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The last thing I want to do, as I’m sure it’s the last thing any reader wants, is to review the year. It seems required of just about everybody who’s a regular media contributor.

But one aspect of the year has prompted me to override my own reluctance, since it’s brought up by factual reporting (though we’ll come to how fully factual it might be, later) not by opinionated reviewing.

We all know that online searching has become the key to how we consume our media now – even though the time-honored notion of simply (did I hear “idyllically”) surfing the web has not exactly gone away, no matter how antiquated it sounds. So just what, exactly, did we all search for in 2006?

The answers are revealing – and, depending on your point of view, either depressing or very depressing.

The biggest and most trend-capturing search engine is of course Google. And worldwide, what has been searched for through Google can be read in the form of a top-ten table. Number One is – guess what – a website, and a social-networking site at that. It’s Bebo, the fast-rising people-connector whose relative distinctiveness derives from its emphasis on music and musical bands in particular -in the way that YouTube functions through video – and which began in the UK, but in so far as any such entity has a physical geographical home, now boasts San Francisco as a base.

The full top ten list thrown up by Google is:

1 – Bebo

2 – MySpace

3 – World Cup

4 – Metacafe

5 – Radioblog

6 – Wikipedia

7 – Video

8 – Rebelde

9 – Mininova

10 – Wiki

The kicker to this reporting, however, is that Google is recommended by informed observers to be including in the numbers that kick Bebo to the top all sorts of inconsistencies, like the repeated misspellings of Bebo that all get aggregated together. Would that be enough to statistically alter the real rankings? Hmmm…. in later discussion, maybe, we should take note that what appear to be simple facts from Google will often need deeper investigation and interpretation.

Meanwhile the number two search engine, Yahoo, definitely appears to have developed a clear character of its own in 2006. If you hold up to the light its top ten searches, you’ll see that Yahoo has become the engine of choice for our celebrity culture. (Is that because, I wonder, it took its chief executive, Terry Semel, from the world of entertainment, in fact out of a 24 year career in the Hollywood dream factory of Warner Bros. Yahoo’s top ten searches look, like it or not, like this:

1 – Britney Spears

2 – WWE

3 – Shakira

4 – Jessica Simpson

5 – Paris Hilton

6 – American Idol

7 – Beyonce Knowles

8 – Chris Brown

9 – Pamela Anderson

10 – Lindsay Lohan

Now, you may think this is kind of sad, or very sad? But what if like me you’re British? Yahoo’s searches can be rather easily compared country by country. And this below – I tremble to acknowledge – is what the British users of Yahoo.co.uk have been mostly looking for on the Internet in 2006:

1 – Heather Mills McCartney

2 – Pete Burns

3 – Big Brother

4 – The Ordinary Boys

5 – World Cup

6 – Steve Irwin

7 – Borat

8 – Notting Hill Carnival

9 – Zidane

10 – Kate Moss

It makes any self-respecting Brit want to trade-in that nice navy-blue Her Britannic Majesty’s passport.

I could go on, and look at the way the lately re-christened third search engine, Live (formerly known as MSN Search) provides us with a obsession-measure that’s a bit more widely internationally-minded but still as celebrity-ridden, in that as well as Shakira of the magical hips it includes Ronaldinho of the magical soccer toes – but I won’t.

I’ll just wish everyone a happier and more rewarding New Year of searching.

If there remains any lingering doubt about the true meaning and purpose of children’s entertainment in the media, it comes in research published this week before Christmas. It is of course MERCHANDISING.

The revealing numbers come from the Center for Media Research – as it has surveyed which websites people mostly visit in search of toys and games in this gift-giving season. And where do people mostly go? To the sites of Disney and Nickolodeon of course.

Disney is absolute top of the heap with 8,141,000 unique visitors, and Nicolodeon a close-ish second with 7,898,000.

To ram the message home about the integral, powerful association between children’s TV and selling merchandise, these two TV-based entities are far ahead of the sort of companies whose business is the simple selling of toys. The modern online giant, eBay Toys, and the traditional granddaddy of toy mass-marketing, Toys-R-Us, sit respectively at the lower positions of three and four, with 4,060,000 and 2,968,000 unique visitors each. They lack the benefit of highly-visible, constantly outreaching TV platform of their own.

That more high-minded purveyor of children’ entertainment, public television, also figures in this revealing league table, whether it likes the company it keeps there or not. PBS Kids sits at position number eight, – just creeping over the one million mark for unique visitors (actually 1,108,000). And exactly who it’s rubbing shoulders with, or rather panting closely behind, is perhaps a little disconcerting for this proper educationalist. It’s Barbie, she of the blonde hair and plastic curves, who is just ahead with 1,121,000 hits in position number seven. (The entire league table can be seen at — http://www.mediapost.com/research/cfmr_brief.cfm)

I can hardly beat the simple summary of the situation that a inside player in the game offered recently. “Children’s television shows are just giant toy ads,” according to Gary Pope, a London-based children’s marketing consultant.

And I believe (none too proudly, I’m afraid) that it’s to my old home country that we can look to see future trends, especially at the younger end of the market.

The UK has long been a test bed for children’s television, developing innovations that are followed elsewhere. In the 1950s, it introduced the entire notion of educational TV. Before becoming a worldwide hit, the “Teletubbies” phenomenon was launched in the late 1990s by the BBC. That one show is credited with lowering the age of TV audiences to below 3 years, which had been the previous low benchmark.

Today, some of the most popular preschool shows in the U.S. are British, including “Bob the Builder” and “Thomas and Friends.”

And in both Britain and America TV networks are now chasing preschoolers desperately because, first (an old reason) they are at home a lot, but also (a newer line of thinking) they have not been, unlike their older brothers and sisters, abandoning TV for the Internet or video games.