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while social networking and watching video clips are incredibly popular online activities, guess what activity eclipses both of these:

The research and analysis company Parks Associates announced Friday that games are still the most popular Internet activity in the United States. The report, “Casual Gaming Market Update”, found that 34% of U.S. adult Internet users play online games each week, compared with 29% who watch short online videos and 19% who visit social networking sites.

not only is casual online gaming more popular than these other activities, but the industry also has a better revenue model which includes advertising, try-before-you-buy, subscriptions, and micro-transactions, according to James Kai, a research analyst at Park Associates.

that said, the year-over-year growth rate of the casual online gaming industry is 79%, while online video streaming enjoys 123% and social networking is at 46%, which means that gaming sites need to act fast if they are to keep their lead in the long run.

you know that great facebook feature that let’s you share things with your friends? and you know how you run into a problem if you’re trying to send a message to or share something with all your friends but can’t (and have to email a few separately) because some of your friends aren’t on facebook? well, facebook has updated their sharing/messaging feature so that you don’t have to worry about that anymore.

Now you can enter a friend’s email address into the To: line when you send a message or share an album, and Facebook will email them the message. Your friends will be able to reply without signing up, and they will be able to see content you share with them.

rich skrenta, founder of dmoz.org and co-founder and ceo of topix.net, has some advice for jason and his human-powered search engine, mahalo.

We know this from experience: No one will ever go to Mahalo directly, just as no one ever went to About.com, dmoz, Tripadvisor, Nextag, IMDB or any other vertical or broad-but-shallow site. Google is where everyone starts and Mahalo’s distribution strategy has to be SEO. Its traffic is going to live or die based on SEO skill and Google’s continued favor.

given how passionately jason hates anything and everything that has to do with seo, that’s gotta hurt. here’s the response:

From where we sit we think that we can make a great service that is not driven by SEO. If we rank high because some of our pages are one of the BEST pages for a keyword on the internet we are honored to be considered. However, it’s not our focus. Our focus is on building the best pages and we think that we can capture a significant audience who will either come to Mahalo first, or side by side, Google/Yahoo/Ask.

Social media is everywhere recently. It’s almost hard to call yourself respectable marketer if you don’t know the in’s and out’s. So to hone your social media skills, here’s 5 questions about Digg with social media analyst/blogger and uber-digger Muhammad Saleem.

check out the interview.

beginning of this month, loren feldman decided to post a video on his site about the lack of black technology bloggers, a video that eventually stirred up quite a bit of controversy. because loren decided to use blip.tv to host the larger flash version of the video, some of the site’s patrons got upset and one of them actually sent them a letter detailing the potential damage to the blip.tv brand as a result of hosting the video.

Are you sure that blip.tv wants to have their brand associated with such “comedy”?? The blip.tv logo is prominently displayed next to his player (as was podtech’s) - is blip.tv as a company willing to risk such negative news coverage as this.

rather than taking the video down, blip.tv has responded as follows:

I found the video distasteful and not funny. But as a company we don’t delete videos on that basis. Instead, we err on the side of free speech, and enabling discussions. I think that a remix or response video would be more effective a refutation than censorship.

not only has this put blip.tv on my radar, but i have an enormous amount of respect for the site and their team.

i saw the following submission on reddit earlier today,

and couldn’t help but point out the irony. as of last count, the submission had 35 positive votes (and 25 down votes). the following are screen grabs of two different times from the reddit front page from a little while back:

one of the things social media is about, is instant gratification. and maps, charts, graphs, statistics, and pictures, help content producers do exactly that.

there has been too much talk going around about this site or that site being a digg killer (or replacement). while i think its great for the ‘socially driven news’ space as well as for digg itself that new sites pop up and try to compete with the incumbent, it is not only frustratingly inaccurate but the practice of labeling every new socially driven site as a ‘digg killer’ has become incredibly trite.

here are some examples from bloggers that (while i disagree with them from time to time) i have a lot of respect for and think have enough foresight (and their fingers on the pulse of the industry) to predict the next big thing. let’s take a look at their thoughts on what would kill digg and how it obviously didn’t.

Behind Curtain Number One: Michael Arrington

What he said: “On Thursday, AOL’s Netscape property will no longer be just another portal - it’s being converted into a Digg-killer.”

Verdict: While I think Netscape, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc are all great sites in their own right, none of them is a Digg Killer.

Behind Curtain Number Two: Pete Cashmore

What he said: “MySpace News: The Digg Killer?”

Verdict: MySpace News is not an Anything Killer.

Behind Curtain Number Three: Jason Calacanis

What he said: “Will digg die the death of 1,000 cuts?”

Verdict: Pligg is a great content management system, but the secret behind digg’s success is not just the socially driven system the site uses but the huge incredibly active community that it has engendered. Pligg is not going to kill digg.

Behind Curtain Number Four: Robert Scoble

What he said: “Google Reader + Facebook Application = Digg killer?”

Verdict: Mario Romero’s application is great but by no means even close to being a replacement for Digg.

Behind Curtain Number Five: Josh Lowensohn

What he said: “Streamy-yes, it’s a Digg killer”

Verdict: After using Streamy for a couple of days I can say with complete certainty that Streamy and Digg aren’t even competing in the same space.

Behind Curtain Number Six: Jeremiah Owyang

What he said: “Could NewsTrust be a Digg Killer?”

Verdict: NewsTrust is a great product and while i don’t see it as a digg killer, it is definitely something that could be integrated into digg to provide a better social news experience.

Behind Curtain Number Seven: Steve Rubel (and Steve Mermelstein)

What they said: “Steve Mermelstein wisely states that Google Reader could be a digg killer.”

Verdict: Google Reader is not even a high-end feed reader replacement, let alone a Digg Killer.

As you can see, I have only begun to skim the surface with these few observations. There are hundreds if not thousands of sites that are referred to as Digg Killers while they are simply socially driven sites trying to implement or further the socially driven news model. While it’s great to give these sites coverage and complement/critique them for their work, it’s just unfair to expect them to stand a chance against Digg and in most cases even the other big sites (Netscape, Reddit, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Fark, Slashdot, and so on).

comscore has released its list of the web’s 50 most trafficked sites for july, and it’s incredibly interesting to look at the top few companies. take a peak at what powers these online giants and you’ll note more than just a touch of the social:

1. yahoo! sites (also include flickr, upcoming.org, del.icio.us, mybloglog, etc.)
2. google sites (also include blogger, dodgeball, youtube, feedburner, orkut, etc.)
3. time warner network (also includes weblogs inc., netscape, etc.)
4. microsoft sites (also include wallop, windows live services, etc.)
5. fox interactive media (also includes myspace, photobucket, etc.)

this goes on to show the importance these growing companies are placing on new and emerging social technologies and how these technologies are helping these online giants solidify their positions at the top.

Jeff Atwood at the coding horror blog has a great list of 13 blog cliches that we should all consider avoiding.

1. The Useless Calendar Widget
2. Random Images Arbitrarily Inserted In Text
3. No Information on the Author
4. Excess Flair
5. The Giant Blogroll
6. The Nebulous Tag Cloud
7. Excessive Advertisements
8. This Ain’t Your Diary
9. Sorry I Haven’t Written in a While
10. Blogging About Blogging
11. Mindless Link Propagation
12. Top (n) Lists
13. No Comments Allowed

while i agree with most of the points on the list, i think some of them can vary from blog to blog. for example,+ an author that attends a lot of conferences can definitely use a calendar widget, and blogging about blogging is perfectly fine because it does create value for those who are out of touch with the platform, and finally, i think top (n) lists are great (in moderation of course). nonetheless, the list is a good critique of some of the mistakes that many bloggers make over and over again.

while i’m sure most of us aren’t fans of racism or hateful and inflammatory expression, i don’t thing most of us would go far as suspending freedom of expression. british national paper, metro is reporting that there is a substantial effort within the facebook community to ban unpopular speech.

now to be fair, facebook’s terms and conditions do say that any groups that are promoting material seen as ‘harmful, threatening, hateful or racially or ethnically objectionable’ can be removed. and since facebook is not a public forum, facebook users aren’t protected by the first amendment and facebook would be right within their terms to regulate what is said on their site. this does however beg the question, how much should online communities regulate expression? should organizations like the kkk and the dnp, as despicable as they are, be able to express themselves?