So Google blew past it’s numbers last week but it seems it still may have a ways to go in monetizing YouTube.

Not so, for Simon Cowell. Yes, that Simon Cowell of American Idol fame.

For those of you who may not know, Cowell is also one of the judges on the UK series Britain’s Got Talent.

Enter Paul Potts. Paul who? Paul Potts. Think Pavarotti. Think phone salesman steps up to microphone, blows audience away with Turandot’s Nessum Dorma, winds up with an instant career faster than you can pour boiling water into a coffee cup and over 40 Million YouTube views. No, seriously, 40 Million YouTube views.

Further to my August 23rd post, “Yellow Pages Goes Social” I talked about how the Yellow Pages Group in Canada had launched their integration of Facebook for users who want to save and share their favorite businesses by using their link function on Facebook.com.

Darby Seiben, Senior Manager - Traffic, Distribution and eProduct Management with YellowPages.ca, posted a great update on his blog letting us know that yellowpages.ca expanded this one step further by integrating the “add to facebook” directly into the search results as well as the business profile page for every business in Canada

It’s safe to say that Digg leads the pack among the popular social news site websites. It’s not my favorite, by I do drop by often, in pursuit of the next best top 10 list.

This week, I’m reviewing Digg, by the numbers:

* Digg started out as an experiment in November 2004 by Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson. They wanted a site where “Netizens” could vote on their favorite stories of the day. All currently play an active role in the management of the site.

When I was writing my piece on “Search and the Pareto Principle” (aka the 20/80 Rule) last week, I was playing around with Sphinn (a Digg types news submission and sharing service for those in the SEO/SEM/SMM industry) and found some really interesting information that I thought might be worthwhile sharing.

Here are some of the findings as of yesterday:

1) there were 4371 profiles on Sphinn … that’s a large number of people engaging in seo/sem/smm to one degree or another

According to a recent survey by Prospero Technologies, nearly 9 in 10 marketers already using social media said they plan to “increase” or “increase significantly” their spending.

Marketers were asked.

Prospero’s 2007 Social Media Survey found 30 percent of online marketers who use social media plan to “spend significantly more on social-media applications in 2008″, while an additional 58 percent also plan to “increase” spending, though not “significantly.”

Some 59 percent of respondents reported that social media performance in 2007 met or exceeded their marketing objectives. Survey participants included major brands from a variety of industries, including Media, Education, Financial Services and Health.

Whether it’s watching someones misfortune, individual rants, old music videos, my favorite teams past sporting glories, lost TV episodes or political debates, I just can’t seem to get enough of YouTube. It’s become a personal entertainment option and, from an SEO standpoint, as videos are beginning to rank, I enjoy the challenge of defining my clients video content strategies.

This week I’m exploring YouTube, by the numbers:

* YouTube was created in mid February 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, three former PayPal employees.

* The domain name “YouTube.com” was activated on February 15, 2005

The use of the Internet keeps growing in China. The country now has more than 160 million Internet users and at least 1.3 million websites. But the promise of free expression and information has been nixed by the Chinese government’s online censorship and surveillance system.

According to Reporters Without Borders and Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a Chinese Internet expert working in IT industry has produced an exclusive study on the key mechanism of the Chinese official system of online censorship, surveillance and propaganda.

Hot off the heels of Google offering free Mobile Adwords until mid November and The Kelsey Group boldly predicting mobile search to generate more than $1.4 billion in ad revenue by 2012, comes a new survey from Nielsen/NetRatings and WebVisible, which shows a whopping 92% of 2000 U.S. Internet users surveyed, felt that receiving local business ads on their cell phones would be “irritating.”

This doesn’t bode well for mobile marketers and SEO’s who are hoping to cash in on the mobile hysteria, particularly when the same survey revealed that nearly 75% of U.S. Internet users believe they are overexposed to advertising.

Hot off last August’s announcement that R.H. Donnelley (No. 3 Yellow Pages publisher in the US) had begun selling ad placements in Yahoo! Local, comes today’s news that Canada’s Yellow Pages Group will begin reselling Google AdWords advertisements.

Its agreement with Google allows Yellow Pages approximately 425,000 advertisers to appear alongside Google search results. Previously, Google Local or ‘Maps’ would display only names and addresses of Yellow Pages’ businesses next to results from searches on local information.

Yellow Pages Group has been working with Google since 2004, when they struck an agreement granting the Internet giant access to its databases and, quietly I may add, began embedding Google AdWords on its websites earlier this year.

It’s been forever since I’ve posted anything and it’s probably going to take me a while to come back up to speed, but in the meantime, I’ll start with the proverbial babysteps.

So, guess which magazine is making it’s long overdue comeback?

While it may be old news from CNET, I for one welcome the return of the Industry Standard.

Gosh, how I remember cutting my baby SEO teeth on the standard.

There was just some ineffable thing that made it completely accessible and crunched down to Internet time, making it the perfect in transit reading.