These are my links for January 14th through January 15th:

• PlaceWidget Allows Venues To Show Off Their Foursquare Mayors With Pride –
• Twitter’s Answer To Facebook Connect –
• 9 Specific Ways Your Business Can Use Twitter –
• Mozilla Drops Firefox 3.7, Switches to More Frequent Feature Updates –
• Where Have All The Old Tweets Gone? –

These are my links for January 7th through January 8th:

• Photograbber Downloads Tagged Photos of You from Facebook – Facebook – Lifehacker – The next time you're skimming Facebook and run across pictures your friends have posted, there's no need to monkey around asking for copies via email. Use Photograbber to snag them right off Facebook yourself.
• Remains of the Day: The U.S. Consumes 3.6 Zettabytes in One Day Edition – Remainders – Lifehacker – Wow
• Delete Giant Email Chains to Speed Up Gmail Mobile Webapp – Gmail – Lifehacker – Gmail's iPhone/Android-optimized webapp is nearly as good as a mail client, but not if you keep multi-multi-message threads near the top of your queue. One blogger saw a nearly 7-second decrease in loading time after killing one seemingly endless chain.
• MailBrowser Keeps Gmail Contacts, Attachments Local and Handy – Gmail – Lifehacker – Firefox/Internet Explorer: If Gmail or Google Apps mail is attached to your workday like your right arm, MailBrowser could be a handy pop-out sidebar tool for making sense of the people who mail you and the files they send.
• Boxee Blog » Boxee Beta Goes Public, Download Now – The Boxee Beta is officially out. You can grab it here.
• Facebook is Building a New Payment Operations Team – Although Facebook has been talking about building a payments service for years, the project has only slowly rolled out.
• Yahoo Further Bridges the Gap Between Internet and TV – Today at CES, Yahoo is expanding its partnerships and making the TV Widget Developer Kit publicly available.

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 14th through 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

• Redesigning Your Web Site? Don’t Neglect SEO – Search Engine Watch (SEW) – Usability and SEO go hand-in-hand. Search engines want to rank Web sites that provide a quality user experience for the searcher. How that's defined can be somewhat subjective (every Web site is unique and its target audience will also be unique).
• SEOmoz | Google Quietly Pushing More Links + Data in Snippets – The last 3 months have heralded a bevy of new tests and features from Google's search results, and it's worth taking a review of the most frequent of these and examining what it potentially holds for optimization of the future.
• SEOmoz | A Link Building Rule to Cut Out and Keep – Link Building Explained
• ReadTwit: All the Links From Your Twitter Stream in A Filtered RSS Feed – ReadWriteStart – In these hard times, it takes something pretty nifty to get us to write about a Twitter app; our eyebrows rose an inch or two when we were told about ReadTwit, an RSS application that makes Twitter smaller, faster, and better for those who need to find and consume interesting links.
• Personal Relationship Manager Gist Launches to Public – Gist is not a system for the casual email user whose main communications involve sending email forwards to friends and pictures of the kids to mom and dad. Instead, Gist is designed to help the professional email user who often opens up their inbox only to feel like it's helplessly out of control. How do you know what the most important communications are? How can you stay up on what your email contacts are doing? Gist aims to solve these problems.
• Brier Dudley’s blog | Microsoft launches Zune, clarifies what’s up apps, raps iPod | Seattle Times Newspaper – The HD Zune is here chock full of features.
• Zune HD to get Twitter, Facebook as Microsoft abandons ‘squirting’ – Microsoft will support the two major players in the social media space.
• New Facebook Application Creating Massive Volumes Of Photo Spam – The photo tagging phenomenon has officially jumped the shark on Facebook with the All my Friends! application which lets you instantly tag your friends in pre-made images. It’s not exactly a new concept but for some reason this iteration of the application has been extremely successful having attracted over 5 million users so far and growing daily.
• Make Google Search Real-Time With This URL Hack – Google web search results can be limited by timeframe using the "search options" link on every page, but one startup company CEO discovered today that searches can also be limited to results indexed minutes or seconds ago by making a simple change to the search results page URL.
• Ask.com Powers Breast Cancer Cause-Search Campaign – According to Ask.com spokesperson Nicholas Graham, while companies are expected to help community organizations, it's not unheard of for these cause-related partnerships to also benefit the companies. After donating $25,000 to Autism Speaks through a targeted awareness campaign, 80,000 visitors changed their Ask home pages to Autism Speaks-related skins and 63% of campaign visitors became permanent users. Despite the fact that the promotion lasted only a few days, Ask saw a 10% increase over other holiday and non-cause related skinning promotions. In anticipation of October and Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Ask is building upon its community successes and teaming up with Susan G. Komen for the Cure in "Search for the Cure".

This is the Daily Link Report for September 1st

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

• 45+ Excellent Fresh Free WordPress Themes Around | Showcases | instantShift – Excellent Fresh Free WordPress Themes Around
• Yes, You Can Use HTML 5 Today! [HTML & XHTML Tutorials] –
•  HTML5 Gallery – A showcase of sites using HTML 5 markup
• Inline Validation in Web Forms – Okay we all agree validating forms is a must. Getting your forms to validate and heck even work sometimes is a real pain. Alistapart has agreat tutorial on how to do it inline.
• Get Ready for HTML 5 – HTML5 is here if you like it or not. It will most likely revolutionize the Web.
• Google CEO Eric Schmidt Interview: His Thoughts On Search, Books, News, Mobile, Competition And More – Techcrunch interview with Google's CEO Eric Schmidt
• EBay Is Said to Have a Deal to Sell Skype – NYTimes.com – EBay plans to announce on Tuesday a deal to sell its Skype Internet calling division to a group of private investors, according to two people briefed on the company’s plans.
• The Mobile Payment Rivalry Heats Up – First there was the OS wars then the Browser Wars and then the Social Media platform wars. Now there's the micro payment wars.
• Twitter’s Massive Growth Spawns Second Web Hosting Facility – Finally Twitter is starting to scale or are they? A new hosting facility will help with the load. But we can only wait to see if it will really help the Twitter infrastructure.
• BROWSER WARS: Google Chrome to Come Standard With Sony Computers – Sony has made the choice to make Google Chrome to be it's standard browser. This might bolster Google's meager 2.6% of the browser market.

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.

Rohit Bhargava posted a fantastic and very useful post on Twitter on his Influential Marketing Blog. He recently did a study on how peple are using Twitter, the microblogging social media service. His findings are very interesting and informative. One concern I have is that Twitter, as it goes main stream will slowly die off because those who join up won’t become active participants in the online community. Right now it’s just a fear, but it’s possibly a valid one. Check out his findings below:

1. 21% (One Fifth) of Twitter accounts are empty placeholders. These are the percentage of Twitter accounts that have never posted a single tweet. They may either be registered simply to hold a username for later use, or be experimental accounts started up but never used.
2. Nearly 94% of all Twitter accounts have less than 100 followers. In a finding perhaps consistent with the newness of the tool as well as the fact that many people may currently have an account simply to start experimenting with the tool, Sysomos found the vast majority of Twitter users have an extremely low followership.
3. March and April of 2009 were the tipping point for Twitter. During these months, Ashton Kutcher launched his quest to get to 1 million followers faster than CNN, Oprah started using Twitter, and the steady flow of new users to the site continued. For many, it offered a safer and easier way to get their feet wet with social media, 140 characters at a time.
4. 150 followers is the magic number. In a particularly interesting data point from the survey, Sysomos found that Twitter users tended to “follow back” all their followers up until about 150 connections. Then the reciprocation rate fell off dramatically, which seems to indicate that this number may be the crossover point where people shift from using Twitter for more personal use to using it more for “lifecasting” their thoughts and actions to a community of people who they feel varying levels of connection to.
5. A small minority creates most of the activity. A steep curve of a small minority of actively engaged content creators generating most of the activity on a site is common among social networks, but it is steeper and more pronounced on Twitter. 5% of users account for 75% of all activity, and 10% of users account for 86%. This seems to suggest that the site has managed to engage a mass audience beyond those who typically engage with social media.
6. Half of all Twitter users are not “active.” If you take a general description of being “active” on Twitter to mean that you have posted a tweet at some point in the last 7 days (1 week), then the survey learned that 50.4% of all Twitter users fit this category. If you remove the 21% from point #1, this leaves about 30% of users who have an account and have tweeted before, but happen to be inactive now.
7. Tuesday is the most active Twitter day. One of the most useful data points from the report is that it clears up the common question of which day of the week is the best day to tweet something. Sysomos found that Tuesday stood out as the most popular day for tweets and retweets, followed by Wednesday and then Friday.
8. APIs have been the key to Twitter’s growth & utility. In terms of tools that people are using for Twitter, Sysomos found that more than half (55%) of all Twitter users use something other than Twitter.com to tweet, search and connect with others. This may, in part, be due to Twitter’s notorious reputation of failing/crashing, but also is a credit to all the third party applications that have been built on top of Twitter and do their fair share to bring new users to the service.
9. English still dominates Twitter. When exploring Russia as part of a class that I am teaching this summer at Georgetown, one of the barriers we learned about was the difficulty of fitting some Russian language words into just 140 characters. Twitter is, however, extremely English-friendly. As the Sysomos report found, the top four countries on Twitter are all English speaking (US, UK, Canada, Australia). Of these, US makes up 62% of all Twitter users, followed by UK with nearly 8% and Canada and Australia with 5.7% and 2.8% respectively. The largest non-English speaking country on Twitter? Brazil with 2%.
10. Twitter is being led by the social media geeks. This particular finding should likely come as no surprise, but 15% of Twitter users who follow more than 2000 people identify themselves as social media marketers. These individuals are more likely to post updates every day (sometimes more than once per day) and also use Twitter more actively for direct communication.

Bonus Geographical Stat/Quote: “The cities with the biggest Twitter populations are New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, San Francisco, and Boston. Los Angeles is the fastest growing city on the list.”

Download the full report from Sysomos at http://www.sysomos.com/insidetwitter/

Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Flash is a great tool for interactivity and overall interaction. What it’s not good for is Web design. If you really, truly, want to get found on the Internet you don’t want your site in Flash. Yes, you can do really neat things with it. Make your cursor make sounds, have your buttons animate in a way that CSS and xHTML just can’t, but you need to ask yourself two questions. First, do all these “flashy” (pardon the pun) effects do anything to promote your product or your company? Second, is it really worth giving up some Search Engine find-ability for a little unnecessary glitz and glamour? In my opinion, no.

There was a very interesting article in Search Engine Land blog yesterday. The author points out some very interesting points:

But what about those that have a more basic Flash site that does indeed provide information? For them, I would ask, why Flash? If you don’t need to allow your visitors to interact with your website, then why not just use HTML with Flash accents? Because even if the search engines are indexing the information contained in Flash (more on this in a bit), there are other reasons not to use it. First and foremost, not every browser has Flash installed. In fact, currently on an iPhone, Flash shows up as a little blue cube. Second, many Flash-based sites use only one URL for the entire site. Besides the search engine implications of that, it is also a nightmare for bookmarking, as well as for most web analytics programs.

via Are The Search Engines Really Indexing Flash?.

So I leave you with this, if your site does not need the wow power and interactive feel of Flash, but you want to capitalize on the search results, leave Flash for another day or another project.