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 Link Report for September 25th through September 28th:

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

• The Easiest Way To Explain the Marketing Process | Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing –
• 4g Wireless Evolution : What is WiMAX? – Consider the existing Internet opportunities for Internet connectivity today — broadband wireline, WiFi, and even dial-up. There are issues with each one: broadband service can be expensive, depending on the provider, and it certainly isn’t available in many rural areas; WiFi has very limited range, again limiting coverage, and dial-up is simply slow and can’t come close to meeting requirements for today’s applications.
• An Important Analytics Distinction: Bounce vs Exit – Bounce rate can be an incredibly helpful metric, particularly when trying to not only drive more traffic to your website but trying to get more of that traffic to convert. However, it’s vitally important to understand what bounce rate is, how it differs from percent exit, and where you can potentially misunderstand the data.
• Link Building Outreach: 5 Steps To Maximize The Value Of Every Opportunity – Extensive backlink prospecting and qualification, even with automated research processes and crawlers, can take days. Creating highly-linkable content can take even longer. Because of this significant investment, we often recommend conducting your organic link building outreach in a way that maximizes conversion rates, grows relationships with both linkers and link decliners, and ensures that any future link building campaigns are faster, easier and more effective.
• 6 steps to KILLING long tail keywords for SEOs & Content writers – When you are fortunate enough to be blessed by the Search Gods, you need to maximize that blessing, one strategy most of us probably don’t take full advantage of is blowing out the long tail keywords when we already are getting signals from the search engines that they like our site for head or short tail keywords.
• Good Call-To-Action Buttons | UX Booth – The call-to-action button is an important tool in the user experience designer’s box of tricks. In this article I’ll give you a few pointers on providing effective ones.
• Official Google Blog: Jump to the information you want right from the search snippets – For most search results, Google shows you a few lines of text to give you an idea of what the page is about — we call this a "search snippet." Recently, we've enhanced the search snippet with two new features that make it easier to find information buried deep within a page.
• Web Development Project Estimator – The Web Development Project Estimator is a simple tool that allows web designers and site developers to quickly and thoroughly estimate the time and materials required for a proposed web project.
• SEOmoz | Why Linkbait is a Tactic the Search Engines Will Always Value – There have been more than a few debates and suppositions over the years about the potential value of linkbait/viral content strategies and whether search engines will always reward these practices.
• China Blocks TwitPic After Explosion Images Go Viral – China is now blocking TwitPic in the hope of stopping the flow of information.

This is the Link Report for September 18th through September 19th:

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

• Social media on marketers’ menu for 2010 – Trends & Ideas – BizReport – While email remained the most popular media among marketers for use next year (56.8% "realistically" plan to use it), social media isn't far behind. Over half (56.3%) "realistically" plan to include it in future marketing plans, found the Center for Media Research.
• Business Implications of Facebook Lite: Advice for Social Media Marketers and Businesses on Facebook | Suite101.com – Facebook Lite is a stripped-down version of the Facebook social media application that went live in September of 2009. Facebook has stated their intention to be the service of those users who do not have high-speed internet connections or bandwidth to support the main site.
• Local companies embrace social media to bond with customers | Minnesota Public Radio NewsQ – We've heard a lot lately about the power of social media services like Facebook and Twitter to connect people, spread news and even influence world events. Tens of millions of people are signed up for one or more of these services that connect folks with shared interests or concerns.
• The New AIM: Less Clunky and Annoying, More Social – PC World – I use AOL’s instant-messaging network all day long, but I’m not sure when I last used the AIM software itself (with the exception of the iPhone version). I’ve associated it with feature bloat, annoying ads, and a sort of old-timy, Web 1.0 feel. So I long ago switched to other clients that support the AIM network (Apple’s iChat when I’m on a Mac, GAIM when I’m on Windows, and the Web-based Meebo anywhere and everywhere).
• Blueprint: A CSS Framework | Spend your time innovating, not replicating – Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your development time. It gives you a solid foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, useful plugins, and even a stylesheet for printing.
• Ultimate Cheat Sheet Colllection – Hungred.com – Cheat Sheets are handle for web development. Usually, these sheets are either printed out and pasted on the wall of your working area or they are placed on your computer as wallpaper. Referencing in this way makes working faster and more effective. Here are a complete list usually used by most designers and developers during web development. Enjoy!
• Tutorial: How to change plugin table structure in WordPress – Hungred.com – Some of us will have problem updating or changing your table structure in your WordPress plugin after it has been released to the public. Many people will come up with different ideas to change their existing plugin structure to a new one. Idea such as checking for that particular column existence either through pure SQL or mixture of SQL and PHP. However, the approach here may be a bit overkill. There is a much simpler way.
• RedBeacon Wins The Top Prize At TechCrunch50 2009 – RedBeacon is a new service that made its public debut at TechCrunch50 that further streamlines this process by bringing the OpenTable model of online transactions to much broader spectrum of services.
• Google Launches New Ad Marketplace; Display Ads Will Never Be the Same – You’re probably familiar with Google AdSense and AdWords, Google’s (Google) flagship advertising products. It’s how Google makes its billion of dollars. Highly targeted text ads appear on Google search and third party websites that are part of the AdSense program. Advertisers buy ads based on keywords, with more popular keywords costing more per click than less popular terms.
• MediaPost Publications Study: Half Of Ad Impressions, 95 Percent Of Clicks Fraudulent 09/18/2009 – Click fraud continues to plague online advertising, but many just want to sweep it under the rug. Radar Research managing partner Marissa Gluck calls it "the dirty little secret of the online ad industry that no one wants to talk about."

This is the Link Report for August 30th through August 31st:

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

• Be Careful When Evaluating Paid Search Tests – Interpreting test results for paid search campaigns can be surprisingly difficult. One reason for this is order latency. The fact today’s clicks don’t all generate orders today, but instead sales trickle in over time means that analyzing new launches and tests can be tricky. Two ways to address this complication are described below.

  Problem: Successful tests can look bad initially because of order latency

• Turn Google Voice into a Growl-Friendly Windows App – Google Voice – Lifehacker – Get Google Voice as a windows popup app. Very handy!
• Adobe Buys Business Catalyst / GoodBarry – Adobe will own the American part of the Australian company. Business Catalyst / GoodBarry provides tools that help web designers set up online businesses for their clients with minimal cost and effort and no programming skills required, combining website content management, e-commerce features, e-mail marketing, business analytics and basic CRM tools into one system.
• Wikipedia Will Use Colors to Add Layers of Trust to its Articles – Wikipedia plans on signifying the level of their trustworthiness by adding layers of color. It’s easier to trust editors with a high number of entries and revisions than those who are new to the site, and now registered users will be able to easily discern between the two by looking at the color of the text’s background. This will most likely make Wikipedia more authoritative.
• AJAX Search: Is Google Sweating Bing Or Just Feeling The Need For Speed? – Is it possible that Google sees a real threat in Bing? Possibly but they've been improving their search for a long time, well before the birth of Bing.
• Google Voice Warms Up For iPhone, Cuts Off Calls After 15 Minutes – Google voice dropping calls on the iPhone after 15 odd minutes? Oops!
• Why Don’t Teens Tweet? We Asked Over 10,000 of Them. – Over the last few months everyone has weighed in on the question of “Why Don’t Teens Tweet” — except, it would appear, teens. We recently ran a survey of 10,000+ US teens aged 13 – 17 to see if we could add anything new to the question. As it turns out, the question itself is flawed.

  Great analysis on how people and teens tweet

This is the Link Report for August 26th through August 27th:

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

• Phone Call Tracking in Google Analytics – Website Magazine – Website Magazine – UK Internet marketing company ClickThrough Marketing today introduced a module add-on for Google Analytics that allows advertisers to track phone call conversions from any source/advertising channel.
• Ready for a Mobile (Advertising) Storm? – Website Magazine – Website Magazine – A report from Juniper Research has found that growing consumer adoption of mobile Internet services and heightened brand engagement with mobile services will be reflected in a sharp increase in expenditure on mobile Internet advertising. How much of an increase? According to the report, ad spend on the mobile Internet will reach $500 million globally in 2009 and rise to nearly $2 billion per year by 2014.
• Essential WordPress Plugin: Add To Facebook – Website Magazine – Website Magazine – Plenty of plugins are out there to help readers share your blog content, but perhaps the new Add To Facebook plugin for WordPress is the most significant. For starters, consider Facebook's more than 250 million users.

  The plugin is extremely easy to add if you are using one of the latest versions of WordPress. Simply download the zip file and upload it through your WordPress administration panel. You can then choose your settings for the plugin under your WordPress "Settings" section – either a text-only link or a small image and text link, and whether to add the link to every post.

• Snow Leopard review – A very thorough review of Apple's new Snow Leopard OS at Engadet
• EASTER EGG: Yelp Is the iPhone’s First Augmented Reality App – This makes your iPhone just that much more cooler and helpful. Augmented reality uses your iPhone’s camera, GPS, and compass to show virtual items in the real world. Put your camera in front of a restaurant and it will come up with info, or use it to find nearby Twitter users
• Audi Taps its Facebook Fans to Help Design Car of the Future – The German luxury car maker is taking a stab at using social media to create buzz about the company, the brand and their cars. Very clever
• New Facebook Privacy Policies Will Have A Significant Impact On Platform Applications – As a result of a new privacy agreement with Canada, Facebook has issued statements suggesting that there could be major platform changes ahead for developers.
• New Attack Cracks Common Wi-Fi Encryption in a Minute by PC World: Yahoo! Tech – Computer scientists in Japan say they've developed a way to break the WPA encryption system used in wireless routers in about one minute. (That's great! <insert sarcasm>)
• Social Networks: Boomers Feel Left Out – Even though baby boomers make up more than one quarter of all US Internet users, and even though the majority of this group spends over five hour per week online, a new survey by Burst Media found that only 14% of boomers feel that the content on the Internet is focused on people their age.
• 5 Social Media Lessons Learned from Whole Foods – Whole Foods is into using Social Media. The best way to improve your own company's use of social media is to learn from others. Check out the case study on Mashable.

This is the Link Report for August 23rd through August 24th:

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

• Victoria Advocate | Social networking helps some businesses gain customers – Social Media helps some businesses gain customers. It's true so long as you're willing to work at it and cultivate the relationships.
• MediaPost Publications The Social Media Rules Are A-Changin’ 08/21/2009 – Social Media unrealistic for corporate America? That's what one PR CEO says.
• Fanbase Launches Wikipedia-Style Directory Of All Things Sports – Billed as the web’s “largest almanac of pro and college athletes, built entirely by fans”, Fanbase is today launching its directory of all things sports to the world after 18 months of work and a few months of public beta. Backed by $5 million in venture capital from Benchmark, Fanbase’s aim is to mobilize and unite fans around pages of any athlete or sports team at any level.
• TWEET IDEAS: 13 Things to Do on Twitter Besides Tweet – Besides Tweeting, what else can you do with the microblogging platform?
• Snow Leopard Has Arrived, Shipping August 28th – Nice price point. Wish Windows 7 would be that cheap.
• Why AT&T can’t keep up with iPhone data demand | TechBlog | Chron.com – Houston Chronicle – AT&T just can't handle the pressure or the load of the iPhone.
• Send big files the easy way. Files too large for email attachments? No problem! – Need to send a big file to some one sendspace is a great service to do this.
• 10 Best Ways to Backup Data – by Digital Trends 2009 08/23 – Most computer users recognize the importance of backing up key files on a regular basis — be it documents, music, irreplaceable photos and camcorder footage — but not everyone is aware of how to go about doing it, and which products are needed to pull it off. Here we look at a handful of top-rated backup solutions to help you make a suitable choice based on your needs and budget.
• FastStone Image Viewer, Screen Capture, Photo Resizer … – An image converter / resizer intended to enable users especially digital camera owners to convert, rename, resize, crop, rotate, change color depth, add text and watermark to images in a quick and easy BATCH mode.
• List of Best SEO plugins for WordPress – Amazing list of great SEO Plugins for the WordPress Blogging Platform as tweeted by @wpchick

This is the Link Report for August 14th through August 17th:

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

• The Proper Way to Pitch on Twitter – There is a right way to pitch people on Twitter and there is a wrong way. As with regular life you need to do the right way and avoid the wrong way.
• Top 100 Best Social Media Books, Ever « Mellow Billow – The Best Social Media books ever
• Three Ways To Optimize Business For Local Search Via Online Newspapers – Local search marketing experts have long recommended that businesses improve their online presence by optimizing profiles in online yellow pages (IYPs) and local search engines. After accomplishing that, there still remains a lot of small, local “constellations” of geographically-oriented sites where companies should seek to maximize their presence as the next stage in their local SEO. Newspaper sites are pretty much at the top of the list following IYPs, so here are three ways that one can engage with them and optimize for search.
• Official Gmail Blog: New in Labs: Hide labels, see subject lines on netbooks – New innovations in GMail Check 'em out!
• Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Specifying an image’s license using RDFa – Ever wonder if the image in Google Image search is free to use? Now the search giant has added a feature that will help in the process of finding reusable images.
• Martian Designers — 5 Copywriter Peeves | Copywriting in Web Design | Escaping the Word Cage – Wizely's pet peeves with copy writing in web design
• David Beckham may have Swine Flu – Doctors are keeping a close eye on David Beckham this weekend as concerns grow that the soccer star may have been exposed to Swine Flu.
• Swine flu facts | World news | The Guardian – Q&A about Swine Flu from the Guardian in the UK
• Create online business card – card.ly » Home – Make your "tiny" portfolio online in which you'll be able to integrate your networks (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.), a little about you and how to contact you. Choose between many nice skins and features.
• SEOmoz | Whiteboard Friday – Matt Cutts on NoFollow – Head of the Google Search team Matt Cutts talks to the SEOMoz team about the NoFollow tag.

This is the Daily Link Report for August 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

• 30 Creative Illustrator Logo Design Tecniques and Tutorials : Speckyboy Design Magazine – Do you need some creative ideas for logos. Check these 30 designs out!
• 10 Things You Must Do to Earn Your Audience’s Trust – On social media trust doesn't come easy. Here are 10 things you can do to earn the trust of your audience
• 15 Tools for Testing your Website – A great resource of tools to make sure your Website is up to par
• Sex Offenders Banned from Social Media Sites – Illinois Governor Pat Quinn signed into law a bill that bans all registered sex offenders from using social networks. Though this sounds like a good idea, you have to remember that often states classify people as sex offenders for much lesser crimes than just rape and molesting (like peeing in public in some states). This law could possibly be unconstitutional. Read more click on the link.
• A Closer Look At Local Search Ranking Factors – Does local search help? In my opinion yes. Click to read the article
• Facebook Usernames: 50+ Million Claimed and Counting – People on the social media networking site haven't stopped claiming vanity urls since they first went live a few months ago.

This is the Link Report for August 12th through August 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

• Facebook Grew Twice As Fast As Twitter In July – Facebook not only bought Friendfeed this month they grew twice as fast as twitter in July. Making them the clear dominant market leader.
• YouTube Launches Its Redesign – Now that redesign is going live for all users. If you take a look at YouTube (YouTube).com, you will see the new interface for yourself. YouTube has also blogged about the redesign, explaining some of the new features and a few that were removed. Here’s the text and a screenshot:
• The Internet Marketing Driver: Your Google Local Business Center Dashboard, Analyzing and Refining Your Google Maps Listing Based on Analytics – Another great post by SEO Guru Glenn Gabe about local search and local business center in Google
• Official Google Reader Blog: A flurry of features for feed readers – Google Does it again
• Google Caffeine FAQ: Your Questions Answered – PC World – Q&A about the Google update
• Technology Review: Blogs: TR Editors’ blog: Caffeine Injection Gives Google Search a Boost – For instance, Caffeine is undoubtedly faster than the current Google Search, often coming back with results in about half the time. It also appears to crawl many more pages–sometimes twice as many for a particular keyword. And according to some pundits, Caffeine's results suggest that it also uses a more complex combination of keywords to rank pages.
• Facebook Goes Lite and Tests Twitter-Like Version of Itself – Let the gloves come off. Facebook bought FriendFeed the other day and not they are going straight for their competition, namely Twitter. Will it work?
• Twitter Not Suing Developer, But Spam Apps Should Watch Out – Developer of app MyTwitterButler an auto following Twitter app claimed that he was being sued by Twitter. Twitter denies this.
• Federal judge in Tyler says Microsoft can’t sell Word | TechBlog | Chron.com – Houston Chronicle – What a shock, MIcrosoft infringed on a patent. Judge orders halt to sales of Microsoft Word.
• Pixorial: Bringing Sexy Back to Online Video Editing? – Put together by former executives from Netscape and Oracle, Pixorial has been in private beta since January of this year. Its mission is to “help people do more with video memories than ever before,” and to that end offers an interesting mix of digital and analog video services.