After going at the whole blogging thing for months without being tagged for a meme, I got pinged twice this week. Iâ??ll start with the request from Matt, before moving on to Ryanâ??s later this week.

Matt recently dug into his archives to point out the five posts new readers of his blog may have missed. Five posts that represent some of his best thinking. Iâ??ll do the same here. First, I should point out that this idea originated over at The Lonely Marketer and Small Business SEM.

Here are my picks:

The Futility of Awareness
This was my first let-it-all-out post. I was irked by a terrible billboard and wanted to detail just how futile I thought the effort was. This postâ??s lesson to me: You can write what you believe, but do a little research first to add credence to your claims. (I felt like a reporter on this one, calling an agency media buyer I used to work with to get the numbers I presented.) Research can truly solidify the strength of an idea.

RSS: Should you bother?
This post got passed around pretty good, having generated a lot of attention, mostly because of all the links and explanations provided. This postâ??s lesson to me: Provide a lot of value to readers by pointing them to other sources of information.

Full Feed Appeal
Here, I challenged bloggers who donâ??t offer full feeds to move from partial to full. And it worked, the first convert being Greg Verdino. This post also generated quite a lot of discussion, which is always fun. This postâ??s lesson to me: If youâ??re passionate about something, let it out. Well stated passion can lead to results.

But did you sell any newspapers?
This post perfectly sums up how I feel about the advertising industry and how gratuitous advertising may win you awards, but it will hardly ever sell more products. This postâ??s lesson to me: If youâ??re going to challenge an approach, offer alternatives to that approach. Don’t just bash â?? help, improve.

The Early-In Loop
This is a recent post, but Iâ??m very excited by how it got picked up and built on around the â??sphere. Itâ??s been linked to at a few blogs and spurred this follow-up post. This postâ??s lesson to me: The online world is a living, breathing organism where anything can be improved, tweaked and built upon by anyone. And the result is often for the better.

These five posts are still open for comments. Feel free to leave yours.

And thanks for asking, Matt. Itâ??s been fun going through the archives. Guess it’s my turn to ping some folks, so why not send this over to Belgium?

Kris, Philippe, Luc â?? you’re up!

UPDATE: Just want to make one addition to this list. It’s a post I originally shortlisted and then forgot to include.

NYC Conversations and Connections
This was the post that made it all hit home for me. It’s the post that made me realize that you can feel as close to people you’ve never met as you do with people you spend every day with. This post’s lesson to me: In Toby’s words, “a friendship is “Real” no matter where it’s made!” (Via CK’s Blog.)

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