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 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 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 Daily Link Report for 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

• Facebook COO’s advice: Just post quickly – Postcards – Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg offered up some tips on how businesses can best use the social networking site during Fortune’s Most Powerful Women conference.
• Mood Lighting and DIY Privacy Screens – Workspaces – Lifehacker – What do you do if you want some extra privacy in your office but you're not at liberty to go around tearing walls down and remodeling to fit your needs? Don your DIY hat and set to work.
• Fast Food Chart Rounds Up the Unhealthiest Items at Popular Chains – Eating – Lifehacker – It's a given that fast food isn't the most nutritious way to sate your hunger, but as a helpful reminder, the gang over at web site Next Generation Food have charted the unhealthiest items from the most popular chains.
• Windows 7 Transfers Your Wireless Settings Easily – windows 7 – Lifehacker – After discovering how easily WEP can be cracked and creating a long, secure WPA2 key, you've probably noticed it's a pain to get friends connected to your Wi-Fi network when they stop by. Windows 7 makes this process easy.
• Facebook Crosses 300 Million Users. Oh Yeah, And They Just Went Cash Flow Positive. – 300 million is the obvious big news. But really, it was always just a matter of time before Facebook was going to hit the milestone. They hit 250 million back in July. Really, the much bigger news is the second item.
• Breaking: Adobe To Acquire Omniture For Approximately $1.8 Billion – Adobe Systems has announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement with Omniture for the former to acquire the latter in a transaction valued at approximately $1.8 billion on a fully diluted equity-value basis. Under the terms of the agreement, Adobe will commence a tender offer to acquire all of the outstanding common stock of Omniture for $21.50 per share in cash. The proposed offer represents a premium of 45% over Omniture’s average closing price for the last 30 trading days through yesterday’s close.
• The US Government Is Going Google – It looks like The White House has copied a page from Google’sGoogleGoogle playbook and is now advocating that federal agencies move to the cloud. Google has long been a proponent of business in the cloud, most recently advocating their web-based Google Apps to enterprise prospects in the “Going Google” campaign.
• Google Releases Chrome Version 3 – While the new stable release doesn’t introduce anything groundbreaking (unless you just love custom themes), it does provide some important tweaks. The biggest one focuses on Google’s (Google) #1 obsession: speed. This is Chrome’s (Chrome) bread and butter. The search company claims that the new browser is 25% faster at executing JavaScript than Chrome V2, among other speed fixes.
• One in Five Tweets Are Free Brand Advertising – Research from Penn State found that a full twenty percent of tweets mention specific brand names or products. Out of half a million tweets examined during the study, one fifth were essentially free brand advertising.
• Of course the Zune HD has been torn apart and photographed – It’s a tradition around these parts to photograph a dissected gadget. This time around it’s the new Zune HD which looks just as good on the inside as it does on the outside. Hit up anythingbutipod for the complete gallery of the teardown.

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 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 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 Daily Link Report for August 20th

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 Top Twitter Client Is Still the Web – Despite what many of us Twitter-holics think most people still use the Web interface for Twitter more than any other means of access. Why? I don't know.
• 15 savage mistakes commonly made by PR folks | Blog | Econsultancy – In PR? Don't make these 15 savage mistakes.
• Measuring Success — How Deep Do You Go? – Search Engine Watch (SEW) –
• How to Use Twitter in Your Web 2.0 Marketing Strategy – The economy has significantly changed customer and vendor behavior. Spending marketing dollars in the wrong place limits the information available to your prospective customers. Making sure you are connecting well with your customers is the ROI that will truly fuel your company's growth. Before you allocate your reduced marketing budget, make sure you are connecting with your prospective customers online. Here, Knowledge Center contributor Mary Van Zandt explains how to use online communities and social media sites such as Twitter to maximize your company's marketing strategy.
• Low-Hanging Fruit for Content Promotion & Links – Search Engine Watch (SEW) – Are you frustrated that your remarkable content (a.k.a. link bait) isn't acquiring high-quality links? The problem might be that your focus is too broad and competitive. These days, it's easier to focus on minor topics to obtain high-quality links.
• Palm’s Colligan Said to Reject Jobs’s Offer to Stop Recruiting – Bloomberg.com – Former Palm Inc. Chief Executive Officer Ed Colligan rejected a proposal from Apple Inc.’s Steve Jobs to refrain from hiring each other’s employees two years ago, calling it wrong and “likely illegal,” according to their communications.
• The Bridge Between “Evolve” or “Die” | Altitude Branding | Brand Elevation through Social Media –
• URL Shortener for PHP & MySQL | Z.ips.ME – Z.ips.ME is a free program that allows you to use your website as your very own URL shortening service.
• You Don’t Need Bit.ly, Tr.im & Co.: Just Host Your Own URL Shortener – All the recent talk about the future of tr.im and giving up control over our links on Twitter to third parties made us look into alternative solutions for shortening our links over the last few weeks. While there aren't too many alternatives to using hosted services for short links, we did come across two self-hosted solutions that you can install on your own hosting account: z.ips.me and Shorty. Both have some pros and cons, but they do give you total control over your short links.

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? –