Three and a half years ago, I quit a cool job and started Technologizer. It’s been the best gig I’ve ever had. So far.

As a sideline, starting in September of 2010, I’ve been writing for TIME.com and TIME magazine. That too has been huge fun, and an honor. Over the past few decades, TIME has influenced my editorial brain as much as any publication. Just as important, I’ve been impressed by its current incarnation online, in print, on tablets, and elsewhere.

I’m pleased to announce that my relationship with TIME is about to become way more than a sideline: I’ve agreed to join its staff as an editor at large.

So am I ditching Technologizer? Nope, not at all. A big part of my day will be to continue to write for Technologizer, which will morph from its current stand-alone form into a blog on TIME.com, and part of its Techland tech section. I’ll also work on other projects for TIME’s site and for the magazine, including some ambitious stuff that will be easier to pull off as part of TIME than as an itty-bitty independent site.

Technologizer is by far the most personal product I’ve ever worked on; in theory, the notion of melding it into a very large site owned by a very large media company should be intimidating. But having already worked with TIME’s team for months and written dozens of stories for them, I know that they get what I do. That’s why they want me to do it over at TIME.com, and to do it under the Technologizer name.

So I plan to just keep on doing my thing for TIME’s jumbo-sized audience–and I might even do more of it and do it better, since I’ll be able to focus my energies on one outlet. (In recent months, I’ve been writing for Technologizer, TIME, CNET, and AllBusiness.)

The new version of Technologizer on TIME.com will debut soon. I’ll have more to say before the switchover happens, including some words of thanks for Benj Edwards, Jared Newman, Ed Oswald, and the other folks who have joined me as contributors here on stand-alone Technologizer. I’m lucky to have worked with them.

And I’m just as grateful to all of you who have contributed to the Technologizer experiment to date by commenting on our posts, hanging out with me on Twitter, and otherwise being part of the community. I plan to make my new TIME job the best gig I’ve ever had–and I hope that you’ll come along. It wouldn’t be the same without you…

2011, as you may have noticed, is finally over. And what a year it was in tech. The news just kept on coming, and while some of it was sad (the passing of Steve Jobs), alarming (the PlayStation Network break-in), or just plain weird (Qwikster!), it was never tedious.

Technologizer has never set out to be a plain-vanilla tech news site, so what gets read around here isn’t a snapshot of the year’s most momentous stories. Instead, it’s something a bit more idiosyncratic: a gumbo of major events, personal observations, history, and more. Basically, it’s what I and my fellow Technologizer scribes thought you’d find interesting.

And here are the 25 stories that you found to be most interesting–as ranked by the number of people who read them.

1.Whatever Happened to the iPad Alternatives of 2010? (September)

• I take a look back at scads of tablets announced soon after the original iPad.

2. PlayStation Network Down Indefinitely, Again. (May)

• For awhile, all anybody wanted to read about on the Internet was the PlayStation Network outage. Jared Newman covered it in a series of stories.

3. How the iPad 2 Became My Favorite Computer (December)

• On my stubborn refusal to believe that the iPad isn’t a good device for creating content.

4. A Brief History of Apple Not Buying Things (July)

• People keep thinking Apple is about to buy large, famous companies. People keep being wrong.

5. Is Samsung’s New Galaxy Tab Fibbing About Its Figure? And About Those Galaxy Tab Fans…

• At CTIA, controversy arises over the exact dimensions of a new Samsung tablet–and I notice that the real people in a video don’t look too real.

6. PlayStation Network is Down For  Day or Two (April)

• Jared’s first PSN outage story, when it looked like no big deal.

7. My Mom Reviews the iPad, Her First Computer (March)

• David Worthington interviews his mother, who never owned a computer until she got an iPad.

8. Polaroid’s SX-70: The Art and Science of the Nearly Impossible (June)

• My exceedingly in-depth look at one of the most amazing gadgets of all time.

9. Osborne! (April)

• The story of the first portable PC, and the odd, remarkable man behind it.

10. Qwikster: Not to be Confused With Quixtar, QuickStar, Kwikster, Quickster, Kwik Star, Quik-Star, or Kickstar (September)

• Netflix’s new name for its DVDs-by-mail service sounds sort of familiar.

11. iPod Oddities (October)

• Benj Edwards celebrates a decade of Apple MP3 players with a look at some fun sidelights. (In terms of total page views, this slideshow was the #1 story of the year.)

12. The Legend of Zelda Oddities (February)

• Benj pays tribute to twenty years of Nintendo’s sword-and-sorcery epic. (This one was the #2 story in terms of page views.)

13. The Mac’s Malware Problem Just Got a Lot Worse (May)

• Ed Oswald explains that Mac Defender, the first piece of noteworthy Mac malware in a long time, has reared its ugly head again under a new name.

14. Steve Jobs, 1955-2011 (October)

• My first reaction to the news of Jobs’ passing was to share a favorite photo I’d taken of him.

15. Verizon’s iPhone 4 Tethering Reality Check (January)

• Ed notes that if you want tethering with the new Verizon iPhone, you’ll have to pony up some cash.

16. Saying Apple Will Never Do Something: Always Dangerous (April)

• Some folks are positive that Apple won’t get into the TV business. They should talk to the ones who were certain it wouldn’t make phones and tablets.

17. Steve Jobs Steps Down the First Time: The 1985 Press Coverage (August)

• How the world reacted when Apple decided it was better off without its co-founder.

18. Who’s Suing Who? A Cheat Sheet to the Mobile Patent Mess (April)

• An info graphical look at the ugly world of patent squabbling.

19. PlayStation Network Data Breach: It’s Really, Really Bad (April)

• Whoops! Sony lost PSN users’ personal info.

20. Remembering the Apple I (April)

• The first Apple gadget of them all, and why it mattered.

21. To Steven Jobs on His Thirtieth Birthday (October)

• A remarkable film, made by Steve Jobs’ colleagues in 1985.

22. Windows 8: The Verdict Isn’t in. (September)

• Why taking awhile to review tech products makes sense.

23. A Strange Sort of Prison, a Strange Sort of Freedom (October)

• Two open-source gurus think that Apple’s customers are idiots.

24. Some Quick Thoughts on GarageBand for iPad (March)

• Jared tries out Apple’s neat new music-creation app.

25. The Secret World of Alternative Operating Systems (May)

• Benj explores a bunch of OSes that aren’t Windows, OS X, or Linux–yes, there are lots of them.

Thanks to all of you for reading all this stuff–and for commenting, sharing, and otherwise being part of the community. You’re a smart, fun bunch to hang out with.

On Monday June 6th at 10am PT, I’ll be at San Francisco’s Moscone West for Steve Jobs’ WWDC keynote. It sounds packed, packed, packed–we’ll get our last big look at OS X 10.7 Lion before it ships, and our first big looks at the next version of iOS, and the long-rumored service now known as iCloud. And rumor has it that there are occasionally surprise announcements at these events. (I’m told Jobs likes to keep them until the end.)

I’ll blog the keynote news as it happens, with color commentary from special guest Doug Aamoth of Techland. Tens of thousands of folks attended our last Apple live coverage (the iPad 2 announcement), but we’ll save room for you. Join us at technologizer.com/wwdc11–and go there now to sign up for an e-mail reminder if you like.

We have winners in our ScanSnap scanner giveaway! Ruth Hiner won the ScanSnap S100. And Harvey Rogers won the ScanSnap S1300.

Thanks to Fujitsu for providing the scanners…and to everyone who entered here and on Twitter and told us about the paper documents in their lives.

Weren’t we supposed to live in a paperless world by now? I seem to have at least as much stuff printed on dead trees in my life as ever—business documents, photos, greeting cards, and a whole lot more. So do you, I’ll bet. And if you’d like to cut clutter by bringing them into the digital world, here’s a way to get a shot at a scanner that can do the job.

Courtesy of Fujitsu, we’re giving away two of its snazzy ScanSnap scanners in a random drawing: the super-portable S1100 (a $199 value, shown on the left above) and the double-sided S1300 ($295, on the right). Both are compact desktop models that can scan to PDF, Office, e-mail, and more, and are compatible with Windows PCs and Macs.

There are two simple ways to get your chance at winning:

• Leave a comment on this post talking about the paper items in your life you most want to turn into digital form. (Please use a real e-mail address so we can contact you if you win; we won’t display it, share or sell it, or use it for any other purpose.)
• Tweet me (I’m @harrymccracken), again sharing your thoughts on the paper items you want to turn into digital files. (Make sure you’re following me so I can Direct Message you if you win. And if you have enough characters left over, you can optionally use this hashtag: #ScanSnap.)

You only need to enter once; multiple entries won’t increase your chance of winning. Please enter between now and 12pm PT on Friday, May 27th. We’ll choose two winners at random from everyone who participates by this deadline and notify them by Monday, May 30th.

For more on ScanSnap, check out Fujitsu’s ScanSnap Community and its Twitter account. Have fun—and good luck!

In the end, the contest wasn’t that much of a contest: Josh Baer, founder of the neat service OtherInbox, won the overall competition handily and beat me at air hockey like I’ve never been beat before. I went away happy anyway, having tied for second place, won the trivia round, and generally comported myself better than I did at last year’s inaugural IronGeek edition.

After the jump, a few photos I took of my fellow contestants.

Best Web Publication/Consumer (hey, we’re up against our friends at PCWorld here)

Best Web or Digital Publication Article/Consumer (for Fanboy! The Strange True Tale of the Tech World’s Favorite Put-Down)

Best Web or Digital Publication Blog/Trade and Consumer

The winners will be announced at an awards gala on April 29th in LA. I’ll let you know how we do.

Official event #1: On Monday, March 14th at 12:3pm in room 12AB in the ScreenBurn section at the Austin Convention Center, I’ll moderate a panel called “Platform Success: Earning Developers’ Trust, Hearts, and Minds.” Panelists include Peter Hoddie of Marvell, Brandon Watson of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 team, James Keller of iOS developer Small Society, and Ben Satterfield, the CEO of TestFlight.

Official event #2: On Tuesday, March 15th at 3pm at the SxSW Block Party, I’ll be doing my darndest to fare well in a competition called Das IronGeek, which pits a few folks against each other in a tech tournament including a typing race, a build-your-own server competition, and other challenges, including at least one they haven’t told me about yet. (I competed last year, in the inaugural edition, and didn’t do so well–but this year I’ll prevail. Or at try not to embarrass myself.)

Hope to see some you at one (or both) of these events, or just around town.

Tempest. Tapper. Rampage. Popeye. Dig Dug. Those are my five favorite classic arcade games, and I’m really not sure what order I’d rank them in. Tempest would probably come out on top–but Tapper would have a shot, too.

Tapper debuted in 1983 and existed in two versions. In one, you played the part of a bartender who served Budweiser beer, in an early example of product placement in games. The other edition was Root Beer Tapper–shown above–in which you were a soda jerk serving non-alcoholic refreshments. The gameplay was identical: You ran around tapping beverages and flinging them down counters at hordes of impatient customers in various settings. It was twitchy good fun, the graphics and sound were excellent for their day, and I know that the game has held up well–I played it, repeatedly, just a few months ago at the amazing California Extreme arcade mega-event.

And now there’s Tapper World Tour, a new version for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad from Warner Bros. and Square One. You may not be surprised to learn that the graphics are more ambitious this time around, and you serve drinks in a lot more settings. But the basic drink-flinging gameplay looks like it’s come into the modern era intact, as it should:

Lovers of 1980s gaming have another reason to be interested in this revival: Its graphics were designed by Don Bluth, whose animation studio produced the animation for Dragon’s Lair (1983) and Space Ace (1984), two games which used laserdiscs to provide astoundingly rich animation and audio for their era.

Interested in playing the new Tapper? It’s scheduled to show up on the iOS App Store in early spring. And courtesy of Warner Bros. and Square One, you have a chance at a free copy–and an 8GB iPod Touch to play it on. We’ll be giving an iPod Touch with Tapper World Tour preinstalled to one lucky winner.

You can enter the drawing in three ways:

1) Leave a comment on this post telling us what your favorite classic video game is, and why. I’ll leave it up to you to define “classic”–for me, it would anything dating from before 1985 or thereabouts. For you, it might be anything before 1995, or 2005. (Please use a working e-mail address so we can alert you if you win–it won’t be public, and we won’t use it for any other purpose.)

2) Tweet me (I’m @harrymccracken) and say as much about your favorite classic game as you can in 140 characters or less. If you have space, use the hashtag #tapper. (Make sure you’re following me so we can Direct Message you if you win.)

3) Post a message on the wall at Technlologizer’s Facebook page–again, with some thoughts on your favorite game.

(You can comment on more than one game, or in more than one venue, but multiple entries won’t increase your chances of winning.)

No matter which method you use, please enter by 12pm noon PT on Wednesday, March 2nd. We’ll perform a random drawing from all entrants and announce a winner by Friday, March 4th. The winner will receive the prize once the game is live in the App Store.

Now all we need are great authorized iOS versions of Tempest, Popeye, and Rampage–Dig Dug is already with us–and life will be as perfect as it’s likely to get. Let’s end with a trailer…