This is the Link Report for September 16th through September 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

• » Competitor Analysis – 10 Key SEO Factors to look out for – SEO Software for Professionals from Interleado – Find out what your competitors are doing with their website to attract traffic.

  Getting more traffic than your competitors is what most companies are striving for online. Achieving this usually requires that you rank better than your online competitors – this requires that your website has more authority and that your content is better optimised.

• SEOmoz | Our Stance on Paid Links & Link Ads –
• Twitter Closing New Venture Round At $1 Billion Valuation – Fast growing startup Twitter will soon be joining a select group of startups with private venture round valuations of $1 billion, we’ve heard from multiple sources. CEO Evan Williams disclosed the round to employees at a recent all hands meeting.
• Oneok Sues Twitter For Trademark Infringement [Update: Dropped] – Natural gas distributor Oneok Inc. has sued Twitter for trademark infringement. The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Tulsa, said that Twitter had allowed an anonymous user to use the user name ONEOK, a company’s trademark.
• 5 Easy Steps to Stay Safe (and Private!) on Facebook – Unbeknownst to most mainstream Facebook users, the social network actually offers a slew of privacy controls and security features which can help you batten down the hatches, so to speak. If used properly, you'll never have to worry about whether you should friend the boss and your mom. You can friend anyone you want while comfortable in the knowledge that not everyone gets to see everything you post.
• Bug testers: Google is clean, Bing is buggy | Relevant Results – CNET News – An independent search engine bug bash gave high marks to Google's bug testers and found that while Bing is buggy, it's also doing a lot of things right.
• Brilliant 360-Degree Panorama of the Milky Way | Wired Science | Wired.com – Makes you feel small.
• 7 Moves Facebook Has Made to Outflank Twitter in the Last 6 Months | Ignite Social Media – Facebook is innovating, what does this mean for Twitter?
• HOW-TO: Write Effectively for Twitter & the Social Web – Social media itself has changed writing online – making it more informal and personal. In fact, when you’re writing online these days, you’re writing not only for your audience but also for search engines and social media sites. Add Twitter to the equation and the need to communicate with only 140 characters raises writing for the social web to a new art form.
• Facebook Photo Tag Search: The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread – facebook_photosYesterday we wrote about Facebook prototypes, a new Facebook (Facebook) feature which lets you try out beta versions of new features. Click on “Applications” at the bottom left of your screen, then “Browse More Applications”, and then on “Prototypes”.

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 10th

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

• TweetMixx: A Better Way to Track Twitter Trends and Topics – New web service TweetMixx is a bit like TweetMeme (Tweetmeme) meets saved Twitter searches meets a web-based Twitter client. It allows you to follow your favorite topics, not just people, and attempts to help cull the best tweets from people you don’t and may not even want to follow.
• Facebook Now Lets You Fax Your Photos. I Have No Idea Why Anyone Would Want To Do This – Now this is the dumbest feature I've ever seen.
• Facebook Open Sources FriendFeed’s Real-Time Tech – With Tornado Friendfeed and Facebook appear to have decided to keep Friendfeed alive! w00t
• Gmail Lets You Check Your Google Voice Messages – You can now listen to your Google Voice messages in Gmail! A much needed addition to Labs
• Obama Health Care Speech: What Did Twitter Think? – The Twitterverse was opinionated like usual. Very interesting graph.
• Tornado Web Server Documentation – This is a link to the Documentation for the Tornado (off shoot of Friendfeed). Very exciting.
• The technology behind Tornado, FriendFeed’s web server – Bret Taylor’s blog – Today, we are open sourcing the non-blocking web server and the tools that power FriendFeed under the name Tornado Web Server. We are really excited to open source this project as a part of Facebook's open source initiative, and we hope it will be useful to others building real-time web services. Check out the announcement on the Facebook Developer Blog. You can download Tornado at tornadoweb.org.
• Facebook Tornado: FriendFeed’s Real-Time Web Framework Goes Open Source – It appears that Facebook is doing what many of us Social Media freaks had hoped. They are turning their recently acquired Friendfeed into a opensource platform called Tornado.
• Facebook @Mentions: Five Ways They Could Impact Twitter – Facebook just sent shockwaves through the social web with its announcement that they will be supporting @mentions in status updates. The feature, which Facebook calls tagging, allows you to not only reference friends, but groups, pages, and events.
• BREAKING: Facebook Lite Is Live – Now the testing seems to be done. Facebook Lite has launched

This is the Daily Link Report for September 11th

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

• Dropbox’s Web Interface Gets An Overhaul: Adds Bulk File Management, Search, And More – Dropbox, the impressive file syncing service which makes it easy to sync your files across multiple computers and the web, has released a brand new version of its online interface. Today’s upgrade brings with it a number of new features that will make it much easier to manage the large number of files users often have on their Dropboxes.
• Yeah, But Did You Steal The Zynga Playbook, Playdom? – It’s a day late, but social game site (and Zynga-antagonizer) Playdom has finally responded to our request for comment on the lawsuit and temporary restraining order they got hit with earlier this week.
• Skype Kills Extras (and Its Developer Ecosystem) – Skype’s new owners should be aware of one small thing: They are paying $2 billion for a company that, despite having more than 400 million subscribers, doesn’t know how to leverage that platform. Why? Because it doesn’t understand developers. It never has. We have consistently pointed out this lackadaisical attitude towards its developer ecosystem. The fact is that if you put your lot with Skype, then you are really on your own. Today the company announced that it’s killed Skype Extras, an API-based effort that was launched with much fanfare in June 2007.
• Yeah Ok, So Facebook Punk’d Us – Techcruch's report of the "Fax Photo" feature in Facebook was a joke played on them by Facebook.
• Twitter Changes TOS, Opens the Door for Ads – The new TOS, which is far more expansive and specific than the old one, not only addresses privacy concerns, but ownership, spam, rights, and links. The microblogging company said that, now that they better understand how users utilize Twitter, they can update the TOS to match.
• Facebook Friends Can Now Be Filtered By City (Again) – Over the last few weeks, Facebook has been removing regional networks. Silicon Valley? New York City? Peoria, IL? They have been slowly stripped from Facebook, to the dismay of many. The biggest complaint from users? They want to find their friends by location when they travel.

  Facebook’s heard the complaints and they understand the value of finding friends by region. So Facebook has decided to address that complaint by adding a filter to find friends by their hometown. This was announced via a Facebook wall post.

• How to Access Gmail When It’s Down – Gmail – Lifehacker – Just because the Gmail Web interface is down it doesn't mean you can't get your email.
• Morning Types Crash Faster Than Night Owls, Study Says – Habits – Lifehacker – The early bird may get the worm, but there's something to be said about burning the midnight oil. In fact, according to a new study, staying up later and longer may increase alertness and productivity more than being an early riser.
• Microsoft: We haven’t bought ‘pornography’ | Technically Incorrect – CNET News – A Microsoft representative declared in an e-mail: "Microsoft has not purchased the keyword 'pornography,' and this term has never been in our AdWords account."
• Your Tweets Are Yours: Now Back Them Up – Yesterday’s change in Twitter’s Terms of service, in which they explicitly state that every user owns their own tweets is cool, but what does it really mean for the user?

This is the Daily Link Report for September 9th

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 for B2B – Search Engine Watch (SEW) – Many business-to-business (B2B) companies are struggling with what their social media strategy should be, or if they should even have one. Unfortunately, many executives incorrectly believe that social media isn't applicable for their B2B company. Rather, they think it's something reserved for business-to-consumer (B2C) companies.
• Social Media and the Impact on Network Security | Search Engine Journal – There are many pros for social media. You can use social media to augment traditional public relations and communications strategies. You can build a profile and a brand and reach a wider audience. You are more engaging and can communicate directly with customers and the public. Your employees can provide value well beyond the 9 to 5 work hours. Social media has become necessary to fill the void as the media/newspapers have closed down or cut reporting staff recently. You can supplement existing partnership capabilities with tools such as podcasts, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to accelerate the sharing of knowledge, increase teamwork and enhance communication between co-workers.
• Did @PhilBaumann Just Save Follow Friday? – A better way to utilize #followfriday's power
• Google Preps To Turn On Chrome Extensions – Good news for those Firefox users who really want to switch to Chrome but fear living a day without extensions, that day is here. Or, at least, near. Google today announced that it was turning on extension support in Chrome by default in all the new developer builds (in Windows) from now on.
• In other news, we got to see the Palm Pixi today. It’s not too bad (but, really, no Wi-Fi?) – You get the feeling that Palm had something to hide today. On the surface that makes no sense, considering it officially announced the Pixi, the company’s second webOS-based phone, this morning. (The company’s first webOS phone, the Pre, launched to much fanfare last June, owing to an almost Bill Goldberg winning streak-like level of hype.) But as you’re already aware, Apple had an announcement or two of its own today, including the inclusion of a digital camera on the iPod nano. It’s unfortunate, but Apple events are really the black holes of this industry: on Apple event days, no other tech news can escape out into the wild. That is to say, unless your company name is Apple, Inc., you’d be better served laying low for the day, and make any announcements later in the week.
• Google Books Investigation: Congress is Now Involved – The entire Google Books affair has turned into one complicated mess.

  Here’s a recap of what’s been happening: In late 2008, Google (Google), The Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers came to an agreement over Google Books, which lets you search and read millions of scanned manuscripts. The agreement settled copyright issues and gave publishers and authors a cut of the revenue Google generated. For a long time, we thought that was the end of the matter.

• Google Proposes Micropayment System To Rescue Newspapers – Despite their frosty relationship, Google is proposing a micropayment system that could give the newspaper industry a way to charge for its online content. According to the Nieman Journalism Lab, the micropayment system will be based on Google Checkout and be available within a year “to both Google and non-Google properties.”
• Google Says Domain Registrations Don’t Affect SEO, Or Do They? – Over at Search Engine Roundtable today, Barry Schwartz writes about the latest comments from Google about domain registration and its impact on SEO/search rankings. In this case, it’s Google employee John Mueller suggesting in a Google Webmaster Help forum thread that Google doesn’t look at the length of a domain registration.
• 5 Ways to Pimp Your FireFox Address Bar | Search Engine Journal – The address bar is where you see the full URL of the current page. This is the only bar in FireFox I always have in front of my eyes (I may have some of the bars hidden when I need more space but this one is always active).
• Yahoo Launches New Contacts API | WebProNews – Yahoo has launched a new Contacts API, which uses OAuth. With the API, applications can allow users to read, write, and sync access to their Yahoo Address Book, which is one of the biggest address books on the web.

This is the Link Report for September 2nd through September 3rd:

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

• X/HTML 5 Versus XHTML 2 – The competition to become the next markup language for the Web is heating up. This article takes a look at what's cool and what's uncool about the competing technologies.
• 10 free tools to help you create online presentations | Blog | Econsultancy – 10 great tools to present online. A great list
• What Keeps Us Online Late at Night: Porn, Games, and Chat – Study says a lot about what people do late at night on the Internet.
• Facebook Captcha: What You DON’T Need to Type – Facebook's captcha has a bigger bark than a bite. You don't have to fill out a lot of it.
• Google Patents World’s Simplest Home Page – Google – Gawker – After a five-and-a-half-year fight, Google and its attorneys have managed to convince federal bureaucrats to bestow a patent on the company's iconic home page. We always thought the page was brain-dead simple, but apparently it's an innovative "graphical user interface."

This is the Link Report for August 18th through August 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

• Five Features We Want to See in Google Voice – Google Voice – Lifehacker – 5 features Lifehacker want to see in Google Voice
• How to Manage Your Online Life When You’re Dead – TIME – Times have changed. There's one more thing to add to your list to take care of be for you kick the bucket.
• Make Post-Mortem Plans for Your Online Life – Email – Lifehacker – Email, Facebook messages, Twitter DMs—they will, as inbox guru Merlin Mann suggests, keep coming even after we're dead. TIME suggests you make a plan for your online accounts-especially if you don't want your inbox contents revealed.
• No Tweet trademark for Twitter – It has been decided that Twitter can't trademark the term "Tweet."
• Gmail Backup | Safer is better – Do you use Gmail for everything? Then you probably should backup your emails. Gmail Backup does just that.
• Google Continues To Feed The PubSubHubbub. Google Alerts Now In Real-Time. – Today, Google has announced yet another service that is PubSubHubbub-compatible: Google Alerts.
• reBlog by Eyebeam R&D – A reBlog facilitates the process of filtering and republishing relevant content from many RSS feeds. reBloggers subscribe to their favorite feeds, preview the content, and select their favorite posts. These posts are automatically published through their favorite blogging software. Thanks @nealwiser for pointing this out.
• Official Google Research Blog: On the predictability of Search Trends – Google predictions based on trends
• Google Knows What You’ll Search For–12 Months From Now – Scary but true to some extent
• SEOmoz | Best Practices for Targeting Generic & Specific Terms & Phrases –

This is the Link Report for August 13th through August 14th:

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 Rank vs Google Caffeine Rank Tool | Sembience – Test your ranking in both Google and in Caffeine
• WP.me — shorten your links « Blog « WordPress.com – The guys over at WordPress have done it again making a url shortener that is really short
• Twitter Is Revamping Retweets, Launches A Retweet API – Twitter is getting easier Retweetability.
• The Evolution of Blogging – Where is blogging heading Om Malik of GigaOm has some ideas.
• Friendfeed launches custom (and public) themes – The Next Web – Custom themes have come to FriendFeed
• Google Doodled: Hans Christian Ørsted (1777-1851) | Technology | guardian.co.uk – Thanks to Google, hundreds of millions of people are today celebrating Hans Christian Ørsted's birthday without having much of a clue who he is … so who exactly was he?
• Netscape founder seeks rematch with Microsoft in new browser war – Marc Andreessen is back. Famed Netscape browser founder who took on Microsoft in the original browser wars of the 1990s is building a new browser.
• Jolicloud, a cool new OS for your netbook – Looks really neat
• How Google’s Caffeine Will Impact PPC – ClickZ – Every once in a while Google makes a major algorithmic change to its organic results. In reality, its organic algorithm changes at least monthly, if not more frequently, but the major changes are sometimes announced. Even when they aren't, these changes are quickly named by the industry, like hurricanes named at the time they prove themselves able to do damage.
• SEOmoz | Case Study: How Much Do Rankings Matter? –

Source: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/

With the recent turmoil in Iran over the election results, there is much talk and communication on the Interwebs about what’s going on over there. It is important that the truth gets out. Please if you’re going to Tweet or participate in ANY WAY, please follow these basic guidelines:

The purpose of this guide is to help you participate constructively in the Iranian election protests through twitter.

1. Do NOT publicise proxy IP’s over twitter, and especially not using the #iranelection hashtag.  Security forces are monitoring this hashtag, and the moment they identify a proxy IP they will block it in Iran.  If you are creating new proxies for the Iranian bloggers, DM them to @stopAhmadi or @iran09 and they will distributed them discretely to bloggers in Iran.
2. Hashtags, the only two legitimate hashtags being used by bloggers in Iran are #iranelection and #gr88, other hashtag ideas run the risk of diluting the conversation.
3. Keep you bull$hit filter up!  Security forces are now setting up twitter accounts to spread disinformation by posing as Iranian protesters.  Please don’t retweet impetuosly, try to confirm information with reliable sources before retweeting.  The legitimate sources are not hard to find and follow.
4. Help cover the bloggers: change your twitter settings so that your location is TEHRAN and your time zone is GMT +3.30.  Security forces are hunting for bloggers using location and timezone searches.  If we all become ‘Iranians’ it becomes much harder to find them.
5. Don’t blow their cover! If you discover a genuine source, please don’t publicise their name or location on a website.  These bloggers are in REAL danger. Spread the word discretely through your own networks but don’t signpost them to the security forces. People are dying there, for real, please keep that in mind.
6. Denial of Service attacks. If you don’t know what you are doing, stay out of this game. Only target those sites the legitimate Iranian bloggers are designating.  Be aware that these attacks can have detrimental effects to the network the protesters are relying on.  Keep monitoring their traffic to note when you should turn the taps on or off.
7. Do spread the (legitimate) word, it works!  When the bloggers asked for twitter maintenance to be postponed using the #nomaintenance tag, it had the desired effect. As long as we spread good information, provide moral support to the protesters, and take our lead from the legitimate bloggers, we can make a constructive contribution.

Please remember that this is about the future of the Iranian people, while it  might be exciting to get caught up in the flow of participating in a new meme, do not lose sight of what this is really about.

(http://reinikainen.co.uk/2009/06/iranelection-cyberwar-guide-for-beginners/)