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.

Of all the social media sites out there, StumbleUpon is by far my favorite.

From an SEO standpoint, I’ve used it to generate instant traffic and awareness of client websites and, from a personal standpoint, I’ve used it to discover hundreds more websites than I ever could through traditional search.

This week I’m taking a look StumbleUpon, by the numbers:

• StumbleUpon was created in 2001 by three friends who were still finishing off post-graduate studies in Calgary, Canada.

• Silicon Valley investor Brad O’Neill assisted with a move to San Francisco and the initial round of $1.2 million in fund-raising.

Social Media sites are all growing very rapidly. Facebook is leading the way by far, signing up over 150 000 new members daily.

In the coming weeks, I’ll explore each of the most popular sites ‘By the Numbers’. Here are some interesting facts about Facebook:

- Facebook was started in February 2004

– On August 23, 2005, Aboutface Corporation sold the domain name facebook.com to Facebook for $200,000

– Facebook has over 300 employees

– The website has over 40 Million active users

– Averages more than 150,000 new registrations per day.

Delicious (they have dropped the del.icio.us) has just launched version 2.0 to a by invitation only preview group. Boasting 3 million registered users and 100+ million unique URLs bookmarked, Yahoo! owned Delicious is in for some major changes.

Founder Joshua Schachter was quoted saying that we can expect a complete code rewrite, along with a decidedly different interface, broken down into four sections; Home, Bookmarks, People and Tags.

Michael Arrington has a post with detailed screen shots of some of the new features which include:

In what to me amounts to the high impact SEO story of the year, Ammon Johns has announced that he is stepping down as an administrator and moderator of Cre8asite Forums.

Ammon Johns (1966) is a household name in the SEO community. Active in SEO and SEM since 1997, Ammon was one of the first proponents of the holistic approach which has ROI instead of “just” high rankings as its goal. Instead of sending more visitors to a site (the classic SEO model), Ammon worked to send qualified traffic where “every single one of them is a genuine, prequalified sales prospect”.

When the Toronto Star published an article several weeks back announcing that roughly 700,000 Facebook users belong to the Toronto city network, my phone rang off the hook from clients asking what their Facebook strategy will be.

SEP has been working with Social Media, at a variety of levels, for some time, so the announcement that General Motors Europe is launching a “social media newsroom” caught my attention.

Essentially, GM Europe’s new website will allow downloads of its photography from Flikr, a link to their video collection in YouTube and news to be “republished, commented on, shared and tagged by a large community where the boundaries between news provider and news consumer continue to blur,” it said in a statement.

Last month I blogged about the death of the Yellow Pages being premature. The next day, R.H. Donnelley continued its aggressive online push by acquiring Business.com for $345 million.

Today, R.H. Donnelley, the No. 3 Yellow Pages publisher in the US, announced it has begun selling ad placements in Yahoo! Local, according to a News Observer report.

The Carnegie Mellon University has published an interesting study which attempts to show that online shoppers are so concerned with their privacy that they are willing to pay for it.

Sounds catchy and I imagine some e-merchants running to their keyboard to hammer out a premium ”upgrade privacy package” page but alas, it is a little bit different.

See, the 72 subjects were given money to make two online purchases (don’t ask what…) and some were sent to Privacy Finder, a shopping search engine which takes privacy policies into account. This too is a project of the Carnegie Mellon University.

I just read that the European Union gave Germany the go ahead to give $165 million for research on Internet search-engine technologies that could someday challenge Google.

Called Theseus, the project is aiming “to develop the world’s most advanced multimedia search engine for the next-generation Internet”. It would translate, identify and index images, audio and text.

European companies in general spend far less on research than US companies do, and so the EU said the project should help change that.

The Theseus project was born out of Quaero, a joint French-German Internet search initiative. Quaero was put to rest in December 2006 when the German and French researchers “took different directions”.

I have passion for Soccer, or Football as the world calls it. I’m a massive fan of Panathinaikos Athens, Toronto FC and Manchester United, so the story of a gifted nine-year-old being signed by the Reds caught my eye.

It wasn’t the fact that Rhein Davis was 9 years old, but that the worlds richest football club were interested after hearing about him from YouTube. The video showing him doing stepovers like Ronaldo, is a big hit, having been viewed by over three million people and counting!