These are my links for January 8th:

• Google Toilet Paper : Optimize Your Wipe | Search Engine Journal – Here’s a fun Friday post about what could be easily mistaken for a new Google product launch to accompany the Nexus One and other new Google products : Google Toilet Paper (which gives a new meaning to “just Google it”).
• MediaPost – news and directories for media, marketing and online advertising professionals – If you were on vacation, similar to me, during the end of December you might have missed Twitter's big announcement. The company acquired Mixer Labs, the creator of GeoAPI, which provides developers with the ability to query data. That data can come from about 16 million businesses and thousands of points of interest. The technology also offers developers a layer on which to handle complex geographical queries and location-based services.
• National Weather Service: Twitter Storm Reports – GeoTagging is the act of associating geographical information with something, and Twitter has recently added the capability GeoTagging individual Tweets. This allows the NWS to correlate each Tweet to your location when it was sent. This capability will help to enhance and increase timely & accurate online weather reporting and communications between the public and their local weather forecast offices.
• Wanted: Your Weather Reports, Geotagged and Tweeted – If your natural reflex when the weather gets rough is to tweet about it, that reflex can now help the National Weather Service do its job better thanks to a new Twitter storm reporting program.
• Social Media Today | Social Media Policies of 113 Organizations – With companies searching for and developing standards for social media usage, many of them have come up with social media policies of their own.
• Top CMOs on Twitter – These are the top 63 Chief Marketing Officers around the world who 1) provide useful content and consistently engage with their followers on Twitter, 2) truly "get it" when it comes to the best ways to use Twitter and other forms of social media, and 3) were active on Twitter as of January 7, 2010. Please let me know if I have missed any CMOs who have 500 or more followers. After the review and confirmation process, he/she may be added to this list, which is updated regularly.
• The Dawn of Facebook’s People-organized Web – GigaOM – In 2010, Facebook is setting out to structure a social layer of the web, indexing web pages and objects by harnessing what its users say about them, including whether those users like them or not, and what they tag within them.
• Apple And Verizon: Are Two Star-Crossed Lovers Ready To Consummate? – Apple and Verizon. Two star-crossed lovers.

  A few years ago, when Apple originally set out with the idea of giving the iPhone to one carrier exclusively in the U.S., they first went to Verizon. But the network balked at some of Apple’s demands, which at the time of complete and utter carrier dominance in this country, must have seemed like a joke. So instead, Apple with with AT&T, and the rest is history.

• Anxious Yahoo BOSS Developers To Speak With DOJ About Microsoft Deal – In July 2008, Yahoo announced a radical new product called BOSS, or “Build Your Own Search Service” that lets developers tap into Yahoo’s core search index with an unprecedented amount of flexibility. Now, in light of the Microsoft/Yahoo search deal that was announced last summer, the future of BOSS is uncertain. That’s bad news for the many developers who have built projects on the BOSS APIs, some of whom are building businesses off of the service. Now, after being met with months of silence and uncertainty, some BOSS developers are taking action: they’ve scheduled a conference call with the Department of Justice to discuss their concerns.

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.

These are my links for January 4th:

• Make Video Encoding Easy and Affordable With Encoding.com – Encoding.com is the leading SaaS provider of studio-class video encoding services. It scales instantly and supports all popular media formats.
• Yahoo to Unload E-mail Provider Zimbra on VMWare – As Yahoo continues to refine and redefine itself, it’s been offloading and shuttering some services in an effort to slim down (RIP Geocities!). One of the divisions that’s been on the auction block since September is Zimbra, an open-source e-mail company Yahoo acquired in September 2007 for $350 million.
• 5 Superb Social Media Tools for Musicians – Musicians take notice
• Eric Schmidt: The Baddest Man On Twitter – Stop what you’re doing right now (reading this) and go look at Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s latest Twitter profile picture. Now look closer. Yes, it appears he’s wearing a flak jacket, also known as a bullet-proof vest.
• An Inside Look At A Twitter Style Guide: 140 Characters – We’ve all seen Twitter grow into the company that it is now, but what was it like when it first started — back when it was still called Odeo, and Twitter wasn’t in existence. As we know, Twitter was spun off from Evan William’s company Odeo, into what we know now as Twitter, the social networking service where you post short messages in 140 characters or less.
• Nothing to celebrate on Public Domain Day 2010 in the US – What child has not sat starry-eyed around the fire, dreaming of the goodies to come on January 1—Public Domain Day? The thought of new books and movies and music coming out from copyright is enough to send sugarplums dancing through heads, unless you live in the US in 2010. In which case, you have nothing to celebrate, since nothing is entering the public domain this year.
• Pearl Jam Gives A Song Away For A Tweet – Regular readers may know my affinity for Pearl Jam. The band, which released a new album, Backspacer, last year had a series of promotions with MySpace to promote the album. Now they’re turning to Twitter for some more.
• 4 Ways for Augmented Reality to Get Past the Hype – GigaOM – With 197 million augmented reality-capable smartphones set to be in the global market by 2012, up from nearly 91 million in 2010, the building blocks are falling into place for people to merge digital information with their view of the physical world. But while we’re just getting to the point that normal users can see the promise of augmented reality for themselves, there’s still a long way to go.
• If You Tweet, He Will Come: Mayor Cory Booker Shovels Snow for a NJ Resident – As the snow piled up on New Year’s Eve, Jersey resident Ravie Rave didn’t call a snow plow service to take care of her 65-year-old father’s walk — she tweeted at Newark Mayor Cory Booker.
• CES 2010: What to Expect [VIDEO] – What to expect from CES 2010. From the team at Mashable.com

This is the Link Report for September 22nd through 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

• Google Steps Where Many Have Stumbled: Sidewiki – By 2001 web startup Third Voice, which let people annotate websites via a browser plugin, was done. Website owners just didn’t like the idea of people “defacing” their websites with comments they couldn’t control. But the idea has lingered (really), and now Google is taking a shot at their own version of the service. It’s called Sidewiki, and it just launched.
• Microsoft’s Courier Tablet Is ‘Astonishing’ – Technology News Briefs | Newser – Microsoft’s foray into tablet computers looks to be “astonishing,” Gizmodo blogger The Paperboy raves after getting a look at leaked photo of the Courier, which has two screens and opens like a book. It has touch-screen and stylus capabilities, and is in the “late prototype” stage, sources say.
• Courier: Microsoft Has an Apple Tablet Rival, And It Looks Impressive – microsoft courierAlthough the Apple Tablet remains one of the most hyped (and mysterious) upcoming devices, it’s now not expected to launch until February. In the meantime, a variety of other innovations are looking to steal some of its thunder.
• STATS: 84% of Social Media Programs Don’t Measure ROI – We talk a lot about the rapid adoption of social media in a wide array of industries. According to an August 2009 survey by Mzinga and Babson Executive Education, 86% of professionals in a variety fields said that they have adopted social media in some way.
• Microsoft Pri0 | How much Razorfish, Windows Live and Microsoft Mobile Services make | Seattle Times Newspaper – Microsoft announced the financial impact of some reorganizational changes it made to some groups this morning, and gave some interesting detail on how much these businesses earned and lost. It looks like Razorfish, the digital ad agency that Microsoft just sold, lost money last year.
• WordPess Security Tips: 2 Easy Ways to Keep Hackers at Bay! – Tips, Tricks, Helpful Guide, News and Info from Article Maniac – It's wise to collect and use good WordPress security tips and techniques to prevent hackers from wreaking havoc with your blog.
• Google Crowdsources Reader, Docs and Search Features – Google has just opened the floodgates. With millions of users, it's only natural that the company is prioritizing features and crowdsourcing new product ideas. In a recent blog post, the company has revamped Google Product Ideas as a series of separate feedback pages for iGoogle, Google Docs, Google SketchUp, Google Ad Planner, Google Custom Search and as of today, Google Reader.
• Picasa 3.5: Ruining Your Good Name with Face Recognition Tagging – Say goodbye to your controlled web presence and say hello to Picasa 3.5. Google released Picasa 3.5 with a slew of new features including facial recognition and name-based batch tagging, faster geo-tagging and better web uploading functionality. The service is so good at finding your mug and tagging it that wild photos from yesteryear can resurface and wreak havoc on your reputation.
• Google Wave: You need to pay attention to this. – Jason Kolb re: the Future of the Internet – So here's the deal with Wave: If you deal in technology, and you get this one wrong, you'll miss the boat. And it's a big boat. If, on the other hand, you get this one right, you have the potential to do some incredible innovation.
• Yahoo! Search Gets a Massive Revamp | Search Engine Journal – There you go, Yahoo has just announced a major revamp of its search portal, particulary the search results format. According to the Yahoo Search blog the new Yahoo Search format aligns with the previous changes recently made on Yahoo’s other products such as the Yahoo homepage, Yahoo Mail, and Yahoo Messengers video calling feature.

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 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 8th through 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

• WordPress Acquires Grammer Gramer Grammar Checking Software – Automattic has announced the acquisition of After the Deadline, a service that provides spell checking, style checking, and grammar checking. Huzzah!
• 7 PPC Tools that Can Help Your SEO Efforts | The Adventures of SEO Boy –
• Don’t Lose Yahoo Traffic By Not Optimizing for Bing | WebProNews – Don't forget that Bing and Yahoo are still part of the mix. People still use these search engines and therefore you should optimize for them (Well at least Bing)
• Have a Facebook Page? Post on Tuesdays – As it turns out the best time to post to your Facebook is on Tuesday. Find out why.
• Protect Your Company’s Collaborative Spaces – You need to be prepared to lock out former workers from your online network once they leave. Good article from the people at GIGAOM
• United Way hopes to net new donors via social media – When one of United Way’s 500 cause members on Facebook asked her friends to donate money to the charitable organization in lieu of buying her birthday gifts, officials at the Greater Dayton agency were not only pleasantly surprised but excited about the possibilities for future fundraising.
• Should you ‘friend’ your doctor on Facebook? – CNN.com – Staying connected with your doctor takes on a whole new meaning. Good? Bad?
• Obama’s Facebook advice: Making a prez: The Swamp – "Let me give you some very practical tips,'' the president told the high schooler. "First of all, I want everybody here to be careful about what you post on Facebook.
• The Internet Marketing Driver: SEO, Forms, and Hidden Content – The Danger of Coding Yourself Into Search Obscurity – Too much coding with forms and hidden content Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) shows you how to fix this and do well in SEO
• AIM Now Goes Both Ways (With Twitter And Facebook) – Remember AIM? Yea that thing called Instant Messaging. Wow that's dated. Well now AIM can be used as a Facebook/Twitter app

This is the Link Report for August 25th through August 26th:

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 Now Using You To Provide Traffic Data To Maps – Google is now using location-enabled mobile phones that have Maps for mobile installed to improve its real-time traffic data.
• Bing Continues With Fake Referrers: What Part Of Stop Don’t They Understand? – Among Microsoft's search identity crisis one thing has been consistent, their bot's have been sending fake referrals to Websites. Read More.
• My Favorite Link Building Lie – While it is pointless to seek links (via email or any other method) for crappy content from other sites with equally crappy content, link building via email does in fact work perfectly – but only under one perfectly obvious and sadly overlooked circumstance: when the link seeker represents meritorious content and the link granter is looking for that type of meritorious content to link to. It’s so painfully obvious to me, that I fight the urge to laugh out loud when I read quotes like the one above.
• Amazon Adds A Virtual Private Cloud – ReadWriteEnterprise – Amazon has created a hybrid cloud that can work securely for the enterprise, balancing the need for encryption with the low cost and scaling power that the cloud provides.
• The Twitter Exploit That Could Have Stolen Your Info and Much, Much More – Found by David Naylor, the vulnerability exploits an issue with a recently added an HTML tag to all of their links (rel=nofollow, which tells GoogleGoogleGoogle that links on Twitter shouldn’t count in its algorithm). The result is that David was able to change the links in such a way that it generates a huge cross-site scripting vulnerability.
• Over 80% of Americans Use Social Media Monthly – The demographic data follows the trend we see overall—younger people are more heavily involved, but over-35s and over-55s are becoming more and more active in social networking. While 10% or less of online adults aged 18-34 are “socially inactive,” the older age ranges are showing high growth. Among adults 35-54, participation grew 60% over last year:
• Top 5 Current Email Scams You Should Know About – There are numerous ways to be scammed nowadays. Pyramid schemes, ‘too good to be true’ investments and of course the good old internet. There are literally millions of websites that will gladly take your money, personal info, bank details and a host of other things from you and then skedaddle.
• Make Firefox Faster by Vacuuming Your Database – Firefox – Lifehacker – Speed up Firefox!
• Yahoo’s Testing a New Search Interface…Bing’s Interface Actually – Examples of how Yahoo! is now Bing!
• Twitalytic Alpha Preview–Archiving, Curating, and Threading Tweets | Smarterware – Lifehacker Founder Gina Trapani has a new twitter app. It's not like anything else out there… well except for Twitters business model. Check it out it's in alpha. Open source too.

Have you heard the news? Yahoo has officially bought the photo-sharing startup Xoopit.

Yahoo! acquires Xoopit.

Xoopit is joining Yahoo! to make the world’s best email even better.

Yahoo! will be integrating both our photo sharing applications and our content indexing and discovery technology into Yahoo! Mail and other services over the coming months.

Xoopit has emerged as a leader in mail applications, indexing and content discovery. Yahoo! has recognized that Xoopit’s technology elevates photos to the forefront of people’s everyday email experiences. Mail is the original online photo sharing experience, and combining these two products results in an evolved inbox experience. Yahoo! Mail users can expect to see their mail become even more efficient, social and fun!

The Xoopit team would like to thank our users for all the support and guidance in developing a service that people love. We would also like to thank our angels and venture investors, Charles Moldow from Foundation Capital and Theresia Gouw Ranzetta from Accel Partners for wisdom and commitment along the way!

This is an interesting purchase from the search company, especially since they already own a very robust photo-sharing site, that some might remember, Flickr.

Why Yahoo hasn’t been able to really monetize Flickr, your guess is as good as mine. But with this latest purchase, Yahoo seems to have Gmail, search-giant and arch-rival Google’s email client, in its sights. It’ll be interesting how the companies merge.

What I don’t understand is why Yahoo hasn’t integrated Flickr into Yahoo Mail? Why buy another photo-sharing product? What are your thoughts? Post them in the comments.

Demo of what Xoopit is all about:

What are your thoughts? Post them below.