Personally and professionally, this past week has been challenging to say the least. I’ve been virtually AWOL from the web and tried to catch up on a weeks worth of reading this Sunday afternoon.

Here are 10 interesting articles that caught my attention and what I learned:

What you don’t know about Facebook: Don Peat of the Toronto Sun reveals some fascinating information about the social media giant including the country with the highest per-capita number of users, average age, number of friends and daily visits of each user and the fact that the Toronto Facebook ( 1+ million and counting) network is made up mostly of women who keep their political views and relationship status private.

00:00 - Digg goes down for maintenance. When it comes back, something has changed…

01:00  - The Digg Algorithm has Changed

"Digg went down today for a short time.  The results may be that many diggers will go down for a long time."

12:15 - Two Diggs One Cup

"Digg has pretty much taken a crap in a cup, and asked everyone, including even the top diggers, to partake in the offering. It now takes (barring a miracle, or a massive, collective pre-planned quick-strike diggfest), around 200 diggs to go popular, which leaves many (including me) to wonder… is Digg TRYING to drive away users, and if so, why?"

Update available here

If the Blu-ray copyright issue is any indication, a storm is a brewing over at Digg.

A storm that has users up in arms.

In the course of an hour, during which Digg went offline on Wednesday (Jan. 23), Digg has strengthened changes which make it harder for a story to go popular.

Used to be 100 Diggs could get you front page. No more. For some power users it can now take up to 200 Diggs before going popular.

It’s that time of year again when everyone is talking about football. I don’t know about you but at one point in my life, the lead up to the big game had me focused on nothing but. While life’s priorities have lessened my interest in football, I still find myself watching the big game and it appears I’m not the only fair weather fan.

Last year, CBS aired the game before an astonishing 93.2 million viewers. Thirty-second spots cost as much as $2.6 million. Fox has the game this year and is asking everyone, except godaddy.com, for upwards of $3 million for a thirty second spot.

Microsoft has applied for a patent on technology that will enable computers to monitor user behavior “to facilitate managing and optimising the utilisation of various system resources”.   How scary is this and what kind of seeds are we planting for our employment futures?

Courtesy www.technovelgy.com

Lets look at it objectively.  Using infra-red sensors to measure the breathing patterns, heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature, etc of an employee can provide valuable information to an employer who is unaware that they are putting too much pressure on their staff or alert others on a project team that someone is struggling with their requirement, or even provide warnings of possible health issues arising due to stress or illness.

I came across Michael Martines blog this week. In it, he says that he managed to increase his blog’s subscriber count by nearly 200%, to 900 subscribers in just two short weeks, by offering a free eBook for subscribing to his blog.

eBook readers have always sounded like a great idea to me, but until this past holiday season, they’ve fallen short of expectations. Sony and Amazon have taken advantage of new technology to release eBook readers that they’re hoping will take off.

source: digital-lifestyles.info

All around good guy and internet marketing guru Matt McGee today announced the launch of the SEMMYs … the search industry’s equivalent of the EMMY’s.

The EMMYs are described as; an annual awards event honoring some of the best articles and blog posts from the search marketing industry, as voted by the industry. We have 127 authors nominated, representing 111 blogs/sites.

There are 15 categories for awards:

• SEO
• PPC
• Small Business
• Local Search
• Google
• Blogs & Blogging
• Link Building
• Social Media
• Analytics
• Search Tech
• Rants

At its core, Delicious is simply a bookmarking system. It’s a place to store all those links that are too much to be in your “Favorites” folder. What makes it so useful is its one of those technologies that has a simple interface. What makes it so compelling is it’s ability to do so much more; keep, discover, share, research and collaborate from any computer.

This week I take a look at Delicious, by the numbers.

The Beginning:

As search engine marketers, we all know that content is king and that content is more than just text. Images, video and audio each represent a fantastic opportunity to drive traffic to our client’s sites. As such, the latest Horowitz Associates report caught my attention.

According to the report, six out of ten high speed Internet users watch or download online video content at least once a week and 86% do so on a monthly basis. Leading the way is news, user-generated and non-professional content, followed by movie previews, music videos, sports events and podcasts.

“On a very basic level the name symbolizes socially driven news. Interacting with content by submitting, voting, commenting, and sharing interesting, entertaining, and otherwise important news items. but more than that it symbolizes what Netscape plans to do going forward, i.e. propel the social news model into the next generation through a mix of fixing the problems with the current generation and innovation.”

Muhammad Saleem - Netscape scout

Upon first impression, Propeller may appear similar to Digg; however there is one key differentiator that make it both interesting and unique. News on Propeller is submitted by a team of paid power-users and editors. That paid team also produces original content and appears to “steer” the content, conversation and the overall direction of the site.