These are my links for January 7th:

• Social Media Collective Wisdom | Who’s Blogging What (Special Edition) Jan 7, 2010 – Some expert thinking on five social media questions as we enter the first decade
• Facebook Just Got Its Own VitaminWater Flavor: “Connect”. Seriously. – Here’s a first. VitaminWater has just announced that its newest flavor will be called “Connect”, complete with a Facebook logo and a full paragraph description loaded with references to untagging, friend requests, and photo stalking. It’s black cherry-lime flavored, with caffeine and “eight key nutrients”. And it’s coming to stores nationwide in March.
• Ask Me, Ask Me: Tumblr Adds a New Query Feature – Good news for anyone who loves interacting with a particular Tumblr: The blogging platform has added an Ask feature that allows you to directly ask a blogger questions.
• Ford SYNC Will Soon Stream Pandora Radio – 2010 is shaping up to be the year Ford SYNC forever alters how we experience digital content in our vehicles. Today, the automotive company is breaking even more ground with the news that the next evolution of SYNC will support third-party mobile applications. Get ready to stream Pandora and tweet hands-free in your Ford.
• Have a Nexus One? Good, Now Tear it Down – Geeks can usually be divided into two categories: those who are perfectly happy with merely using their gadgets, and the more radical type, who simply have to tear them down to see what’s inside

These are my links for January 6th through January 7th:

• HootSuite Now Lets You Update Your WordPress Blog – HootSuite, the popular Twitter app geared towards businesses and power users, has just issued yet another update to their web-based client, featuring the ability to post to the WordPress.com blogging platform, URL and content previews, and trending topic explanations.
• iTunes Browser Previews Now With Actual Music – Back in November of 2009, Apple finally rolled out a web browser preview for music in the iTunes catalog. It let you view the albums page, see all the songs included on the album, their length, as well as price for individual tracks.
• Graphic.ly Creates the Digital Comic Book Store – During Microsoft’s keynote at CES 2010 this evening, Steve Ballmer showed off a very cool mobile and web application called Graphic.ly, a platform that aims to be the ultimate digital content delivery system for the publishing world.
• 2010 Census Turns to Facebook to Maximize Impact, Reach Young Adults – As the year 2010 gets underway, so does the federal Census in the United States — only this time around it has gone somewhat digital, incorporating Facebook and other digital media to spread the word about being counted.
• HOW TO: Erase Your Online Past [HUMOR] – These days, it’s getting tougher and tougher to keep a good name unbesmirched. Surveys indicate that as many as half of hiring managers use search engines to screen job applicants, and 1 in 10 have rejected potential employees because of damaging information on the web. Even if there’s no one out to get you, it’s likely that you’ve left your own e-trail of embarrassment: FacebookFacebookFacebook photos, blog comments, cached web pages, YouTubeYouTubeYouTube videos — all these things can provide the world with evidence of your previous poor judgement and wrongdoing.
• Echofon 3.0 Gets With the Twitter Times – You have plenty of options when it comes to using Twitter on your iPhone. But Echofon just made a big move for your attention by releasing version 3.0.
• Video: Google’s “F*ck You iPhone” Phone. The REAL Google Phone (Satire, NSFW) – As we’re all well aware, Google released the Nexus One yesterday, the first supposed “Google Phone.” But it’s hardly an iPhone killer. For that role, Google has something much more sinister in mind. Meet the “Fuck You iPhone” Phone.
• “Inspired” By Formspring, Tumblr Launches Nearly Identical “Ask Me” – Popular microblogging service Tumblr has just launched a new feature called “Ask Me."
• The Oscars of Twitter: Shorty Awards to Honor Creators of Short-Form, Real-Time Content – Last year, SawHorse Media, a Twitter aggregator that pioneered the concept of lists, put together the Shorty Awards. This contest and ceremony was intended to "honor the best producers of short, real-time content."
• 5 Great Blogs For Funding Advice – ReadWriteStart – The best advice we can give you is to know your audience. You don't try to sell booze to pregnant women, you don't make God-jokes in Utah and you don't get a term sheet without tailoring your pitch. Investors are already blogging about what they want from potential portfolio companies, so if you're looking for funding you should be reading their blogs. While we know there are plenty of useful investment-related blogs, here's a list of five to get you started.

These are my links for December 30th:

• Zynga CEO Mark Pincus On Charlie Rose – Charlie Rose welcomed Zynga CEO Mark Pincus on his show last night for a 15 minute interview. Pincus says 60-70 million people a day are playing social games on Facebook and MySpace, and 1%-2% are willing to shell out actual cash to enhance gameplay. Mobile social gaming is still small, just 5 million – 6 million/ day, he says. But mobile is a fast growing platform.
• Evernote Reaches Two Million Lifeloggers, Half Of Them Are On The iPhone – The idea of a life recorder that captures every moments of your life on video is still a bit of a tech fantasy, but an early version of the life recorder already exists. It is called Evernote, the popular iPhone (and now Android) app which lets you record your memories by snapping geo-tagged photos, making voice notes, or just text notes and making it easy to search through them. Evernote does not yet support video recording other than as an attachment (for premium subscribers), but when that becomes more practical it will.
• 10 Things You Need for Your Social Media Road Trip –
• Palm Pre and Palm Pixi Headed to Verizon? – The Palm Pre is headed to Verizon sometime in early 2010, but now BGR is reporting that the Palm Pixi will be coming to Verizon, too.
• Hot PCB – Printed Circuit Board Design, Fabrication, and Assembly Industry Blog » Blog Archive » When a Tweeter becomes a Twiddler – We have all experienced that moment where we open our email again even though we just minimized it and there was nothing new. Or we have refreshed our facebook/twitter to see if anything new has popped up. Or we’ve closed a browser and out of habit opened it up again even though there is no need. Or you end up staring aimlessly at your monitor wondering “what can I do?”
• SEOmoz Decision Making Flowchart – SEOmoz caused a stir this week by publishing a “study” that allegedly showed NoFollow tags were still effective in sculpting the flow of PageRank.

  This of course flies in the face of what Matt Cutts has said on the issue, and the data in the study doesn’t seem to actually be all that solid. But hey, why let that get in the way of a good link bait post, right?

• Twitter API Is Becoming Far More than Just an API for Twitter – Webmonkey – Twitter’s API has spawned hundreds of mashups and third party software apps, but now it’s growing even further — outside sites have begun mimicking an API to piggyback on Twitter clients.
• Web Designer – Defining the internet through beautiful design » Blog Archive » What has blogging done for the quality of writing on the web? – IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to read much of the IT press these days without coming across an article about Twitter, how it’s going to save the world, and how it isn’t. I don’t want to add to that discussion here (except maybe I already have) but its soaring popularity got me thinking about how easy it is to get one’s voice heard on the web these days. Twitter is a special case – technically it’s micro-blogging – and it is typically used to provide short updates on what people are doing there and then. But it is a form of blogging, micro or not, and it is blogging in general I think I have a problem with. Wikipedia defines a blog as “A type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video.
• Is Social Media Killing Your Business? | Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing – Social media for the small business is a catalyst, a tool, a way to create awareness and deeper engagement – it’s not a way to take orders.
• 10 Questions for Brian Williams – TIME – Brian Williams doesn't get Twitter. Calls it a time suck and a waste of time. He misses the point completely and it's really sad.