This is the Link Report for September 28th through September 29th:

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 Wave Invites: How To Get Them – The web is buzzing with excitement and anticipation. In less than 24 hours, Google Wave will launch to 100,000 early adopters. The real-time communication platform has been making headlines ever since it was announced back in May as a result of its potentially game-changing features.
• Create Your Own Building for the Biggest Monopoly Game Ever – Play Monopoly using Google Maps! Neato!
• Dropbox Meets The iPhone; Access Files On The Go – Dropbox, the easy to use file access manager which syncs your files across all your computers and the web, has introduced an iPhone application to make it even easier to access your files anywhere in the world. After almost 7 weeks of waiting, Apple has finally approved the application. With this new iPhone app, users will get access to all their Dropbox documents, PDF’s, pictures, videos and much more. Dropbox also introduced offline viewing in the iPhone app, with “Favorites.” If you add a file to your ‘Favorites’, they’ll be accessible at any time. To do so, just hit the star at the bottom of any file, and it’ll be added. Otherwise, your files stay in the cloud.
• Sean Parker Joins Yammer’s Board Of Directors – Sean Parker is no stranger to Internet success. He’s 28 years old and has already helped start four very well-known services on the web: Napster, Plaxo, Causes, and of course, Facebook. And now he’s taking his impressive resume to Yammer, where he is joining the enterprise microblogging service’s Board of Directors.
• FCC’s Broadband Plan: A Need for (Actual) Speed – U.S. broadband policy must take into account real network speeds, which lag advertised speeds by at least 50 percent, according to the FCC task force charged with helping to develop a national broadband plan. But just how policy should address the differences between the two is far from clear.
• Metered Broadband Is the Future: Verizon CTO – Verizon Chief Technology Officer Dick Lynch said today that in the coming years, wired broadband will likely be sold in packages based on the amount of data a person wants to consume, much like wireless broadband is sold today. In comments made to press at the 2009 Fiber to the Home Conference Expo in Houston, Lynch stressed that he wasn’t announcing a shift in pricing for Verizon, but that: “We’re going to have to consider pricing structures that allow us to sell packages of bytes, and at the end of the day the concept of a flat-rate infinitely expandable service is unachievable.”
• STUDY: 80% of Twitter Users Are All About Me – Rutgers University Professors Mor Naaman and Jeffrey Boase set out to analyze the content and characteristics of social media activity. They dubbed communications systems like Facebook and Twitter, “social awareness streams,” and then took to examining user behavior.
• SEOmoz | Design Trends: The Single Purpose Homepage – This post focuses on a design style that's both retro (it's been around a long time) and emerging (the popularity, at least to me, feels like it's on the rise) – the single-purpose homepage.
• Twitter Tips to Help Brands Stay Authentic and Transparent – Online Marketing Blog – Any marketer who’s successfully made the move to social media will tell you the rules of traditional marketing have to be reexamined. That’s particularly true with Twitter, where brands have just 140 characters to inform, evoke emotion and inspire action. One of the most basic and critical rules for brands on Twitter? Be authentic and transparent in all you do.
• Five Search Marketing Tips For The Holidays – What is unique for holiday season 2009 are the specific strategies online retailers must take this year to reap the most sales possible. With lessons learned from last year’s bloated inventories and fire-sale prices, many retailers this year are restricting inventories and fine-tuning merchandising in an attempt to lure shoppers to purchase earlier and at higher prices. And, of course, the best way to get potential shoppers to your site is via search engine marketing. 82% of holiday shoppers polled by Google said they find search engines “extremely or very useful” in making their purchases.

This is the Daily Link Report for September 23rd

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

• SEOmoz | Followed Links from Four Unexpected Sources – Great follow links
• Is Microsoft’s DRM Patent for P2P Networks Too Late, or Ahead of Its Time? – If Microsoft’s freshly granted patent for a digital rights management system sounds like a 2003 idea coming to fruition in 2009, that’s because it is — the patent that was granted yesterday was filed six years ago. The newly codified bit of intellectual property is a DRM system that’s distributed over peer-to-peer networks, decentralizing a processing mechanism that traditionally resides on a central server. The entertainment industry has used DRM to prevent unauthorized duplication of copyrighted material, but it’s been largely abandoned by the music business in response to customer demand for unprotected files.
• Will Cuil’s New Streaming Feature Put It Back on the Map? – I thought this thing was dead. My god. Die already. You're not Cuil! Get it?!
• Twitter Gets an Unofficial App Store [INVITES] – One of Twitter’s fundamental strengths is its third-party ecosystem. From sending tweets, tracking stats or sharing media, there are web apps, desktop clients, mobile apps and services that add value to the microblogging juggernaut.
• Greatly Improve Your Physical Workspace with Small Changes – Office – Lifehacker – Many of us spend quite a lot of time in our workplaces yet spend precious little time thinking about how that workspace is laid out. It's time to assess the state of your workplace and improve it.
• The Beginner’s Guide to Tricking Out Your WordPress Blog – Blogs – Lifehacker – You took the leap and installed WordPress to host your own blog because you want complete control over how it looks and works. Now, it's time to power it up, lock it down, and make your blog completely yours.
• Google Wave Team Gives Up on Internet Explorer | Smarterware – After “countless hours” of work, the Google Wave team has thrown up their hands and decided not to make Wave work in Internet Explorer natively. Instead, they released Google Chrome Frame, an IE add-on that puts Chrome’s backend inside Internet Explorer. Next week another batch of Google Wave invitations will go out, and IE users will have to install Chrome Frame or switch to Firefox or Safari to try Wave. (The screenshot is the prompt IE users will get when they try to log into Wave.)
• Why Your Company Needs Social Media | Search Engine Journal – There are case studies abound of how big brands such as Zappos, Jet Blue, Comcast, etc. have put social media into action and the success that they’ve had with it. Can small businesses be just as successful using social media? Absolutely! There are many advantages of using social media during the sales process for customer service, sales prospecting and customer retention for small businesses.
• Google Says, Referrer Spam Does Not Hurt Your Google Rankings – Referrer spam is a kind of spamdexing (spamming aimed at search engines). The technique involves making repeated web site requests using a fake referrer url that points to the site the spammer wishes to advertise. Sites that publicize their access logs, including referrer statistics, will then end up linking to the spammer's site, which will in turn be indexed by the search engines as they crawl the access logs.

  This benefits the spammer because of the free link, and also gives the spammer's site improved search engine placement due to link-counting algorithms that search engines use.

• Apple: New Nano Not Banned By Health Club Chain – Tech Trader Daily – Barrons.com – The hot button topic of the day among Apple (AAPL) obsessives was the theory that the new video-camera equipped iPod Nano might be banned in health clubs. That would not be good news, given the number of people that buy iPods specifically to listen to music while working out.

This is the Link Report for September 20th through September 22nd:

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 Chrome Injects Itself Into Internet Explorer With Chrome Frame – Google just announced the launch of Chrome Frame, a new open-source project that will allow Chrome's rendering engine to run within Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6,7, and 8. This plugin, which is available now, will give developers the option to ask users if they would prefer to switch to the Chrome rendering and JavaScript engine. Users simply continue to use Internet Explorer and the switch will be completely seamless, with no noticeable changes to the user interface.
• Mobile SEO Best Practices | mobiThinking – Our basic mobile SEO advice is to assume nothing, go right back to basics and think through the following principles:
• Mobile Search 101, Part 2 – Search Engine Watch (SEW) – One of the challenges for developing and marketing on mobile devices is dealing with different browsers and how they render the Web. This has always been an issue for developers. Another challenge is the different screen sizes, orientations, and rendering speeds.
• Mobile Search 101, Part 1 – Search Engine Watch (SEW) – According to a recent Gartner report, mobile advertising is poised to grow 74 percent this year to $913.5 million. It's then predicted to accelerate in 2011 and then reach $13 billion in 2013. The increased consumer use of smartphones is said to be the contributing factor for the explosion.
• SEOmoz | How to Export Google Analytics Data to Excel via the API – From @wilreynolds. A way to export Google Analytics data to Excel through the API
• Tweet Scenes Launches Yet Another Twitter Background Creator – Companies and brands always want to have their Twitter profiles and background images fit their profile. Tweet Scenes is hoping to make the process of creating backgrounds for Twitter users much easier. You upload your logo, photos, text and links, and give some basic background information on your company and what you’re looking for. You then pay a flat fee ($129) up front, and get your design done in three business days.
• Our Microblogging Lives: Work, Home, Lunch, Sleep? – According to a study conducted by the researchers from Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, Google (Google) and Elisa the top 5 most frequent microblogging posts are “working,” “home,” “work,” “lunch,” and “sleeping.”
• 7 Ways to Boost Your SEO Career Profile | Search Engine Journal – In the current economic climate where the job market has become more and more competitive, sometimes sticking out from the crowd can be as easy as boosting your SEO resume by doing the things that you love.
• TinyChat – Disposable Chatrooms for the Twitter Generation – Even though we live in an age of instant Qik streams, video chats on Skype, and micro-blogging on Twitter, sometimes all you need is a simple chatroom for real-time text chats. TinyChat solves this problem by creating simple, disposable chatrooms. Tinychats works exactly as advertised. It's a disposable, no-frills chatroom, with a deliberately limited feature set. There are no accounts to sign up for and whenever you open up a new room, TinyChat will simply create a new URL for you.
• Greetings! – A quick primer on how to handle business events correctly

This is the Link Report for September 14th through September 15th:

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

• Redesigning Your Web Site? Don’t Neglect SEO – Search Engine Watch (SEW) – Usability and SEO go hand-in-hand. Search engines want to rank Web sites that provide a quality user experience for the searcher. How that's defined can be somewhat subjective (every Web site is unique and its target audience will also be unique).
• SEOmoz | Google Quietly Pushing More Links + Data in Snippets – The last 3 months have heralded a bevy of new tests and features from Google's search results, and it's worth taking a review of the most frequent of these and examining what it potentially holds for optimization of the future.
• SEOmoz | A Link Building Rule to Cut Out and Keep – Link Building Explained
• ReadTwit: All the Links From Your Twitter Stream in A Filtered RSS Feed – ReadWriteStart – In these hard times, it takes something pretty nifty to get us to write about a Twitter app; our eyebrows rose an inch or two when we were told about ReadTwit, an RSS application that makes Twitter smaller, faster, and better for those who need to find and consume interesting links.
• Personal Relationship Manager Gist Launches to Public – Gist is not a system for the casual email user whose main communications involve sending email forwards to friends and pictures of the kids to mom and dad. Instead, Gist is designed to help the professional email user who often opens up their inbox only to feel like it's helplessly out of control. How do you know what the most important communications are? How can you stay up on what your email contacts are doing? Gist aims to solve these problems.
• Brier Dudley’s blog | Microsoft launches Zune, clarifies what’s up apps, raps iPod | Seattle Times Newspaper – The HD Zune is here chock full of features.
• Zune HD to get Twitter, Facebook as Microsoft abandons ‘squirting’ – Microsoft will support the two major players in the social media space.
• New Facebook Application Creating Massive Volumes Of Photo Spam – The photo tagging phenomenon has officially jumped the shark on Facebook with the All my Friends! application which lets you instantly tag your friends in pre-made images. It’s not exactly a new concept but for some reason this iteration of the application has been extremely successful having attracted over 5 million users so far and growing daily.
• Make Google Search Real-Time With This URL Hack – Google web search results can be limited by timeframe using the "search options" link on every page, but one startup company CEO discovered today that searches can also be limited to results indexed minutes or seconds ago by making a simple change to the search results page URL.
• Ask.com Powers Breast Cancer Cause-Search Campaign – According to Ask.com spokesperson Nicholas Graham, while companies are expected to help community organizations, it's not unheard of for these cause-related partnerships to also benefit the companies. After donating $25,000 to Autism Speaks through a targeted awareness campaign, 80,000 visitors changed their Ask home pages to Autism Speaks-related skins and 63% of campaign visitors became permanent users. Despite the fact that the promotion lasted only a few days, Ask saw a 10% increase over other holiday and non-cause related skinning promotions. In anticipation of October and Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Ask is building upon its community successes and teaming up with Susan G. Komen for the Cure in "Search for the Cure".

This is the Link Report for September 11th through September 13th:

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

• What’s Yahoo’s “Plan B” For Search? – If the DOJ won't let the Microsoft/Yahoo Deal go through, what's next for the #2 search engine?
• Joe Wilson’s Payments Provider Reports DDoS Attack – The Austin-based online payments startup Piryx reports that it was targeted in a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack yesterday due to its hosting of a fundraising campaign for Joe Wilson – the politican who made headlines this week after shouting “You Lie!” during Obama’s health care reform speech.
• What information is "personally identifiable"? | Electronic Frontier Foundation – You'd be surprised how information thought to be obscure really isn't.
• Facebook Lite Threatens Facebook’s Brand Advertising Businesss – Facebook Lite seems to be missing the mark. A very interesting piece on how this could hurt brands.
• Why Social RSS Could Be Huge – Phil Baumann talks about how using RSS socially could really bring about great results
• Forget Gen Y: Gen X is Making Real Change – ReadWriteEnterprise – Sometimes even the best researchers forget that the answer you get depends entirely on who you ask. A new Forrester survey of 2,000 information workers has revealed that despite the hype, it's not Gen Y that's getting business to adopt collaborative technology. Gen X, those who are 30-43, are the ones leading the charge for social computing.
• SEMPO Says Time To Get Serious About Mobile Search – SEMPO yesterday released a “POV” white paper that seeks to orient search marketers to the growing mobile market, mobile SEO and mobile paid search in particular. It cites the dramatic growth of mobile web usage and anticipated future growth in arguing that search marketers now need to take mobile seriously. Developed by SEMPO’s Emerging Technologies Committee, the report asks (and seeks to answer) several key questions
• The most popular digital goods are virtual money, weapons and gifts | VentureBeat – People are paying real money for digital goods in all sorts of online applications ranging from Facebook apps to massively multiplayer online games. The No. 1 thing they buy is virtual money. Other top items include virtual weapons and gifts for social networking friends, according to a survey released today.
• No, the Cloud is Not Killing Open Source – Andrea DiMaio from the Gartner Blog Network asks an interesting question in a post titled "Is Cloud Computing Killing Open Source in Government?," and InfoWorld weighs in on the issue as well. One might as well not limit the question to government usage. Is cloud computing killing open source in general? DiMaio notes that government officials in London and Washington D.C. are finding that primary drivers for open source adoption–including cost savings and vendor independence–are going away, while free, cloud applications proliferate and grab headlines.
• Uh-Oh! DOJ Expands Review of Microsoft-Yahoo Search Deal – Google may already have a monopoly on search, but that doesn’t mean the proposed search deal between Microsoft and Yahoo will be automatically greenlighted by federal officials. The Justice Department has expanded its review of the partnership agreed to by the search laggards, Bloomberg is reporting. The DOJ is going to challenge the argument that you need to be bigger in order to compete. I couldn’t agree more. My view is that you need to be smarter and faster. Of course as both Microsoft and Yahoo’s history in search proves, they’ve been neither.

This is the Daily Link Report for September 8th

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

• Flickr Finally Goes Native With An iPhone App – Flickr on iPhone with an app? Nice! Finally, some say.
• What to expect from tomorrow’s Apple event – Techcrunch's take on what to expect from the Apple event tomorrow.
• EduFire Raises $1.3 Million For Video Education Platform – EduFire, the startup that offers online video classes for a variety of subjects, has raised $1.3 million in Series A funding from Battery Ventures, with Google AdSense godfather Gokul Rajaram and Western Technology Investment participating.
• The Top 20 VC Bloggers (September 2009) – When it comes to lists of top VCs, one of our favorites is the top VC bloggers. Larry Cheng, a partner at Fidelity Ventures, started keeping just such a list last May, based on how many subscribers each VC blogger has on Google Reader. This morning he updated his VC blogger leaderboard. The top 20 are below, all 100 are on his own blog, Thinking About Thinking (No. 71).
• Rep.ly: TweetMeme Comments Get Their Own Awesome Short URL – Several weeks ago, Twitter link tracker TweetMeme announced its own comment system, which includes the ability to retweet individual comments left on the site.
• Smart.fm: How Well Do You Know Your Facebook Friends? – Smart.fm aims to act as a full-fledge learning platform, wherein users can access the site, say “I want to learn about this topic” and be presented with tools, quizzes and world lists that test memory retention and understanding. There is a social element too, and users can both add their own information to existing courses, and share their learning schedules, remix content and ask and offer help.
• Google And Apple Go To War (GOOG, AAPL) – Google and Apple are on a collision course.

  While the companies are not each others' biggest rivals, they are increasingly competing with each other.

  This follows years of enjoying one of the coziest relationships in Silicon Valley — one that will now get more complicated as the companies compete in more areas.

• 10 Incredibly Cool DIY Projects – 2009 Backyard Genius Awards – Popular Mechanics – To create an incredibly cool car-crusher or oversize rocket or solar-pedal powered contraption that the world had no idea it needed takes brilliance, determination and a healthy dose of crazy. The winners of our Backyard Genius Awards have all those qualities, and we salute them for it.
• Embeddable Waves: The Google Wave WordPress Plugin – Google Wave is coming and it's embeddable to your blog and Website

This is the Daily Link Report for September 1st

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

• 45+ Excellent Fresh Free WordPress Themes Around | Showcases | instantShift – Excellent Fresh Free WordPress Themes Around
• Yes, You Can Use HTML 5 Today! [HTML & XHTML Tutorials] –
•  HTML5 Gallery – A showcase of sites using HTML 5 markup
• Inline Validation in Web Forms – Okay we all agree validating forms is a must. Getting your forms to validate and heck even work sometimes is a real pain. Alistapart has agreat tutorial on how to do it inline.
• Get Ready for HTML 5 – HTML5 is here if you like it or not. It will most likely revolutionize the Web.
• Google CEO Eric Schmidt Interview: His Thoughts On Search, Books, News, Mobile, Competition And More – Techcrunch interview with Google's CEO Eric Schmidt
• EBay Is Said to Have a Deal to Sell Skype – NYTimes.com – EBay plans to announce on Tuesday a deal to sell its Skype Internet calling division to a group of private investors, according to two people briefed on the company’s plans.
• The Mobile Payment Rivalry Heats Up – First there was the OS wars then the Browser Wars and then the Social Media platform wars. Now there's the micro payment wars.
• Twitter’s Massive Growth Spawns Second Web Hosting Facility – Finally Twitter is starting to scale or are they? A new hosting facility will help with the load. But we can only wait to see if it will really help the Twitter infrastructure.
• BROWSER WARS: Google Chrome to Come Standard With Sony Computers – Sony has made the choice to make Google Chrome to be it's standard browser. This might bolster Google's meager 2.6% of the browser market.