Yesterday, the Nielsen Company -- famous for its TV audience measurements -- put out a series of top 10 in 2007 lists. There are close to 30 different lists covering most-watched TV shows, DVDs, movies, etc. View them yourself (13 page PDF.) Here are some that interested me:

Among major markets, Seattle/Tacoma had the fourth highest percentage of "adults who have used the Internet to read or contribute to blogs within the past 30 days." The top market was Austin, Texas, with 15 percent of adults reading/contributing; followed by:

Portland, with 14 percent
San Francisco/Oakland/San Jose, 13 percent
Seattle/Tacoma, 13 percent
Honolulu, 12 percent
San Diego, 12 percent
Dallas/Fort Worth, 12 percent
Columbus, Ohio, 11 percent
Nashville, Tenn., 11 percent
Colorado Springs/Pueblo, 11 percent.

The national average was 8 percent.

Among the most-purchased packaged consumer goods, measured by the "percent of homes who purchased each category within past year," fresh bread was the leader (97 percent), followed by refrigerated milk, toilet tissue, fresh eggs, cookies, ready-to-eat cereal, canned soup, chocolate candy, potato chips and batteries (86 percent).

The same list, if measured by sales instead of percentage of homes that purchased the category, is lead by carbonated soft drinks ($17.6 billion) and also includes cigarettes ($7.8 billion) and light beer ($5.1 billion).

With the exception of the bread, milk and eggs, it sounds a lot like the presumed shopping list of the stereotypical American gamer, including the batteries to keep the remote and wireless controllers charged up.

And what games were we playing? This list is based on "the percent of PC gamers playing title in the average minute." Nielsen also reports average minutes played per week, from April to November 2007.

No. 1, by a long shot, "World of Warcraft" with 0.792 percent of PC gamers playing in the average minute and 1,023 minutes played per week (I'm guessing that's per individual.)

Here's the rest of the list:

"The Sims," 0.177 percent, 298 minutes/week
"RuneScape," 0.147 percent, 688 minutes/week
"Halo: Combat Evolved," 0.145 percent, 451 minutes/week
"Halo 2," 0.131 percent, 466 minutes/week
"Counter-Strike," 0.114 percent, 504 minutes/week
"The Sims 2," 0.110 percent, 387 minutes/week
"Madden NFL 07," 0.103 percent, 407 minutes/week
"Grand Theft Auto," 0.084 percent, 399 minutes/week
"Counter-Strike: Source," 0.077 percent, 550 minutes/week.

Nielsen doesn't break out console titles, but it does give a list of the most-played platforms based on usage minutes, "a percent of all measured console minutes." Interesting to note that taken together, all the other consoles on the list (excluding the "other" category, which "consists of any other console systems found in the home") are used about as much as the PlayStation 2.

PlayStation 2, 42.2 percen;
Xbox, 13.9 percent
Xbox 360, 11.8 percent
GameCube, 7.1 percent
Wii, 5.5 percent
PlayStation 3, 2.5 percent
Other, 17.1 percent.