Coming Out of a Travel Coma: The Best Links of the Past Few Weeks

Instead of working at my day job, I was learning a new trade at a carpet school near Giza in Egypt

I was away for a couple weeks and have been catching up on what I can, selectively of course. Below are a number of my favorite links in case you’ve missed any. They’re in no particular order, though some sites that I started reading first like TechCrunch are disproportionately represented. Please share any of your favorite updates and posts in the comments.

Going forward, you can also find a lot of my favorite links on delicious, as well as Twitter.

Here’s the rundown:

Kikin is a Firefox (and soon Chrome) plugin that pulls in relevant, personalized information from sites like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Amazon dislpayed when conducting searches in your favorite search engine. I haven’t used it yet and have yet to find one of these kinds of social search plugins that I’ve used beyond a trial, but I’ll give it a chance. (via TechCrunch). Google also just added its own Social Search experiment.

Facebook is offering music and MP3s as virtual gifts, part of a massive gifting overhaul they’ve done lately. And Google has a music service coming soon. 360i compares them.

TechCrunch reports on Flickr adding people-tagging. They say the functionality is better than Facebook’s but Flickr just has photos while Facebook has your network.

Mary Meeker did her annual data review, this year focusing on mobile, at the Web 2.0 event.

MS Economy Internet Trends 102009 FINAL

Comcast CEO to Web 2.0: “Twitter has changed the culture of our company.”

Technorati presents its State of the Blogosphere for 2009.

Google Street View improves access with the Google Trike!

TypePad now lets bloggers (like me) offer an option for readers to mark a post as their favorite.

People spend 8 billion minutes daily on Facebook.

360i reviews what Microsoft’s Twitter and Facebook Search deals mean for marketers.

Search Engine Journal explores what marketers might get out of the keyword research from Twitter search engine CrowdEye.

Photoshop has a new iPhone app that Mashable calls “awesome.”

BusinessWeek looks at the $1 billion app market.

Ad Age reports how Volgswagen of America is launching its new GTI exclusively via an iPhone app.

Speaking of which… did you see that video with the stairway turned into a piano? Volkswagen’s behind it. You can subscribe to The Fun Theory on YouTube.