Especially empowering widget for all those whiners in America commenting bitching about the price of gas right now.

What GAS-COST.NET needs to do is provide an API, then someone can build a tool to monitor and push out Twitter updates to all of us when the price changes.

It would actually be cool to see the geo location of the highest and lowest prices. Not sure if that kind of data is available though. Just a thought.

Tracks the real-time price of Gold.

Add the JavaScript one-liner to your blog and instantly start geo tracking incoming links.

Each widget instance showcases a book collection by author.

Samples available in their Book Widget Gallery.

I understand the perceived economics of how Clark Little, and other professional photographers, make a living. Their product is reprints of their photos for high prices ($450). There is nothing wrong with this revenue stream but rather than build the whole business around it, I would suggest that there is a lot more money to be made by selling derivative products. Five products come to mind immediately:

computer desktop wallpapers
posters for a wall
screensavers
Twitter background image (already formatted correctly)
iPhone slide show app

While the price point of each of these four products is much lower than a single reprint at $450 the potential volume of sales is in the millions and the total revenues from this add-on revenue streams much greater than the traditional ones.

Clark Little could be, himself, out there in the Web 2.0 world creating buzz and building a much more authentic business. I would guess that Clark is a person with a passion for surfing, the ocean, photography, and nature. The traditional business model pulls him away from these passions and requires him to sell his art to folks who may have money but not necessarily a passion for the things he cares about.

I would love to see Clark using Twitter much in the same way as did Lance Armstrong so that people can “tag along” with him on his photo shoots. Clark does have a Twitter account but, like David Beckham’s, it’s a bit stale and displays none of the passion found in his art. Clark Little’s video on YouTube is awesome and inspiring but ultimately, too little. I want more.

As a fan of his photography, I want Clark to create a community around his art where I can be part of the conversation and actually, Clark’s Facebook fan page is proof that he could be making a lot of money off the derivative revenue streams. Check out his FB fanpage here and you’ll see that he’s got over 8,000 fans!!!! That is really really powerful and needs to be better leveraged.

Clark Little is a dream client for a social media agency!! Enjoy his photography and share it with your friends.

Can you image if 12 million people around the world saw your wedding. Nope, neither can I. But that is exactly what happened to Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz, a young couple from Minnesota, after they posted their wedding processional video to YouTube. The processional is non-traditional (understatement) and set to Chris Brown’s song “Forever.”

Perhaps the happiest person of all is Chris Brown, who found himself in PR hell after he plead guilty to a charge of felony assault on his girlfriend, singer, Rihanna. While Brown recorded and posted his own video, apologizing to Rihanna; it is the JK wedding video which may ultimately change the public’s perception of him. Regardless, the JK Wedding Entrance video is the hottest viral hit of the moment and if you haven’t yet seen it…. take a look. It’ll make you smile.

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Union Square Ventures made a similar Web Meets World observation when announcing its investment in Meetup - the online tool for organizing and managing offline communities.  Here's Union Square Ventures partner Brad Burnham describing Meetup as the original "web meets world" company:

Today, the backlash against fun and and non world saving apps seems to have subsided, likely due to Twitter.  Twitter's ability to be trivial, silly, and, yet sporadically, unintentionally useful has made it hip to be lightweight again, as has the success of social gaming companies like Zynga in achieving traction + revenue.

Now, Union Square Ventures lists "playful" as one of it's six guiding principles.  This institutionalized acceptance of "fun" is a big switch from even a year ago.

But let's get back to Web Meets World.  I've always held that the strongest online communities were the ones that had offline extensions of their online relationships.  The WebmasterWorld Forum was my first exposure to an online community that pushed its tentacles out to the offline world.  In 2003, when independent web publishers like myself were trying to make sense of Google's Florida update, the same guys who debated Google's algorithm with me in the forums congregated in Orlando to get drunk, and help each other live and in person.  Online meeting offline, thus making the online community stronger.

And there are plenty of other examples.  I'm convinced that Yelp succeeded while the similarly well funded Insider Pages, Zipingo, and Judy's Book failed in part due to its early emphasis on offline community.  I remember sitting in Zeitgeist in 2005 (?) and having two cute girls approach me and ask me if I wanted to go to a Yelp party.  These parties became the thing of legend, and increased Yelp's rep among urban hipsters, who now generate most of their content.

Again, online pushing out to offline, reinnforcing the online.

Now, I am starting to notice a new aspect to this Web Meets World phenomenon.

Web Meets World is becoming more than just the online relationships moving offline.  Now, there are companies like Foursquare and Booyah (and Brightkite) whose APPS are spanning offline and online.  Here's an excerpt about Foursquare from the Observer:

"If you're having a slamming Saturday night, there's no reason why it shouldn't feel like a game of Legend of Zelda," said Dennis Crowley, who was presenting his new mobile social networking application, Foursquare, on March 9 at the monthly New York Tech Meetup. "What we wanted to do is turn life into a video game. You should be rewarded for going out more times than your friends, and hanging out with new people and going to new restaurants and going to new bars--just experiencing things that you wouldn't normally do."

And here's a description of Booyah from TechCrunch:

These are fun apps - they're not trying to solve the world's problems, but they are trying to integrate themselves into the daily, real lives of their participants via mobile applications.  These apps are trying to make a game out of existing behaviors.  You're doing all this stuff anyway, say Booyah and Foursquare, why not win some points and badges and reputation and keep a digital diary and meet similar people while you're at it.

These companies are not feeding the world's hungry, or beating malaria, or rebuilding New Orleans - in fact, the infamous Keg Standing Scoble critique made by Umair Haque would probably be applicable to (and embraced by) both of these companies.  But their work in binding offline and online worlds is important for our industry.  It's showing us that Web Meets World doesn't have to be heavy and world changing -  people like to keep score, they like to win, and they like to have fun - even in their most mundane activities.  And mobile is providing the recording device. 

I suspect that we will see more apps that attempt to log existing offline behavior in a game format in an effort to blend online and offline - this is the fun side of Web Meets World.

Believe it or not, each week I receive a couple emails from people interested in Krasnodar. Some are tourists, some are interested in investing here, and others are moving to the city to live. I really enjoy sharing my knowledge of Krasnodar and helping people to discovery why Krasnodar is one of the nicest regions in Russia.

Over the past two years I have spoken with well over a 100 different people about Krasnodar. As you might expect, I find myself answering many of the same questions over and over again. Therefore, I thought it might make my life a bit easier and be more helpful to new visitors if I created some forums where I could answer people’s questions publicly.

The forums are located at http://forums.timothypost.com (see menu item “Forums” in top right of website) and are broken into three broad areas- Visitors, Expats, and Investors. I welcome input from others who also have knowledge of Krasnodar and want to share it with others. If you, yourself, currently have a question about Krasnodar, Russia, Sochi 2014 please feel free to register and ask your question.

If you use a web app like Twitter or a social network, like Facebook, you probably already know about URL shortening services (here’s the Wikipedia entry explaining URL shortening). There are literally hundreds of URL shortening services available today. For proof, see this article on Mashable.com from this past January.

Like most people, I started with TinyURL.com and all I cared about was that the long ungainly URL was sufficiently shortened so I could copy/paste it into Twitter.com and not waste too many of the 140 characters that Twitter limits each tweet (i.e. sms message). I eventually added a browser javascript bookmarklet to my browser bar so that I could even more quickly shorten a URL of a website I wanted to share. This is how things stayed for about a year and a half. Then recently, I began to hear about additional URL shortening features, such as analytics, and I made the switch to bit.ly.

Bit.ly analytics feature is great when you want to go back and check-out which URLs, and by definition tweets (I tend not to gum up my FB account by sharing links), have been clicked by readers. Additionally, I also began to find myself wanting to add website page links (shortened URLs) to multiple Twitter accounts (I have over 10 right now) and it became a nightmare to create multiple TinyURL accounts for each Twitter acount. Bit.ly gives you the option of registering as many Twitter accounts as you need.

I have been using Bit.ly now for a couple months and thought that I would stick with it for a while longer but a new URL shortener just came across my radar screen and it has a killer feature. The new company is called su.pr and it was created by the guys over at StumbleUpon.com. StumbleUpon, itself, is an interesting web service, which I had completely forgotten about until earlier this year when I kept noticing that it was the third most popular source of referals to this blog in my Google Analytics.

Every week when I checked my Google Analytics report I would scratch my head and wonder what’s up with this StumbleUpon. While I had signed-up for the service ages ago (I think in 2004), I had hardly ever used it. The last week I was listening to my newest favorite podcast called Net at Night with Leo Laporte and Amber McCarthy and they intereviewed Garrett Camp, the founder of StubleUpon and just as I was about to fast-forward to the next episode they started talking about su.pr. I’m sure glad I didn’t hit the fast forward icon!

Su.pr literally just opened up its beta up to the public and while it still is a bit rough around the edges, it lets users do something amazing. Specifically, su.pr users can now use their very own domains as URLs with which su.pr will shorten a URL. What this means is that instead of a URL like su.pr/fjsk, I can use my own domain (timothypost.com) and the URL will display as timothypost.com/fsjk.

Here’s the full explanantion on su.pr’s website. Also, here’s Tim Ferriss’ review of su.pr (I assume he’s an investor, which is cool since Tim is one of my favorite Web 2.0 “celebrities”) By the way, if you haven’t yet “discovered Tim Ferriss, I highly recommend you start to follow his blog and Twitter account.

Obviously, my own domain is 14 characters versus su.pr’s 4 characters so it slightly eats a bit more of the Twitter “real estate.” Nonetheless, as far as I know su.pr is the only URL shortener to offer this custom URL option. Please note that many services offer a custom path (the suffix after the .com or dot whatever) option. However, a while a custom path on a shortened URL is easy on the eyes it is not the same as a custom domain.

There’s a couple very good reasons why you might want to sacrifice brevity (i.e. 10 characters) for a custom domain. The first is basic security. Today when you see a shortened URL you don’t know who created it and it can easily point somewhere where you don’t want to go. When you use your own domain readers can be sure that it’s really you and if they already trust you then they can also trust the URL you have created.

Secondly, even though you are using your own domain as the shortener, su.pr still uses a 301 redirect so the original link is the one Google, or other search engines, use in their rankings.

Third, it offers you or your clients the opportunity to install the Wordpress plugin and it will automatically create a shortened URL for your blog post or article with which readers can use if they share it with others.

Fourth, it helps you promote your content by automatically submitting each link into the StumbleUpon community and also you can activate a feature called, Promoted Website, within your su.pr Dashboard. What that does (see Tim’s video below also) is when someone clicks one of your su.pr shortened links a small sidebar will appear within the browser window on the page you send them to and it will give people the option of clicking through to other related articles you designate.

While the URL shortener space is still very fluid and while it is possible that I will be enticed away from su.pr in the future, at the moment I am loving su.pr and suggest that you give it a spin to see if it’s right for your needs.

Here a short video of Tim Ferriss’ talking about su.pr:

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• 5 Reasons Why URL Shorteners Are Useful (mashable.com)
• Should Your Brand Have Its Own URL Shortener? Coca-Cola Now Does (mashable.com)
• Su.pr: StumbleUpon’s URL Shortener for Content Publishers [Invites] (mashable.com)
• StumbleUpon’s Su.pr URL shortener now open to the public (downloadsquad.com)

I watched this video last night and thought that all of you would enjoy it as well. See below for the video player. If you are not familiar with TEDTalks then you are in for a treat. TED is an annual conference which originally focused on (T)echnology, (E)ntertainment, and (D)esign…. hence the name. TED has grown into an institution of idea and learning. There are now multiple conferences throughout the year around the world focused on various topics of interest.

TEDTalks are now even translated with subtitles in Russian. If I were advising the Sochi Forum organizers, I would suggest to them that they try to do a partnership with TEDTalks.

I do warn you that TEDTalks videos are addictive and if you’re not careful you’ll find yourself, like I did last night, up until 1:00am saying to yourself, “This is the last video I can watch tonight. Really!”

Enjoy

***************************************

Alain de Botton examines our ideas of success and failure — and questions the assumptions underlying these two judgments. Is success always earned? Is failure? He makes an eloquent, witty case to move beyond snobbery to find true pleasure in our work.

Image via CrunchBase

Here’s the beginning of Robert’s blog post and then my comment, which I left on his blog. This is a fascinating issue with ramifications in a number of other areas of the internet (e.g. OpenID). Be sure to click through to Robert’s full blog post before reading my response.

*************************
BLOG POST by Robert Scoble

So, now, Tr.im’s parent company, Nambu, has announced that the URL shortening service known as tr.im is turning off its service and that links will stop working after December 31. Here’s the news on Techmeme.

What will this do? Well, first of all, any stats are gone. Bam. Second of all, all Tr.im URLs will stop working at the end of the year. Bam. (In an email to me, Nambu’s CEO said that links could be extended past December 31, but he wouldn’t guarantee it).

OK, most of you probably never have used tr.im to shorten your URLs so they fit into Twitter. But I did. I liked the URL better than bit.ly, which is the service that Twitter has “blessed.” Oh, how I hate Twitter’s “blessing.” This is a company that is building a channel for celebrities, bots, spammers, and a few of other types who like to tell each other short sweet nothings but really wants to be a platform for the world’s people, APIs, devices, etc to talk with each other.

***********************
COMMENT by me:

Here’s 2 potential solutions:

A.) What if the short URL companies offered two additional features:

1. As a premium feature let customers use domains, which they already own as the base domain for the short URL. For example, instead of bit.ly producing a short URL such as:

http://bit.ly/hksl

you were able to substitue the based domain (bit.ly) with your own domain (scobleizer.com)?

http://scobleizer.com/hksl

2. Short URL companies opened up “the walled garden” by offering an export option. The export would include the short URL with your domain, which wouldn’t need to change even if it were imported into another service and the destination URL, which should also remain the same.

You already own your domain and with a simple export file you then own the data. It shouldn’t be too hard for a new company to create an import feature which would “relink” the short URL with the destination URL.

Now you have peace of mind. As with most of these issues, the key variable is the the web services is built using a domain which you already own.

The short URL companies could partner with domain registrar’s and create a new revenue stream by selling domains to people.

B.) Twitter, itself, were to create a new domain, such as .twt. Based on what Jason Calacanis said on TWiT, I would not be surprised to see Twitter try to either create or buy a domain for itself.

Were this to happen, users would have the option of keeping their standard http://twitter.com/scobleizer username or they could purchase their very own domain, such as http://scobleizer.twt

As Jason hypothesized, Twitter wants to become the phone book of the internet. In order to do that each users needs to have a unique identifier. Your telephone number served that function, obviously, in the “old world.”

However, users of Twitter are going to be very suspect and reticent to use Twitter’s own domain as their unique identifier. For the very reasons Robert highlights in this post, such trust by users would be foolish.

Therefore, the only true solution would be for user’s to own their unique identifier (i.e. domain). Twitter would be smart to become a registrar as soon as possible or at least do a deal with the folks that own the .tel domain

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This feature is an obvious ode to Posterous, the lightweight blogging platform whose primary publishing UI is the user's email client / service.

We're a small shop, so choosing what to work on is a big deal.  There were all sorts of other important things that we could have worked on - improving our search engine, making our service more accessible to mobile users, improving new user experience, etc. - but we chose to focus on email, an older, less sexy format.

I'm always interested in hearing about the thought processes that drive other entrepreneurs' decisions, so I thought it might be interesting to share ours.  Here we go.

1) With a small team, we try and put resources into the things that are working (as opposed to things that aren't).  This philosophy applies not only to our own projects, but what we see when we look around the social media landscape.  Posterous is working.

2) We are constantly looking at ways to reduce the barriers to contributing content.  We've implemented Facebook Connect, we've experimented with delaying the registration prompt as long as possible, and we've tried other UI tweaks to make it easier and faster to contribute content.  We're enamored by the concept of "lazy registration."  With emailed reviews, the emailed review IS the registration.

3) Email still figures prominently in our referral logs, much more so than Facebook and Twitter.  Social distribution gets all the buzz, but based on our logs, email still dwarfs those channels as a distribution channel.  Clearly, people are very comfortable sharing content via email - why not let them post it as well?

4) Virtually everyone who is online is comfortable with email as a publishing UI.  By teaching our service to accept content from a universal UI, we hope to make it less of a scary proposition for new users to get involved with our site. 

5) Emailed reviews represents our first baby step towards being a mobile service.  Anyone with a smartphone can now post reviews on the go.

That's our story and we're sticking to it.  In the meantime, you can post a review of this blog - instantly - by sending an email HERE.

From where I'm sitting, it appears that TechCrunch is evaluating the two major competing blog commenting services to be the default provider for TechCrunch comments: Disqus and JS-Kit.

Here's Michael Arringon on JS-Kit's new product ECHO:

And in this post, TechCrunch is taking Disqus 3.0 for a spin.

Additionally, Seesmic video comments seem to have been ripped out of TechCrunch.

I'm not going to spend any time debating which of the two services is better - both are well backed companies with quality products and solid teams.  But this looks like a critical moment in the ongoing skirmish between JS-Kit and Disqus.

When Twitter unceremoniously dumped TinyURL for Bit.ly, the URL shortening wars were all but finished.  I don't expect TechCrunch's decision to carry quite the same impact, but there is no question that TechCrunch sits high on the distribution head for any company looking to secure blog commenting.  It does big traffic, it reaches virtually all earlier adopters / bloggers, and it will no doubt be a fabulous case study for whoever wins the business.  And TC's decision can't come soon enough - I don't know of a blog on the planet with more of an anon troll / commenter reputation problem than TechCrunch.

Additionally, the blog commenting space may very well be a winner take all situation.  As I wrote in an earlier post:

I believe that the blog commenting space has some serious network effects - the more blogs that adopt a certain, distributed blog comment provider, the more pressure there is on other blogs to switch over as not to silo themselves (and their commenters)... Because of these network effects, we may very well see a winner take all scenario emerge at some point in this space.  For this reason, today's skirmishes between the blog commenting contenders are worth following.

I've been following the blog commenting space for a while.  See here, here, here, here, here, and here

It will be interesting to see whether a nod from TechCrunch will be enough to tip this space in either Disqus' or JS-Kit's direction.

Here are some write-ups of Disqus V3: Disqus, TechCrunch, Mashable

And here are some write-ups of JS-Kit ECHO: JS-Kit, TechCrunch, Mashable

I just returned from a wonderful holiday back in Boston and while going through my Google Reader, I kept seeing indignant blog posts about the latest controversy in the Russia-Watcher blogosphere concerning GQ magazine and the Conde Naste’s corporate lawyers apparently killing a story about Putin and the apartment bombing 10 years ago in Moscow. No surprise there. Every week there’s another brouhaha of some sort or another concerning Russia.

What caught my eye was that the NPR correspondent, David Folkenflik, who broke the story “Why ‘GQ’ Doesn’t Want Russians To Read Its Story” was a highschool classmate of mine at Phillips Exeter Academy. So I decided to dig a little deeper.

After reading David’s piece, three thoughts come to mind:

First, David’s reporting on the Scott Anderson story and Jerry S. Birenz’s, a Conde Naste corporate lawyer, efforts to bury the story implicate the publisher not the Kremlin. Sure there is the insinuation that Conde Naste ordered the American issue of GQ not to be distributed in Russia because it feared the possible repercussions should the story upset the Kremlin. While it is true that journalists in Russia have been murdered due to things they have written, there still remains no proof that the Kremlin, and in particular, Putin had a hand in any of the murders.

I know that many of you in the West believe that Putin is guilty but what you may believe, based on what you have read, is a far cry from actually having proof. The reality is that Russia is still dangerous place when you cross powerful people. There are many powerful people in Russia and most of them are not in the Kremlin, which leads to my second thought.

Namely, the primary source for Scott Anderson’s story is the former KGB (FSB) agent, Mikhail Trepashkin. As Matt Taibi points out, “Trepashkin has ties to gazillionaire mob creature Boris Berezovsky….”

Well now, this one fact sheds a whole new light on the story. In almost every unsolved case of murder of a Russian journalist, one name always seems to pop up. There is nobody better at the Western “perception management” game then Berezovsky. Mr. Berezovsky has successfully spent the past ten years proactively shaping Western opinion and the result is that Putin has been painted in a very unfavorable light amongst Western Russia Watchers. Unfortunately, the Kremlin has been either unable or unwilling to engage in this PR game.

However, and this is my third thought, this story presents a great opportunity for the Kremlin to go on the offensive and disprove one of the major allegations against it. Specifically, there is a belief in the West that the Kremlin is authoritarian and will not tolerate any unfavorable treatment of itself in the Russian press. While I would admit that Putin is a bit touchy and certainly not very patient when criticism comes his way, I would argue that the Russian press is much more free and robust than you may know.

It should be pointed out that nothing in this GQ story would be news or unknown to any educated Russian living in Russia today. Somehow there is this idea that Russians live in a media vacuum. Nothing could be further than the truth. First of all, the fact that a couple of the state-controlled Russian TV channels don’t report much in the way of dissenting opinion is a non-sequitur. How many Americans only receive their news from ABC, NBC, or CBS? Not many is the answer. The same holds true for Russians. All educated Russians have access to the internet and read news from many sources both inside and outside of Russia.

Therefore, by acknowledging this GQ story the Kremlin loses little. However, the Kremlin could gain a lot by publicly condemning Conde Naste’s decision to censor the story in Russia. Were I advising the Kremlin on this controversy, I would suggest that the Kremlin spokesperson release a statement to the effect that while the allegations in the story have no basis in fact that the story itself should be run in GQ magazine. The spokesperson should go on to talk about the tragedy and the investigation that followed. The spokesperson then should mention that the primary source for the article is a disgruntled KGB agent who still holds a grudge against the Kremlin. Lastly, the spokesperson should say that it has spoken with the management of the Russian edition of GQ and told them that they are free to run the story as they see fit.

In this era of the internet, social media, and very short news cycles, the best way to handle bad news is to confront it directly and pro-actively. For too long the Kremlin has let others frame the issues and portray it in a negative light. There is no reason why this misguided policy should continue given its lousy track record. This controversy surrounding the GQ story would be a great place to start.

UPDATE: Sean’s Russia Blog examines the facts behind the Conde Nast screw-up and arrives at a similar conclusion. See Sean’s blog post here.

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I just learned that eBay has partnered with Widgetbox to allow eBay sellers to convert eBay RSS feeds to widgets.

This is a baby step to be sure - companies like Cartfly and Adgregate Markets are being far more aggressive about functionality within the widget itself and are focused exclusively on commerce, while Widgetbox's RSS to widget publisher is a bit more general purpose. 

But you can bet that eBay will be tracking store propagation, click throughs, and conversion from this new project.  If things go well, we may see more movement in this area.

This is also a nice distribution win for Widgetbox - I consider their RSS to widget publisher ("Blidget") to be the best out there, and apparently eBay agrees with me.

Here's a sample widget.

Vodka may be one of Russia’s international icons but it is actually whiskey that young Russians drink when they out on the town at night. Whiskey with Red Bull is probably the most popular combination nowadays. When whiskey was first introduced it was whiskey and apple juice but that combo is kind of “girlie” and it’s been a while since I’ve seen a grown Russian order it.

What is important to know when ordering whiskey in Russia is how much (skoal-ka) and whether with ice (sal-dome) or neat. Russians order their liquor in precise amounts of either a small shot at 50 ml (pee-dee-siyat) or a large shot at 100 ml (stowe). Most Russians (87%) know how many milliliters they can drink of a certain alcohol in a night. So should you if you expect to engage in an evening of good old fashioned Russian drinking with the boys. On average, I can (now) drink about 400 ml of whiskey in a night before going off into the land of drunkenness. I say, “on average” because there are a number of factors which can either increase one’s whiskey quota (e.g. a plate of spaghetti carbonara at Minami restaurant or 12 hours of sleep the night before) or decrease it (e.g. your wife will be awake watching CSI “whatever” when you stumble home).

The “magic” quota number in the more serious circles of Russian drinking is 1,000 ml- known simply as a liter (i.e. the whole freakin’ bottle). This level of drinking performance is the cultural equivalent of an American who can drink a case of Budweiser by himself. I, fortunately, have achieved neither.

So, anyhow, the reason I even started this post was simply to repost a creative YouTube video produced by the Johnnie Walker whiskey company. Since we live in a global age it’s fitting that a Hungarian friend of mine sent it to me, an American, here in Russia. I want to compliment the JW company’s marketing department, or whoever the heck thought of the idea, for creating an fun and whimsical 5 minute little “documentary” of the history of Johnnie Walker, the drink, and Johnnie Walker, the man.

Since whiskey is the single most fashionable liquor nowadays in Russia, I also want to suggest to the folks responsible for the “ad” to hire an interpreter and add Russian subtitles. The ad could then be used in the various promotions Johnnie Walker organizes in the nightclubs of Russia (there’s a lot by the way).

Take a couple minutes and watch the video.

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Chitika looked at referral data for more than 120M impressions across 60,000 sites and concluded that Search remains the undisputed king of traffic referrals - and it's not close:

Thanks to Chitika for exposing this fascinating data. 

Note: One possible explanation for why this data might be skewed in favor of search - sites that use Chitika might be more search friendly than social friendly, due to this product.

Here we are, late in 2009 and already there is a jump on the widgets and banners for the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election.

I don’t believe I am yet over the barrage of radio, television and Internet political advertising.

Some of these widgets are just simple banner embeds and others are relavent sources of political news that will deliver candidate related information as the campaign approaches.

First up is, of course Ron Paul.

There are 5 total “DraftRonPaul” banners that are designed to fit nicely on any blog sidebar or header. These come from Trevor Lyman, the architect of the original RonPaul money bomb.

Here is a scrolling widget that serves up the latest U.S. political news from a wide variety of sources such as Time Magazine, Reuters, CNN, ABC News and more. (grab the code right from the widget) This widget is powered by FeedZilla.

You will also be able to find iPhone apps to download:
2012 US Election 3.0.1
or 2012 US Election 3.0.1

Don’t forget the Apple desktop:
2012 Election countdown widget.

…and from Widgetbox:

The 2012 Presidential Election from Widgetbox.

Perhaps a Poll?Try Toluna poll widgets? Here is an example:

As you can see, there are already many choices this early in the game. You can bet that it will only get more crowded as the campaign heats up.

Related posts:

1. 2012 widgets
2. Electionvine Election poll widget
3. Ron Paul widgets on Widgetbox

This Elf is made for sharing!

…on Facebook
…on Twitter
…via email
…and its embeddable!

You can even purchase the video for $4.99, or mugs or….?

Elf Yourself from OfficeMax and JibJab

Related posts:

1. JibJab Crazy dancing heads
2. New Digg widget for your blog
3. If you like Reddit

Shutterfly.com is a photosharing/scrapbooking paradise. Their unique “photobook” creation tools allow you to create some seriously cool scrapbook style, embeddable photo albums.

You can choose to have colorful backgrounds or just cover entire pages with photos. Some templates even allow for nesting smaller photos within larger photos. Did I mention that you can also create “share sites” where your friends and family can download photos. Also available is the ability to purchase gifts with photos printed directly on them. Mugs, ornaments, mousepads, even large artist style canvas wall hangings. There are actually too many to mention here. Check out “Photo Gifts”

There are seemingly endless options for creating your Scrapbook photobook.

Here is an actual widget from a great Shutterfly article at blog.susanfinch.com