A couple nice things happened this week.  For those that haven’t heard BlogHighEd, which this blog is a member of, was chosen to be syndicated on a new startup site Alltop.  You can read some reviews about alltop here, here, and here.  I’m pretty excited about this and hopefully this will increase exposure to this blog along with the rest of the BlogHighEd gang.

Also this week Yahoo makes the first big step pushing the internet in the direction of the semantic web.  You can read more about it here and here. This WILL revolutionize the internet for the better. For anyone that isn’t familiar with the concept of the semantic web check out the entry on Wikipedia. I’m sure it won’t be to long before we hear Google and others following Yahoo’s lead.

• US: Spring Break Searches Rise As Students Prepare for Florida and Vegas - Some interesting data about College Student Spring Break destinations
• The Best Tools for Visualization - Huge list of tools to help you visualize all sorts of internet functions
• Stats: Who’s Hot and Who’s Not in Social Networking - Some statistical data about Social Networks
• ShareThis Raises Another $15M. The Next “Feedburner?” - If you aren’t familiar with ShareThis or AddThis then watch out. This little widget truely has the ability to have the impact on blogs that Feedburner has had.
• 20 Free Ebooks and Whitepapers for Better Web Design
• New YouTube Developer Tools Turn Any Website Into a Video Sharing Hub - YouTube with an API set that lets you skin videos. This could have huge potential as an affordable way for anyone to get into quality video on their site AND I’m guessing it’s also syndicated right to YouTube. Double SWEET!
• Study: Kids Are Master Multitaskers On TV, Web, Mobile - Thanks to CollegeWebEditor for sharing this link - Television is no longer getting the undivided attention of kids, according to a study released on social networking
• Competitive Intelligence: Dominate Your Market With These 15+ Competitive Intelligence Tools - The list breaks everything down into categories for easily finding what you need.
• Review of social aggregators / lifestreaming services - Must Read: Dan Taylor reviews all of the social media aggregators and lifestreaming services and names Profilactic #1 ahead of socialthing!, FriendFeed and Plaxo Pulse. If you are like me and haven’t had a lot of time to dig into this aspect this article does much of the dirty work.
• Mobile Web Use Growing Faster than Ever - It’s apparent that mobile web access is a trend that is growing fast and will continue to grow. Breakthrough devices like the ultra-portable PCs and the Macbook Air make it even easier to to take full computers, and not just cell phones, anywhere and ever
• GoDaddy Silences Police-Watchdog Site RateMyCop.com - This is one of those interesting stories. I have no opinion on the subject (I know hard to believe), but am fascinated by both sides.
• Executives Run Out of Reasons to Fear Google Analytics - In fact, 60% of Fortune 100 businesses now use Google Analytics. And after recent updates to both product and privacy, even the skeptical minority are running out of reasons to fear it.
• Ten Tactics That Could Save Your Online Reputation - A list of tactics that could prevent your company suffering its own online reputation meltdown. This article by Andy Beal is a great compliment to the post I wrote earlier this week about monitoring your online identity. Also kind of cool was the fact Andy commented on my post.
• How to Optimize Your PDFs to Increase Search Traffic: 10 Steps - PDFs contain plenty of publishable content, but not all are created equal. If they’re image-based, the content can’t be indexed by search engines.
• Searchme, Inc. - New Search engine that displays visual results. Kind of cool
• 4 Technologies for Portability in Social Networks: A Primer - Today Marshall Kirkpatrick interviewed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at SXSW, with the main topic of discussion being Data Portability. Later in the day at the festival, a star studded panel discussed building portable social networks.
• 5 Teaching Techniques that will Improve your Blogging
    - The best teachers–from first-grade teachers to university instructors–employ some simple techniques that bloggers can use to their advantage.
• February Search Market Share: Google hits LXX as Microhoo gets boring - The monthly report from Compete about Search Market Share.
• How to monitor your online identity - Being the first person to know what is being said around the web about your institution is a critical aspect for anyone in communication, marketing, or management of a college or university.
• How And Why To Monitor Google Rankings - Monitoring your SERPs using SerpArchive
• February Top Social Networks - Make way for the new guys - While fairly flat trend lines in MySpace traffic may provide an indication of the market reaching its peak, the rapid growth of some very new players in the space speaks to the opportunities in social networking that still exist…
• When is the best day to send an email campaign? - Study looking at the best day of the week to send an email campaign with data breaking down the days.

I hope everyone has a great St. Patrick’s day weekend!