• The Future of the Social Web: In Five Eras – Expect the Groundswell to continue, in which people connect to each other –rather than institutions. Consumer adoption of social networks is increasing a rapid pace, brands are adopting even during a recession, so expect the space to rapidly innovate to match this trend.
• “Conversion-killing” mistakes – Conversion killers—does your site contain any “Nuke Buttons”?
• Patents – Swivel – Patents U.S. Origin and Foreign Origin
• Generations Online – Everyone's online these days from your teenager to your grandma. This graph shows the online population by generation. A report from PEW takes a look at how different generations are using the Internet these days. Some common activities among all ages include: email, social networking, research, shopping, and banking.

• BillShrink – A free, money-savings tool — continuously seeks out new savings opportunities on everyday expenses for you. Save Money on Cell Phones, Cell Phone Plans and Credit Cards at Billshrink.
• Academic Earth – Thousands of video lectures from the world's top scholars.

• Social Networking Now More Popular Than Email, Report Finds – ReadWriteWeb – Nielsen Online, an analytics firm that tracks time spent online at various websites, has issued a report finding that throughout 2008 social networking sites and blogs saw more time spent by users than personal email. While not shocking, the finding does mark an important point in the history of the web.
• “Social Media is Here to Stay… Now What?” – Social media is not new. Media has been leveraged for sociable purposes since the caveman's walls. Even in the realm of the Internet, some of the first applications were framed around communication and sharing. For decades, we've watched the development of new genres of social media – MUDs/MOOs, instant messaging, chatrooms, bulletin boards, etc.

• How To Use Icons To Support Content In Web Design – Why use icons? Design is all about communication: it doesn’t matter how important or exciting the information that you’re sharing is if you fail to hook your visitors. When initially viewing a website, most users will first scan the page for visually interesting content, and only after something grabs their attention will they actually begin reading. Icons are a simple, effective way to draw users into the content of your website.
• 10 Things To Consider When Choosing The Perfect CMS – Choosing a content management system can be tricky. Without a clearly de?ned set of requirements, you will be seduced by fancy functionality that you will never use. What then should you look for in a CMS?
• U.S. Auto Sales Depression Continues | The Big Picture – Aggregate U.S. Auto Sales Trends from 1966 to 2009. Deflated by US population growth as of 1980.
• PACs spent record $416M on federal election – Campaign donations from political action committees to House and Senate members in 2007-2008:
• How much is a trillion? – A trillion dollars used to be a sum that never naturally came up in normal conversation. Now all of a sudden, it's the standard unit we seem to be using to talk about our economic problems and what we're trying to do about them. Fortunately, I think I finally got a handle on what $1 trillion really means.

• AFP: China expresses deep concern over US trade protectionism – China said on Monday it was deeply concerned over trade protectionist measures a range of countries were adopting amid the economic crisis, singling out the United States for special criticism.
• Google Website Optimizer – 108 Free Tips | Conversion Rate Experts – a quick-start guide to conversion rate optimization
• Google Announces Plan To Destroy All Information It Can’t Index – Executives at Google, the rapidly growing online-search company that promises to "organize the world's information," announced Monday the latest step in their expansion effort: a far-reaching plan to destroy all the information it is unable to index.
• Netflix, Adobe, Google Rated Best Places To Work. AT&T, eBay, RadioShack Among the Worst. – Where are the best and worst places to work? Glassdoor, the site that surveys employees about workplace conditions in great detail, has issued lists of the best and worst 50 companies as rated by employees out of the 11,000 in its database.

  Here are the top 20, with tech companies in bold:
  1. General Mills
  2. Bain & Company
  3. Netflix
  4. Adobe
  5. Northwestern Mutual

  The five worst places to work, according Glassdoor, are:
  1. DHL Express (USA)
  2. United Airlines
  3. Reynolds and Reynolds
  4. Farmers Group
  5. Gibson Guitar

• One year in 40 seconds on Vimeo – Images from the same spot through one year. Audio captured at the same place.
• Somali Pirate Explains How To Steal Ships – Why has there been such an increase Somali piracy? In Somalia all the young men are desperate. There is wide unemployment in the country, there are no sources of income. One of the only sources we have had is fishing, and the superpowers and Asian countries sidelined us in our own sea. So at first we started out just to counter illegal fishing, but international forces started to protect them.
• Google Zeitgeist 2008 – After a whirlwind year of election news, economy woes, and the lead-up to the showstopping Summer Games in Beijing, we’re looking back to see what was on the minds of Americans through it all. One thing’s for sure: it was a wild ride.
• The year 2008 in photographs – The Big Picture – 2008 has been an eventful year to say the least – it is difficult to sum up the thousands of stories in just a handful of photographs. That said, I will try to do what I’ve done with other photo narratives here, and tell a story of 2008 in photographs.
• Swift Wind Turbine – Residential Wind Estimator – Generate a custom estimate (based on location) comparing the cost of electricity using a wind turbine against traditional electricity power. Vermont doesn’t look good unless you are in the mountain areas.
• 2007 e-tailing Facts: Older but Still a Great Collection – Our intention is to help keep you up-to-date with the trends in the online world in order to give merchants a competitive edge in this growing channel.
• Trends in Media Consumption Amongst Millennials – Wondering where internet marketing is heading? I recently went to a music conference in Toronto and picked up an interesting handbook called ‘Millennials in the Digital Information Age’. It described and profiled ‘Millennials’ – those born between 1981-2001.
• Media Consumption vs. Spending Comparison – A study recently done by TNS Media Intelligence shows a large disconnect between media consumption by consumers and media spending by builders/developers. The study shows that builders/developers are disproportionally spending money on outdoor and newspaper, where as consumers look to TV and the Internet as the top two sources for advertisements. How are you spending your marketing dollars?

Have a great weekend…

“The best part is that it bounced right back out of bounds, so he gets to do it again after the other kid stops crying.”

(If you can’t see the video click here to view it)

• Technorati: State of the Blogosphere 2008 – There have been a number of studies aimed at understanding the size of the Blogosphere, yielding widely disparate estimates of both the number of blogs and blog readership. All studies agree, however, that blogs are a global phenomenon that has hit the mainstream.
• Web 2.0 Asia : Do they sell Mercedes-Benz cars on TV elsewhere? – A Korean dealer of Mercedes-Benz cars saw dozens of customer sign-ups (what they call "pre-contracts") after they aired an infomercial on the $170K Benz S550's on Korea's home shopping TV channel.
• The noise in Web 2.0 is mainly a Tech Elite’s problem – If anything the current web 2.0 trend is fragmentation. There are thousands of social networking sites out there, each fighting a battle to get users. There are a whole lot of services that let you interact, publish, follow or be followed. There are aggregating sites that aggregate it all for you. There are aggregators that aggregate all the content from the sites that already aggregate content for you. And if that wasn’t enough we now need to take it away from the browser and move each of these services into tiny little desktop applications. I can already predict the next wave in desktop application development. Someone is bound to get the idea to integrate Twhirl and all those other desktop applications into one big aggregator on the desktop.
• filtrbox – filtrbox's mission is to leverage the power of the Internet by delivering the timely market intelligence that is critical to success in today's hyper-competitive business world.

Hilarious video and a well executed political social media campaign…

Link: CNNBC / Moveon.org

• Tell-a-Friend: Leverage Word of Mouth Marketing – Tell-a-Friend makes it possible for your site visitors to share your content with their friends without directing them away from your site. Tell-a-Friend synchs with their IM, email in the context of the content they're sharing without those tedious pop-up forms that require manual input.
• Open Source Intel Rocks — Sorry, It’s Classified – So-called "open source" intelligence — spook-speak for tidbits taken from newspapers, internet postings, and TV shows — is starting to play a major role in the nation's spy agencies. That's a major change, in a world that's used to relying on secret satellites and clandestine agents. But old habits die hard. Open source intelligence may come from unclassified material that's available to anyone with a TV or an internet connection.
• Leave Wall Street and Join A Startup – For years, one of the biggest challenges facing New York city based startup companies has been the competition for technical talent. It was very difficult for a venture-backed startup to compete with the compensation packages offered by the big investment banks. Stock options had a hard-time overcoming oversized cash bonuses.
• It’s Time To Open Up The Feeds To Marketers – So it's time to start allowing marketers into these feeds on a highly targeted/highly relevant basis. FeedBurner did that with this blog's feed and many other feeds with ok results a few years back. But honestly, the ads were not targeted enough or relevant enough to work really well. Facebook has probably done the most of anyone to allow marketers entry into the feed. Here's a screenshot of facebook news feed this morning. You can see the sponsored feed entry for the vista business network in there at the bottom.

• There isn’t any recession. – "There isn't any recession. The latest figures show that we clearly were not in one as of midsummer, whether you use the rule-of-thumb definition – two consecutive quarters of GDP shrinkage – or the looser concept of a sustained and significant economic decline.

  The economy shrank marginally (-0.2%) in the fourth quarter of 2007, but otherwise it's been growing steadily for years. In the most recent quarter it grew at a vigorous 3.3%, fueled not by government stimulus checks but by a strong rise in net exports.

  Consider the 1992 election: The last recession had been over for 18 months, and President George H.W. Bush campaigned by asserting that the economy was growing smartly. But the psychological recession, stoked back then by corporate restructuring, was still going strong. Bill Clinton understood that and campaigned by telling voters he felt their pain. Bush was right, but Clinton won."

• Donate to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation – This year, I'll be taking part in JDRF's Walk to Cure Diabetes, along with one-half million other walkers across the country, as we try to reach our goal of raising $100 million.

• Burton EST – EST™ stands for Extra Sensory Technology. Its focus on the ability to feel and read the snow is essential no matter where or what you ride. EST breaks free from traditional thinking, offering seamless flex and the purest connection between you and your terrain. This creates super natural feel, control, and response unlike anything you have ever ridden before.
• Truth in Engineering | A4 – Audi raising the bar for online virtual test drives…

• Dell buys $100 million of Dell – At least Michael Dell sees value in Dell (DELL). The company founder and CEO spent $100 million late last week to acquire 4.7 million shares, according to a Federal filing Monday.
• Hadron Collider – Large Hadron Collider Video
• Multibillion-dollar experiment to probe nature’s mysteries – The Large Hadron Collider will look at how the universe formed by analyzing particle collisions. Some have expressed fears that the project could lead to the Earth's demise — something scientists say will not happen. Still, skeptics have filed suit to try to stop the project.

• iPhone Web share hits record 0.48%, up 58% in one month – Apple 2.0 – The percentage of Web hits coming from iPhones passed 0.2% in June and then dipped in the weeks that followed. But it peaked on August 23rd at a record high 0.48%, according to the new data, before drifting back last week.
• U.S. Presidential candidates by Website Traffic – During the primaries we took a look at the visitation to the websites of presidential candidate hopefuls to predict the winners by state. Now that the nominations have been decided and the DNC is underway with the RNC not far behind, I thought it would be interesting to revisit this analysis.
• The Golden Age of Streaming – Comcast’s decision to cap monthy broadband usage at 250GB is being decried as the end of the Internet as we know it. Maybe so, but it can also be seen as the dawn of the Streaming Era.
• Google Chrome – Download a new browser – Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier.