These are my links for January 9th through January 11th:

• 3 Ways Educators Are Embracing Social Technology –
• Is This KFC Ad Racist? [YOUTUBE VIDEO] –
• Facebook Founder on Privacy: Public is the New “Social Norm” –
• Twitter Argument Leads to Alleged Murder [REPORT] –
• 38 ways to optimize and speed up your WordPress blog | WP Garage –
• iPhone Beats Droid, Nexus One And Droid Eris In Touchscreen Performance –
• Can the Skiff save the magazine industry? – There has been quite a bit of talk about Hearst’s Skiff ereader and we got a hands-on last night before the show closed. The device is about as big as a Kindle DX (11.5-inch display and a very thin bezel) but quite thin (.25-inches). They use a metal board spun-coated with e-ink instead of a glass sheet for the screen, which will definitely prevent the heartbreak of shattered ereaders for the next generation of readers. It uses Sprint’s 3G network.

These are my links for January 8th:

• Apple Seizes 16 Domain Names From A Guy In One Fell Swoop – When you own domain names associated with the trademarks of a large company, more often than not, they’re going to file a complaint with the ICANN UDRP (Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy). And more often than not, they’re going to win control of the name. Such was the case yesterday with 16 names related to Apple that one man happened to own.
• Pioneer to Bring Pandora to Your Car Radio … For $1,200 – Pandora and Pioneer — manufacturer of car audio systems — are partnering to bring Internet radio to your car.
• Qualcomm Chip to Power Verizon iPhone [RUMOR] – Qualcomm’s CEO Paul Jacobs has openly expressed interest in inserting a Qualcomm chip into Apple’s popular iPhone. New rumors reported by TheStreet.com indicate that Qualcomm’s endeavors were successful: A Qualcomm chip will power a new version of the iPhone on Verizon in the summer.
• DASH: Sony Reveals Pocket Internet Device – Sony has revealed details about their Internet device at the CES – Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Read on find out more.
• Vimeo to Launch Support for 1080p – In case 720p wasn’t enough for your gorgeous, transcendent works of motion picture art, Vimeo will begin hosting 1080p videos by the end of this month.
• The Rise of Digital Music & The Return of the Record – According to the report, sales were up 2.1 percent in 2009 from 2008, with consumers snagging 1.16 million digital tracks (an 8.3 percent increase from ‘08) and 76.4 million digital albums (a 16.1 percent bump). In fact, 40 percent of all music purchases in 2009 were digital.
• Tweetdeck Infiltrates the News Room – Sky News — a 24-hour UK news site owned by News Corp. — is changing up their entire newsroom to focus more on Twitter.
• Boxee Beta Goes Public and Boxee Box Specs Revealed – Today on the company blog, Boxee revealed the specs for the Boxee Box and announced that the Boxee Beta is now officially open to the public.
• Near Me Now: Google’s Mobile Homepage is Location Aware – Go to Google.com in your iPhone or Android browser and you’ll see a small new addition to the homepage: a tiny Near Me Now option below the search box. The new functionality turns your location into an automated search query and makes finding or learning about places in your immediate vicinity a no brainer.
• Bra Color Facebook Status Updates Go Viral, But Why? – Facebook is quite the colorful place today. An odd meme — bra color status updates — has made its way around the network, but no one really knows how or why the what-color-is-your-bra meme took off.

These are my links for January 7th:

• Social Media Collective Wisdom | Who’s Blogging What (Special Edition) Jan 7, 2010 – Some expert thinking on five social media questions as we enter the first decade
• Facebook Just Got Its Own VitaminWater Flavor: “Connect”. Seriously. – Here’s a first. VitaminWater has just announced that its newest flavor will be called “Connect”, complete with a Facebook logo and a full paragraph description loaded with references to untagging, friend requests, and photo stalking. It’s black cherry-lime flavored, with caffeine and “eight key nutrients”. And it’s coming to stores nationwide in March.
• Ask Me, Ask Me: Tumblr Adds a New Query Feature – Good news for anyone who loves interacting with a particular Tumblr: The blogging platform has added an Ask feature that allows you to directly ask a blogger questions.
• Ford SYNC Will Soon Stream Pandora Radio – 2010 is shaping up to be the year Ford SYNC forever alters how we experience digital content in our vehicles. Today, the automotive company is breaking even more ground with the news that the next evolution of SYNC will support third-party mobile applications. Get ready to stream Pandora and tweet hands-free in your Ford.
• Have a Nexus One? Good, Now Tear it Down – Geeks can usually be divided into two categories: those who are perfectly happy with merely using their gadgets, and the more radical type, who simply have to tear them down to see what’s inside

These are my links for January 4th:

• Former Time Warner CEO Apologizes for “Worst Deal of the Century” [VIDEO] – Now that Time Warner and AOL are officially dissolved, those behind the deal – originally valued at $164 billion – are speaking out. This morning, former Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin and AOL co-founder Steve Case discussed the deal on CNBC as we approach its tenth anniversary.
• Las Vegas Courthouse Shooting: Audio Captured on YouTube [VIDEO] – A deadly shooting occurred in the lobby of a Las Vegas federal courthouse building. According to reports from CNN, the suspected gunman was shot and killed after opening fire on federal personnel. A citizen journalist got it all on tape.
• News Corp. Unloads Rotten Tomatoes Onto Flixster – News Corp is unloading more of its digital assets. This time it’s the movie review site Rotten Tomatoes, which is being acquired by startup Flixster, which has the most popular movie app for the iPhone and other mobile devices. The purchase price was not disclosed, but it was at least in part a stock transaction. News Corp now owns a minority stake in Flixster, which has only raised a total of $7 million in venture capital.
• Pinging In The New Year: Seesmic Acquires Ping.fm – Well that didn’t take long. Just four days in 2010 and we already have an acquisition. Social networking application Seesmic has acquired the social status updater Ping.fm.
• Video: iPhone hacked to support the Magic Mouse – Those gifted gents over at the BTStack might just be too clever for their own good. First they blow our minds by sneaking Wiimote support onto the iPhone, and then tickle our productivity-loving souls by hacking in Bluetooth keyboard support. It’s a bit awkward to be typing away on a physical keyboard, only to have to reach over and poke the screen whenever you want to do something – wouldn’t it be nice to be able to use a mouse instead?
• Vegas-bound! What to expect from CES – All of us at CrunchGear are prepping for the pain-fest we all know as the Consumer Electronics Show. For those not aware, every January, just after they’ve waddled away from the all-you-can-eat buffet called the Holidays, journalists, bloggers, and big box electronics buyers all head to Las Vegas for more of the same.
• Worlds Collide: Twitter Has More Uptime Than Facebook – If one of Twitter’s New Year’s resolutions is to reduce sightings of the fail whale, it is off to a good start. Last week, the service was up a laudable 97.97 percent of the time, beating out even Facebook’s availability of 97.22 percent, according to benchmarks published by AlertSite. The only site in the benchmark with better uptime was YouTube, with 99.13 percent availability during the week. (MySpace and LinkedIn showed below average uptimes of 94.74 percent and 95.48 percent, respectively).
• Kleiner-backed GOGII Releases textPlus for Android – Why pay for text messaging anymore when you can send texts for free? That’s the message GOGII is trying to send to users via its textPlus application, which has been wildly successful on the iPhone with over 3.2 million downloads.

These are my links for January 1st:

• Guide to Twitter – The Ultimate Guide for Everything Twitter | Webdesigner Depot – Twitter isn’t just a cute way for keeping in instant touch with friends on mobile phones anymore. It has ramped up quickly to be the search engine of choice for some with its human driven results.
• At Foursquare Venues, The Mayor Eats For Free – Foursquare, the geo-location based check-in game, just announced its first venue that is combining badges and promotions. On Foursquare you get badges for checking into places. The person who checks into a place the most becomes the “Mayor.” You also get promotions from restaurants and bars nearby based on your location. Now those two elements are being tied together.
• Twitter and Me! Why It’s The Only Social Media Tool I Use. –
• Twitter’s Most Influential Topics of 2009 – In 2009, influence emerged as a source of filtering and focus, especially when Twitter released its new “lists” feature to empower users to organize and follow custom streams by topic, personality, and themes.
• ShopSavvy Barcode Reader for Android: Now With QR Code Support – When Google’s Android platform first launched in late October of 2008, ShopSavvy from Big in Japan was easily one of the most impressive apps available for the platform. Using the phone’s built-in camera, ShopSavvy scans barcodes of any product and then uses the data connection to search the Internet for the best price. It’s one of those really genius mobile app ideas, and it is no surprise that ShopSavvy was one of the winners of Google’s Android Developer Challenge in 2008.
• Tweetup and Hashtag Make the List of Top 2009 Words – “Tweetup,” “hashtag,” “freemium,” “paywall,” “unfriend” and “tag cloud” all made the list, which was compiled by dictionary expert Susie Dent after poring over the two billion-word Oxford English Corpus database. One of the more “late to the party” terms included is “Slashdot effect,” which finally achieves its small measure of lexical legitimacy despite having already arguably had its heyday.

These are my links for December 30th through December 31st:

• Digg Takes a Dip In Traffic, Half The Size Of Twitter – But its latest growth spurt stopped in September, 2009 when it peaked at 32 million unique visitors worldwide, according to comScore. In November, its worldwide visitors were down 15 percent to 27 million, which is about half the number of people who visit Twitter.com. Digg was passed by Twitter back in March (see chart below).
• In 2009, Social Media Overtook Web 2.0 [GRAPHS] – While its definition is not yet etched in stone, most believe it describes a new type of media and communication that creates a world conversation and dialogue. Instead of being fed news (a one-to-many dissemination approach), everyone is welcomed to be a content creator and to generate a debate around that content. While its focus is the web, it goes beyond it as well.
• Digg to aggregate what’s trending on Twitter and Facebook – Holy Kaw! – Looks like Kevin Rose may have found a way to steer the Digg ship back on course with a site overhaul that rumors say will include an aggregation of what’s hot on Twitter and Facebook.
• FCC Chairman’s Facebook Account Compromised – The New York Times’ Bits blog is reporting that FCC head honcho Julius Genachowsi — the man in the middle of the net neutrality initiatives and the Google-Apple disputes — has fallen victim to the fraudulent activity of scammers on Facebook.
• Facebook: 5 Predictions for 2010 – Facebook has been around for more than five years, but it hit critical mass and exploded in 2009. As the new decade begins, the fallout is blowing over the entire web. Facebook Connect is everywhere, in case you hadn’t heard. We’re talking 60 million users on 80,000 web sites
• Facebook App’s Password Data Breach Turns into Lawsuit – Facebook and MySpace app maker and advertising network RockYou isn’t having a great December. Earlier this month, 32 million passwords were compromised by a hacker going by the alias of “igigi.” That’s more than half of RockYou’s monthly active users.
• The Androidification of Everything – GigaOM – A few days ago, Antonio Rodriguez, a Boston-based entrepreneur and founder of Tabblo, emailed to let me know that he was leaving Hewlett-Packard to go do something new. Rodriguez sold Tabblo to HP in 2007 and had been working on some cool stuff at HP, but now he’s decided that it’s time for him to head back to the startup ecosystem. We met when he was trying to get traction for Tabblo, but we have stayed in touch since, musing over the future of devices and user experiences. (Antonio chronicles many of his thoughts over on his blog.)

These are my links for December 29th through December 30th:

• LEAKED: New Details and the Price of Google’s Nexus One – The Nexus One, also known as the Google Phone, has been causing a stir this month after details began to emerge about the project. Earlier today, we learned that the phone will likely be revealed on January 5 at a Google press conference (which we will be covering).
• The Complete National Geographic Collection on a Hard Drive – National Geographic, the legendary yellow magazine that’s been an important part of many a young nerd’s childhood, has been around since 1888. Even if you have a very large room dedicated to storing the magazine, that’s a lot of issues.
• Facebook to Seppukoo: Die! – Remember Seppukoo, that nifty little service that lets you kill your Facebook identity? Well, Facebook doesn’t appreciate the idea.
• Mashable’s Social Media Guide for Journalists – Navigating the journalistic seas this past year has been a particularly challenging/exciting task. As many a publication foundered in the economic benthos, others rode the wave of new technology into previously uncharted waters.
• Comedy Duo Hopes Social Media Power Will Secure Slot on Showtime – Undoubtedly, social media is a powerful force. It can be used as a way to spread breaking news, organize political protests or energize campaigns, and, of course, to promote various brands and individuals. But can social media help a TV pilot ascend from reject bin to series pickup? Jessica Chaffin and Jamie Denbo — the stars and creators of Ronna and Beverly — sure hope so.
• Weather Channel Marriage Proposal: Touching With a Chance of Viral Status [VIDEO] – First Twitter, then Foursquare, now the Weather Channel? People are broadcasting their wedding proposals all over the place these days.
• LinkedIn’s New iPhone App: The 3 Worst Things About It – Business social network LinkedIn made a major upgrade to its iPhone app tonight but coming from a service with such incredible potential, there remain some major disappointments.
• Twitter 2.0: API Rate Change Could Lead to a World of New Apps & Features – One of the best things about Twitter is its wildly creative ecosystem of applications built by people outside the company. Those apps have been constrained, though, by technical limits imposed on retrieving data from Twitter. Those limits are just about to be raised much higher and developers tell us that a whole new world of applications and features may become possible.
• Google’s 2009: A Glimpse of the Web’s Next Decade – In 2009 the web as we knew it changed dramatically. Twitter graduated to become a media darling and a mainstream communication staple. Facebook became the most significant social network of this day and age. And Google changed the way we search.
• 10 Things to Do Before the New Year – Whether you work for someone or yourself, things tend to slow down for many of us in the final two weeks of the old year. What better time to do a little business sprucing? Here are ten things to do before the New Year to feel invigorated and ready to whatever comes your way.

Image: BoyGeniusReport.com

Two new rumors this week are different in the details but share an interesting overarching theme: TechCrunch is reporting that Apple is working on an iPhone OS-based tablet computer that’s essentially a giant iPod Touch for release this fall, and VentureBeat has a fascinating post that not only shows Google’s Android OS running on an Asus Eee PC but says the OS is hardwired to run on netbooks, and that Android netbooks will likely show up in 2010. We don’t know for sure that Apple will ever release more computer-like devices based on iPhone OS or that Android will migrate to laptops, but both ideas are utterly plausible. More plausible, in fact, than the possibility that both OSes will stay phone-only forever.

via Next Stop for iPhone OS and Android: Computers? | Technologizer.

It was bound to happen. With these mobile platforms becoming more and more popular and with the advent of the netbook it only makes logical sense to try and mash the two together.

I know Google has been talking about making an OS for computers for a longtime. Maybe the development of Android was the push the once search company needed to break out into a broader spectrum of computer and technology use.

Though I can see Android being on a small netbook, I’m a bit skeptical of Apple making it’s iPhone OS computer compatible. I think, like what Harry over at Technologizer suggests, Apple will make a bigger more versatile iPhone for more computing than calling.

The big question for both of these operating systems is will anyone buy non-phone products running them?

I’d like to hear your comments. Please post them below.