These are my links for December 23rd through December 24th:

• Why B2B companies should be using social media | Socialmedia.biz – Many B2B com­pa­nies ask me whether social media is right for them. This post is all about why social media and B2B go hand in hand.
• Social media & startups: It’s a different ballgame | Socialmedia.biz – I get asked a lot: “How do I make money off social media?” Uhmm, well, you use the magic wand of online web awe­some­ness, obvi­ously. Or maybe not. We have all read a mil­lion arti­cles point­ing us toward tools we should be using, things we should be con­sid­er­ing, and the best prac­tices we shouldn’t ignore. We get it: Social media is valu­able. I think by now we all under­stand the impor­tance of social media as a vis­i­bil­ity engine and viral mes­sage maker. It can be used to enable con­ver­sa­tions, announce infor­ma­tion, put out fires, and so on.

  It can do a lot. But it has lim­its. Ohhh buzz kill.

• 7 tips to increase your online media literacy | Socialmedia.biz – t’s become a tru­ism that we’re all media cre­ators now, from blog­gers and pod­cast­ers to the most wet-behind-the-feathers Twitterer.
• 5 ways to increase the reach of your blog or RSS feed | Socialmedia.biz – You may be los­ing out on oppor­tu­ni­ties to improve the reach of your RSS feed or blo
• DDoS Attack Takes Down Amazon, Wal-Mart – If you’ve been doing some last-minute Amazon holiday shopping on Wednesday evening, you’ve probably noticed that Amazon’s website was sluggish and, at times, completely down. The same fate greeted Wal-Mart, Expedia and a number of smaller sites. The reason? A severe DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack on the servers of Neustar, the company that offers DNS services to many major companies under the name UltraDNS.
• The Pirate Bay Goes Retro for Christmas – Remember how one of the most popular torrent sharing sites, The Pirate Bay, looked back in 2003? Today, you have a chance to refresh your memory, because the pirates have gone retro, changing the layout of the site to the way it looked back then, when the Internet was innocent and there was no pile of lawsuits on The Pirate Bay’s desk.
• Fun Stats: 28% Of Sites Use Google Analytics; 5% Have Facebook Or Twitter Links – # 28% of sites have Google Analytics on them
  # 12% of sites have AdSense
  # 5% of sites have EITHER a Twitter or Facebook link but…
  # 2% of sites have BOTH a Twitter or Facebook link
• Disney Wants Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg On Its Board – GigaOM – Disney’s board today nominated Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg to be its thirteenth member. It’ll be put to shareholder vote at the next Disney annual meeting, scheduled to be held March 10, 2010.
• Add Clickable Links In YouTube Videos Without Using Annotations – While it is possible to add hyperlinks on YouTube videos via the built-in annotations feature, the only problem is that you cannot link to external websites from YouTube videos – that links should either point to a video hosted on YouTube or to a video search page that’s again on YouTube.
• 2010: Year of digital distraction? – CNN.com – The "real-time Web" is booming. From Twitter to Facebook to new search engines that discover information posted just seconds ago, it seems the 2010 Web will be fueled by our desire for instant gratification.
• Mall of America Tweets Holiday Parking Updates – It may not be rocket science, but it is pretty cool: The Mall of America is using Twitter to tweet parking info for last-minute holiday shoppers hoping to avoid the ever-annoying quest for a space.
• Marketing in 2010: It’s All About the Data –
• Digg’s Top 10 Most Popular Stories of 2009 – It’s the end of the year, traditionally a time for self-reflection. While many of us are making our New Year’s resolutions and looking back on what we accomplished, a lot of social media companies are sifting through their data and sharing what was hot in 2009.
• FTC Inquiry Hinders Google’s Acquisition of AdMob – When Google formally announced their plans to acquire mobile ad network AdMob for $750 million, they didn’t expect any regulatory interference to impede upon the processing of the deal. Unfortunately they were wrong.
• 3 Powerful Social Good Trends in 2010 – 2009 saw a proliferation of online charity events, competitions, and “friendraisers” that spilled across Twitter and Facebook and filled email inboxes everywhere with more requests for money than any Nigerian prince could ever hope to make. And while it’s hard to argue that this is a bad thing — anytime someone gives money to feed the hungry instead of buying another digital potato seed in Farmville, global karma rises, if even just by a little — this focus on using the web as an ever-more elaborate means of getting people to fork over cash misses the much bigger opportunities just over the horizon.
• BREAKING: Twitter Buys Mixer Labs to Boost Location Features – Twitter co-founder and CEO Evan Williams has just announced on the company’s blog that they have acquired Mixer Labs, creator of the GeoAPI.
• Is Hiring a Ghostblogger a Bad Thing? – At any given time, there is usually an ongoing debate in some blogging circle about whether ghostblogging is a good or bad thing. I say it depends on how you’re using the term, and how you are using your ghostblogger.
• Google News Will Not Accept Single Author Blogs – I put in an application to submit our blog to Google news, but it seems Google news will not include sites that are written and maintained by one individual!

This is the Link Report for August 25th through August 26th:

Please feel free to post your thoughts in the comment section below

To see all of our links please visit our Delicious page at Delicious.com/goldsteinmedia

• Google Now Using You To Provide Traffic Data To Maps – Google is now using location-enabled mobile phones that have Maps for mobile installed to improve its real-time traffic data.
• Bing Continues With Fake Referrers: What Part Of Stop Don’t They Understand? – Among Microsoft's search identity crisis one thing has been consistent, their bot's have been sending fake referrals to Websites. Read More.
• My Favorite Link Building Lie – While it is pointless to seek links (via email or any other method) for crappy content from other sites with equally crappy content, link building via email does in fact work perfectly – but only under one perfectly obvious and sadly overlooked circumstance: when the link seeker represents meritorious content and the link granter is looking for that type of meritorious content to link to. It’s so painfully obvious to me, that I fight the urge to laugh out loud when I read quotes like the one above.
• Amazon Adds A Virtual Private Cloud – ReadWriteEnterprise – Amazon has created a hybrid cloud that can work securely for the enterprise, balancing the need for encryption with the low cost and scaling power that the cloud provides.
• The Twitter Exploit That Could Have Stolen Your Info and Much, Much More – Found by David Naylor, the vulnerability exploits an issue with a recently added an HTML tag to all of their links (rel=nofollow, which tells GoogleGoogleGoogle that links on Twitter shouldn’t count in its algorithm). The result is that David was able to change the links in such a way that it generates a huge cross-site scripting vulnerability.
• Over 80% of Americans Use Social Media Monthly – The demographic data follows the trend we see overall—younger people are more heavily involved, but over-35s and over-55s are becoming more and more active in social networking. While 10% or less of online adults aged 18-34 are “socially inactive,” the older age ranges are showing high growth. Among adults 35-54, participation grew 60% over last year:
• Top 5 Current Email Scams You Should Know About – There are numerous ways to be scammed nowadays. Pyramid schemes, ‘too good to be true’ investments and of course the good old internet. There are literally millions of websites that will gladly take your money, personal info, bank details and a host of other things from you and then skedaddle.
• Make Firefox Faster by Vacuuming Your Database – Firefox – Lifehacker – Speed up Firefox!
• Yahoo’s Testing a New Search Interface…Bing’s Interface Actually – Examples of how Yahoo! is now Bing!
• Twitalytic Alpha Preview–Archiving, Curating, and Threading Tweets | Smarterware – Lifehacker Founder Gina Trapani has a new twitter app. It's not like anything else out there… well except for Twitters business model. Check it out it's in alpha. Open source too.

Watch the video below. I’d like to hear what you’re thoughts are on linkbaiting the Whitehat way, discuss in the comments.