OK, so that promise I made in my Christmas Eve post (’oh yeah, there’ll be posts during Christmas week, sure thing…’) got sacrificed on the altar of food, booze and Christmas TV. Still, I’ve had a good time, and I hope you have, too. To round off the year, here’s a quick rundown of some of my favourite sites and blogs from 2007:

Avanta Enterprise’s BusinessClub365 is (I promise) the only site on the list that I’ve actually worked on. It’s been a work in progress for nearly 18 months, and is now more or less complete. The marketing drive for memberships starts (we hope) in January. It’s a great resource for small and growing businesses, and well worth a look if you’re self-employed or thinking of becoming so.

Jango has been developed by my friend Olga Engroff and a team of her buddies. It’s like Last.fm, only much, much better - ’social internet radio’ that plays full length songs and allows you to share music with your Jango friends quickly and easily.

2007 has been the year when web people have finally started to give typography the attention it deserves. So much hangs on readability and presentation in this business that a resource like WebTypography.net is becoming invaluable. It’s lucid, detailed and tremendously useful for copywriters, designers, bloggers and marketers.

There are some great newspaper sites on the web, but my new favourite - The First Post - is a paper site that doesn’t have a print edition. Crisp, concise and witty, it’s strong competition for the likes of the New York Times and Guardian Online.

Blip.tv - much like YouTube, but offering far higher quality video, great flexibility and no ugly idents.

I’ve mentioned Eli James’ Novelr a couple of times recently. I think online fiction could become very big in 2008, and Eli has used his insightful blog to create a great community for online writers and readers.

I’m not a huge fan of webcomics in general, but Randall Munroe’s xkcd is wonderful. Randall’s been drawing the strip since late 2005, but over the past twelve months it’s really begun to get the kind of readership it deserves.

It’s been around for a few years, and millions of people have blogged about it, but I think Stumbleupon is about to make a big leap into the consciousness of marketers. For many products it represents a far more efficient and cost-effective mode of advertising than Adwords and other PPC systems - or at least I think so - and mainstream marketers are finally beginning to catch on. Google is here to stay, but I think Stumbleupon (and maybe Facebook’s increasingly sophisticated ad system) is going to rattle the Big G’s cage in 2008.

That’s it for 2007 - Happy New Year!