These are my links for December 29th:

• 8 Things Every Geek Needs to Do Before 2010 – These tasks comprise a quick to-do list that will leave you feeling competent and prepared for the decade that approaches. Also, you can play the condescension chip and start chiding friends who haven't checked off these items yet.
• Facebook Redesigns Help Center, Gives Unique URLs to Help Topics – Facebook yesterday announced they’ve redesigned their help center, making it more accessible and easier to use.
• Best Job Application Ever: “Twitter Genius” – With its 140 character limit, Twitter is all about brevity. But if you think the same shouldn’t apply for a job application, well then, “you’re done.”
• Conservative Link Shortener GOP.am Aims to Prank the Pranksters | Epicenter | Wired.com – Pranksters riddled a new Republican-branded URL-shortening service this week with unwelcome links juxtaposing the GOP brand with ironic web pages, such as one featuring a sex toy in the likeness of Barack Obama. The pranks forced the party’s web consultant, Political Media, to block certain URLs manually and work on implementing an automatic filtering system.
• Wurld Map: A Geopolitical Guide to Short-URL Services | Epicenter | Wired.com – Domain hacks aren’t exactly new, but with a bumper crop of URL shortening services doing business under two-letter country domains these days, we wanted to know: Where exactly is that? And is the government over there any good?

This is the Link Report for September 29th through September 30th:

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

• Twitter Blog: Soon to Launch: Lists – Lists are public by default (but can be made private) and the lists you've created are linked from your profile. Other Twitter users can then subscribe to your lists. This means lists have the potential to be an important new discovery mechanism for great tweets and accounts.
• Copy Path Puts a File’s Location in Your Clipboard – Timesavers – Lifehacker – Free utility Copy Path adds a new entry to your right-click context menu that lets you quickly copy the full path to any file with two clicks of your mouse.
• Tweetalarm Keeps an Eye on Twitter Keywords for You – Alerts – Lifehacker – If you're fond of using Google Alerts to keep an eye on web searches and wished there was an equivalent for Twitter, you're in luck. Tweetalarm tracks keywords and updates you via email.
• New Malware Re-Writes Online Bank Statements to Cover Fraud | Threat Level | Wired.com – New malware being used by cybercrooks does more than let hackers loot a bank account; it hides evidence of a victim’s dwindling balance by rewriting online bank statements on the fly, according to a new report.
• Geek to Live: Map your time – Downloads – Lifehacker – A great way to see what your spending your time on.
• A Dozen Social Media Applications – Social media gets lots of attention these days. The NFL banned players from using Twitter. Bing integrated Twitter results into its search engine results pages (SERPs). When Michael Jackson died the site handled an estimated 5,000 tweets per minute and, proving Twitter's global reach, a state department official asked Twitter to postpone scheduled maintenance due to the critical role the site played in the recent Iran elections.
• Software Polices Employees’ Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn Posts by Wall Street & Technology – How to let traders, salespeople, customer service reps and investment bankers use social networking in a beneficial way (to attract customers, fix problems, share tips, collaborate, etc.) and be certain that confidential information about the firm will not be leaked, that no employee will ever post an inappropriate comment on a social network, and that no rule will ever be broken (for instance, FINRA's rule requiring customer communications to be monitored and archived) — is a challenge to compliance and risk managers on Wall Street.
• Social Networking Entrepreneur Taking It To The ‘Next Level’ – Venture Capital Dispatch – WSJ – Steve Ressler, a former IT auditor with the Department of Homeland Security, spent a lot of time studying the world’s terrorist networks. He later developed a keen interest in different kinds of networks, and founded Young Government Leaders, Washington, D.C.’s premier professional organization for government employees. Ressler also started GovLoop, an online social network for government workers that numbers about 20,000 members.
• BBC to relaunch websites with focus on social media | Media | guardian.co.uk – The BBC is planning a radical relaunch of its website to include more social media.
• 3 New Facebook Strategies for Building Your Personal Brand – With over 300 million users, no one can deny the power of FacebookFacebookFacebook. In fact, 50% of users log in every single day and spend over 6 billion minutes on the platform. What are they doing on it? Depending on the intent of the user, they’re sharing personal stories and updates, staying connected to friends and colleagues, and even building businesses. Many people only use their profile to keep in touch with friends and family, and form a brick wall so no one else can come inside. This strategy won’t help your career, but if you choose, you can also leverage Facebook to build your personal brand.

This is the Link Report for September 23rd through September 25th:

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

• WARNING: Facebook Worm Spreading via News Feed – Malware and spam are finding new ways to spread across social media. A few days ago, a nasty Twitter Worm spread through DMs. Today, we have received multiple reports that a new worm is spreading via Facebook wall posts and status updates.
• Google Hits Back At AT&T Over New Google Voice FCC Complaint – Ironically AT&T is using the very controls put on them by the FCC against Google Voice. Ironic? Only a little
• We Hold Twitter Ransom For $100 Billion Dollars – 37signals founder Jason Fried probably had the post of the day today mocking Twitter’s $1 billion valuation on its latest rumored round of funding. The post, titled “PRESS RELEASE: 37SIGNALS VALUATION TOPS $100 BILLION AFTER BOLD VC INVESTMENT” is very funny. But it’s also disingenuous.
• Dropbox Reaches 2 Million Users; Continues to Grow – Dropbox, the impressive file sharing service which makes it easy to sync your files across multiple computers and the web, has announced that it has reached two million registered users, just four months after reaching one million users. Of those, Dropbox has almost one million users that are active.
• Video: Symantec Shows The Danger Of Shortened Twitter Links – While there is often a lot of talk about the downside of URL shorteners being that if they go down, they take your links with them, the much more obvious and real problem is that they very easily mask potentially bad sites. We’ve been seeing this more and more in both public tweets and DMs, but luckily so far most of those have just been worms meant to replicate themselves, rather than really bad viruses. But security software company Symantec released a video today to show some very bad links in action.
• Place Pages: Google Launches Rival to Yelp – Just moments ago, Google announced that they are adding information on businesses, restaurants, points of interest, neighborhoods, and more on separate web pages within Google Maps. The project, Place Pages for Google Maps, replaces those expanded info bubbles that used to be part of Google Maps. Yelp had better watch out.
• PostRank Combines Google Analytics With Social Media Stats – As conversations surrounding blog posts start to take in place other places (Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed (FriendFeed), etc.) and people use tumble blogs like Tumblr (Tumblr) and Posterous (Posterous) to quickly comment and share helpful information, tracking that data and its correlation to overall traffic numbers can become really, really helpful.
• Seven Easy Ways to Integrate Your Google Apps – Google Apps – Lifehacker – The information you keep in Google apps like Gmail, GCal, Reader, and Voice doesn't just live in one place. Check out a few easy but non-obvious ways to plug different Google apps together and share their data and features.
• How To Measure The Value Of A Fan Or Follower In Social Media – It’s hard to justify the time spent on social media account management. But there are ways to measure the real value (monetary or otherwise) of fans on Facebook and followers on Twitter. These top two social media websites offer free advertising, an open customer service and communication platform and a demographics database all wrapped up in one, so knowing the value of fans and followers can be a big help when deciding how much time should be allotted to social media efforts. Here are some of the ways to measure how much Facebook and Twitter users are really worth.
• Will Social Media Drive a Web Without Walls? – Search Engine Watch (SEW) – A key question that remains to be answered in the social media battle is the interconnectivity of all the pieces. Carmakers don't use the same supplier for all of their various parts; rather, they select a specialized manufacturer for each component (e.g., headlights, sun roof, seats). Similarly, social media providers can't be the best at every functionality (social network, social bookmarks, wikis, video sharing, photo sharing, etc.).

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 August 6th through August 7th:

• Georgia Takes a Beating in the Cyberwar With Russia – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com – Besides the bloody shooting war going on between Georgia and Russia, there’s another, quieter battle going on in cyberspace.The Georgian government is accusing Russia of disabling Georgian Web sites, including the site for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
• Twitter Restores Service After Online attack – NYTimes.com – Twitter, the popular microblogging site, was out of service much of the day Thursday as it worked to defend itself against a Web attack, but service appeared to have been restored by late evening.Many of Twitter’s 45 million legitimate visitors were unable to use the service for hours. Analysts characterized the disruption as a denial-of-service attack, in which hackers overwhelm a Web site by sending it a deluge of junk requests, and one suggested the attack might have originated in Russia or Georgia.
• Pronounce Names – Dictionary of Name Pronunciation, How to pronounce names, How to say a name, Name pronunciation, Name pronunciations, How to pronounce a name -
• Revision3 > Hak5 > Episode 524: USB Multipass – Linux, Trinity, USB – Why carry around a dozen bootable USB drives when you could merge ‘em all into one? On his episode we build a USB Multipass complete with customized boot menu ready to launch any of favorite tools–including Backtrack, Ophcrack, Kon-boot, dban, freedos, and more. Plus Shannon reviews the Trinity Rescue Kit, the boot disc dubbed CPR for your computer.
• 3 unveils MiFi mobile Wi-Fi service – mirror.co.uk – The 3 network has just pulled the wrappers off MiFi, a mobile Wi-Fi device that allows you to connect any Wi-Fi equipped device to the web no matter where you are.
• Is Cyber Warfare to Blame for Twitter Meltdown? – Everybody’s still regrouping after today’s Denial of Service attacks against Twitter, FacebookFacebookFacebook, LiveJournal, and other social media websites. Now, however, some further details about what happened and who might be behind it are coming to light.
• 20 Simple Productivity Tools for Bloggers – Great post full of links to Mashable’s pick for 20 great productivity tools for Bloggers
• Digg Ads Are Here: Will Users Bury Them Into Oblivion? – Two months ago, Digg (Digg) announced a lynchpin in its revenue strategy: Digg Ads. The program, an attempt to fix the company’s inability to turn a profit, allows users to vote on specific ads within the homepage feed. The more diggs, the less the ad costs to the advertisers. But if Digg users hate the ad, then their downvotes increase the ad price.
• Team Apart Makes the Virtual Meeting Social [Invites] – There is a lot of software out there for conducting virtual conferences and performing demos: GoToMeeting, Microsoft Office Live Meeting, WebEx, and AdobeAcrobat Connect immediately come to mind. Most of these programs though require software to be installed and are meant for conference meetings rather than team collaboration. They’re not virtual workspaces.
• Koobface Virus Gets Smarter; Targets Twitter and Facebook Users [Alert] – Koobface, a virus that targets computers via social networking sites, is apparently back and with added sophistication.A typical Koobface attack – like the one that surfaced on Twitter last month – comes via a link that purports to be an interesting video (i.e. – someone tweets “my home video” with a link to what looks like a YouTubeYouTubeYouTube page). Those videos then tell you that you need to upgrade your Flash player – which, many legitimate videos often do too. Upon “upgrading,” however, the user is infected with the virus.