• Facebook hits 150 million users
• iMedia Connection video on what technology will turn heads in 2009
• Mashable’s list of 5 unique uses for QR codes
• Save a squirrel by eating one
• YouTube Doubler time waster
• TwitterMoms network
• Earth Album Alpha - a Google Maps and Flickr mashup
• Apple’s iGlove patent submission
• Scientists report that the Great Barrier Reef will stop growing by 2050
• Schmap - online travel guides for your mobile and computer
• IMCDb.org, the Internet Movie Car Database
• Firefox tops 20% market share (I would like to see the number though in relation to internet usage as I assume it’d be much higher)
• Over 1m of quotes on Quotes Daddy
• The polls of the 2008 Weblog Awards are open

All right. I’ve overcome the gastro virus my little nephew handed the whole family for Xmas, flew half around the globe and am in the process of setting up life back home in Switzerland. First off I have to recommend a fantastic book that I’m reading right now:

Soon I Will Be Invincible, a novel by Austin Grossman

Doctor Impossible—evil genius, diabolical scientist, wannabe world dominator—languishes in a federal detention facility. He’s lost his freedom, his girlfriend, and his hidden island fortress.  Over the years he’s tried to take over the world in every way imaginable: doomsday devices of all varieties (nuclear, thermonuclear, nanotechnological) and mass mind control. He’s traveled backwards in time to change history, forward in time to escape it. He’s commanded robot armies, insect armies, and dinosaur armies. Fungus army. Army of fish. Of rodents. Alien invasions. All failures. But not this time. This time it’s going to be different…

Now the links:

• How to avoid looking like an American tourist
• AdWeek’s top media & marketing innovations of 2008
• A video of a great white shark circling kayakers in Sydney’s northern beaches
• Jalopnik’s top ten car lists of 2008
• BusinessWeek article on recent discussions around the ethics of pay-per-post blogging
• Vertor - verified torrents (of course you shouldn’t use this technology for pirating copyrighted materials but you knew that already, right?)
• One year in 40 seconds (of a bunch of trees that is)
• Bomb explodes under lake (would have been a good surf)
• Cityrag’s celebrity plastic surgery overview of 2008
• 50 inspiring vintage advertisements
• Ebooks hit mobile phones
• LiveLeak vids of a laptop sale frenzy in Russia and a very lucky forklift operator
• A video of Russian talking turkeys
• Last and least Donatella Versace in a bikini (trust me you don’t want to click this link)

• How to develop a dedicated landing page for Twitter visitors
• The TED 2009 speaker lineup and if you’re lucky there’s even an independently organized TED event near you
• Tasmanian devils at risk as experiment fails
• RFID-enabled poker table that knows every card in the deck
• Top Gear radio control car football set
• Clean up your movies before uploading to the tubes with fixmymovie.com (haven’t tried it yet but it looks promising)
• Do you play an instrument? Then join YouTube’s symphony orchestra
• Gaywheels picks the best of 2008
• The Economist has a downloadable credit crunch board game
• Intel begins shipping 160GB solid-state drives for laptops
• Intel also publishes their official guidelines for their staff engaging with social media
• Wii still hospitalizes 10 people a week
• Seventy percent of all Twitter users signed up in 2008

• First off I once again encourage you to subscribe to the email alerts or RSS feed of the beloved Alien Loves Predator
• Gigaom reckons WSJ failed the Web 2.0 test
• Must-read: Pew Internet’s The Future of the Internet III report
• Nerd rage
• Ogilvy’s recession resources website
• Chevrolet Trailblazer vs. deer - will it blend?
• Mad: Subaru pulls out of the WRC
• SlideShare releases ribbon plugin for Microsoft PowerPoint
• Simon Cowell is more famous than god (when asking British children aged under 10) and the pommies also trust TV as an ad platform the most
• ffwd, a relatively new and recently awarded web-video-sharing-tool (I’ll need to take time to properly check this one out as it looks rather promising)
• Flickr revived an easter egg to add a bit of Xmas feeling to your images
• A World of Warcraft-themed restaurant just opened in Beijing
• Scientists find hole in Earth’s magnetic field
• A list of answers to the age old joke ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’
• Laurel Papworth’s post about the recent growth of Facebook, especially here in Oz
• Piranhas doing some thorough work on an excavator driver (rather graphic)
• Bonnie, the whistling orangutan who can’t hold a tune
• Venturebeat on how Twitter has made Dell $1 million in revenue
• Microsoft releases Seadragon, their first iPhone application
• 35 albino animals of the wild and 100 HQ photos of animals
• Subaru teases ahead of the Detroit Auto Show with a Legacy concept
• Last but not least I’m having issues updating my Mac OS X to 10.5.6… arghhh!

• Time has the top 10 everything of 2008 and Google lets you look through their Zeitgeist into the search highlights of the year
• China inevitably also starts to feel the heat with negative growth for the first time in many years
• BusinessWeek on what Microsoft has to fix with Windows Mobile
• AskMen’s top 10 reasons women can’t drive
• Post about Nike’s recent success and the relation to their social network Nike+
• 84% of consumers say corporate blogs suck
• MediaFuturist has 10 quick ways to reinvent print media
• Jerry Yang’s internal memo about the Yahoo layoffs
• Austrian research shows that the absence of reward induces inequity aversion in dogs
• FreelanceSwitch has 17 tips to overcame a business downturn
• India is not happy about a fake life-sized Taj Mahal, built for a movie
• Did you notice the moon was bigger and brighter the last couple of days?
• Last but not least Russian Xenia Suchinowa is the new Miss World and the original 1950s pin-up model Bettie Page died in LA at 85

Back from wonderful New Zealand. Felt a bit like back home in Switzerland but with a lot less cars and peoples. Truly amazing if you dig landscapes, animals and (lots of) driving. Above a few impressions, more on my Flickr photostream. We travelled from Christchurch to Lake Tekapo, then past Queenstown to Te Anau for a boat trip on the Milford Sound, back up to Wanaka, up the west coast to the Franz Josef glacier, over to the east coast for whale watching in Kaikoura and back to Christchurch. 2,200 klicks of awesomeness. Next time we must take more time though to do heaps of kayaking and hiking.

Here’s a few links from the past week:

• Common talks Softwear by Microsoft
• Woman finds Virgin Mary in her brain scan
• COED Magazine’s impressive collection of 225 demotivational posters
• Jack Daniels makers are thrilled with the state of the economy
• Bailout - Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year 2008
• Tutorial on how to batch edit images in Photoshop
• Socialcast brings social messaging to the enterprise
• Profy thoughts about whether blocking ads is the same stealing as downloading music from torrents
• NYT concludes that Canadians maybe have more friends than US peoples and CNN says happiness is contagious in social networks
• Wordpress competition from Microsoft with Oxite
• Girl vomits in airplane and the puke bag just doesn’t work upside down
• And last but not least YouTube added a terribly horrible search bar on top of embedded videos. Whilst I think it’s cool to search and watch within the video frame it should be party of the bottom nave panel and not in your face. Anyway, article about it on Profy.

Right, I’m off traveling again. This time it’s 5 days dicking around on New Zealand’s south island. To make sure I get to do good photos I just sinned myself into a secondary camera, to top up my Ixus 70, with the purchase of a Canon PowerShot SX10 IS with a fantastic 20x zoom. Here’s some web food from the past week:

• Video interview with Bob Pearson, Dell’s Vice President, Communities & Conversations, on their continuation of using social media
• Epica Awards winners 2008
• The real Shaq’s Twitter profile
• The Science of the Future of War (Wired)
• MediaPost interprets the stats of IBM’s digital media survey
• Jeremiah Owyang’s round-up of social networks site usage
• Gartner survey shows consumers predominantly use the internet for email and search
• Nokia Build phone configurator/designer (UK only)
• Joost pushes onto the iPhone but faces performance issues
• AdWeek asks if the end is near for display ads
• 20 strange and endangered species
• Yahoo’s top searchs for 2008 (same as 2007)
• Copyblogger’s ultimate blogger writing guide (which really applies to everything you write or say)
• David Armano’s 4 C’s of community
• Images of Peter Beste’s book True Norwegian Black Metal
• Mac internet share hits record 8.87%; Windows drops below 90%
• Nokia’s newly released N97 is taking on the iPhone (demo video at Mobile Crunch)
• Google launches a competitive research & keyword research tool
• Couponing in the digital age (Adweek)
• Gay penguins steal eggs from straight couples
• US research findings on target audiences for online games advertising
• Facebook launches their Connect service (TC) and Power.com tries to do the same
• In the meantime the end has come for once called Twitter killer Pownce
• Razorfish issues last rites for Web 2.0
• Adweek article on the two different agency spheres and balancing the billable day vs. the creative way
• Some inspiration to make creative use of your old books
• Wrestling is not always just a show, proven by Joey Mercury’s face that meets ladde
• Dog Photo Booth by Sharon Montrose (check the Border Collie puppy)
• Last but not least here’s help to pronounce names: howtosaythatname.com