole album The Suburbs was great. But The Wilderness Downtown, the HTML5 interactive short made in conjunction with Google Creative Lab was incredible. The video uses data and images of your childhood taken from Google Street Maps, something I found pretty moving. But the browser experience -- pardon the geekery -- was amazing as well. I hope that 2011 brings about more of this sort of disruption of what we think we can do with the Web.