I know, I know… duh! Yes, folks, here’s another finalist for Most Obvious Survey Results of the Year award.

Deloitte & Touche has released the findings of a new survey and–drumroll please–people like using cell phones, the internet, and other tech gadgets!! Look at the woman in that picture, she’s using the internet and a cell phone all at the same time!! And even the baby is wired!

Seriously, who is the genius that pitched his bosses on this survey (who then sat back in his cushy corner office for three months playing World of Warcraft)? I mean…. easiest. Job. Ever.

“Hey boss, I want to do a study on hybrid cars. You see… I think people are buying more of them today than they were ten years ago.”

“Were they even making hybrids ten years ago?”

“I doubt it. But the only way to know for sure is to perform this study.”

“Make it so. Here’s a million bucks for having the genius idea.”

Okay, okay. I’m going on and on a bit here. Sorry. I just can’t believe some of these surveys and studies get done–or that someone feels they need to be done.

Apparently, according to this Earth-shattering new report, 38% of Americans are watching TV shows online, 36% use their cell phones as entertainment devices, and 45% are creating their own online content such as a blog or a website. The degree to which Americans are “wired” has jumped 50% since the last incarnation of this survey eight months ago.

What?! They did the same survey eight months ago? Well now I’m absolutely convinced that some lucky guy has the very best job in the world. Just crank out useless surveys with obvious results year round. Whoever that dude is, he’s laughing all the way to the bank.

Did anyone really think that these results would show fewer people watching online TV, using cell phones, or creating websites? That’s what I thought.

Oh well. Thanks for letting me rant.

What’s that? You didn’t even know that Wal-Mart had its own movie download service? You never even got a chance to try it out?

Well, too late. It’s dead. Let’s all observe a moment of silence for the death of one of the revenue streams of the world’s largest retailer. (Sniff).

They claim that HP discontinued their software which had powered Wal-Mart’s service. That may be true, but I’m guessing that part of the reason for Wal-Mart’s move is due to the fact that they simply weren’t making enough money on the thing.

iTunes and Amazon have pretty well carved up the marketplace on digital movie downloads, splitting it between them. I’m not sure that tech-savvy audiences were really ever going to turn to a discount big-box merchant for their movie download needs. Look, I like buying things online and not having to leave my house or put on shoes to go buy someething as much as the next guy. But why would I download a movie from a store’s website, when I can probably drive to that store’s physical location and get the same film on DVD from the $5 bin up near the registers? But what do I know?

Wal-Mart’s digital music download service is still alive and kicking. Hooray for them. More money for Wal-Mart! That’s something we can all be happy about, right?

It’s fun sending email, isn’t it?

Especially those funny stories or videos where you carbon copy all the names in your contacts list.

Wait… no. That’s wrong. Those are not fun, those are annoying.

Apparently, Basex Inc.–a web analytics firm–agrees with me. They named “information overload” as the number one problem for the coming year of 2008. Seems that workers get disoriented and distracted every time they receive a new email–keeping them off balance and off-task. And people, I guess, just get endless amounts of joy from hitting the “Send” button, so we’re sending more and more email every day. From the article:

“It’s too much information. It’s too many interruptions. It’s too much lost time,” Basex chief analyst Jonathan Spira declared. “It’s always too much of a good thing.”

Hang on a second….I just got the most hilarious email forward that I have to go check out.

(2 hours later)

Still there? Good. Sorry about that. Now where was I?

Man, I guess these Basex folks are right… email can be a distraction. In fact, They estimate that this “information overload” cost employers about $650 Billion in 2006. Yikes! Their advice? Resist the urge to reply immediately to all incoming messages, and tone down the instant messages and use of the “reply to all” feature.

Or at least make sure the folks you’re emailing constantly don’t have a full-time job to be distracted from.

The web is on fire wih the news that many pieces of medical advice that doctors have long prescribed have now been debunked by the British Medical Journal.

The only problem I have with this is that I’ve got one group of doctors (the Journal writers) telling me that another group of doctors is wrong.  Who am I to believe?  It’s like I’m caught in the middle of a tug-of-war.   Remember when eggs were bad for you?  Then they were good for you again?  Yeah….it’s like that.  Expect to come back here in six months and see a follow up story that reads “Debunked Medical Myths Now Rebunked.” 

Anyway, you know how mother always said that reading in dim lighting would ruin your eyesight?  Yeah, not so much.  Those warnings about cell phone use in hospitals being so dangerous?  Not really.  That claim that humans only use 10% of their brains?  Nope.  The distraught man in the photo has just been told, “You know that thing I told you about needing to drink 8 glasses of water a day?  Yeah, turns out I was wrong on that one.  Sorry.”  You can see why he’s so upset.  You’d be mad too if you drank 8 glasses of water a day for 20 years. 

Seriously, though, here’s what we learn from all this:  whatever we think we know for a fact…is probably wrong, and it’s at least not the certified gospel truth like we think it is.  Humanity has a long and well-documented history of realizing we were really WAY off on what we thought we knew.  So add these myths to the rest of them, the Earth is flat, the Sun revolves around the Earth, eggs are bad for you, and reading in dim light will make you blind. 

Or not.  Depends on what day it is. 

Here’s another entry in the “Well…duh” category:  a new survey finds that consumer cell phone spending has overtaken landline spending. 

First, I would have guessed that this had already happened… a few years ago.  But apparently the tipping point only just recently was reached.  In an age where even middle-schoolers have their own cell phone, this is not a surprise.  I cannot think of a single person that I know who does not have a cell phone. 

In fact, the only thing keeping landlines in the conversation is dial-up or DSL Internet service–which uses phone lines to connect to the web (and it is, of course, the phone companies that are offering and pushing DSL Internet service). 

Mobile phones are, well, mobile.  You can receive all your calls without having to sit in the house all day.  Cell phones are not only popular, they are more capable.  Cell phones can double as mp3 players, GPS devices, web browsers, PDAs, and much more. 

For more on this earth-shattering study, go here.  And stay tuned for the sequels:  “Computer Use Outpaces Typewriter Use,” and “More People Drive Cars to Work Than Ride Bikes.” 

Google has unveiled plans for a Wikipedia rival.  Because, it seems, being the go-to source for information on the web isn’t quite enough.  Now they want to be the go-to source for everything. 

There are some differences between Wikipedia and Google’s new Knol service.  The most important one is that authors on Google’s Knol will have bylines, so that everyone can see who authored a particular entry–Wikipedia, of course, lets anonymous users create and/or edit entries, and uses a system of editors to weed out the false info.  Another chief difference is that readers will not have the ability to change an author’s submission, but will instead offer a voting system that lets readers pick the entries that are the best.  Theoretically, the best of the bunch would rise to the top.

From the article:

 ”‘We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content,’ wrote Udi Manber, vice president of engineering, on the official Google blog.”

There’s another wrinkle too:  Google will allow authors to sign up to permit ads to show up on their entries, and is promising a “significant” share of the revenue those ads generate to the author. 

So…in other words…the new Knol service could easily be named: Another Way For Google to Make Money on Ads (but that’s admittedly a long name for a product, so I can see why they went with Knol). 

What I want to know is how this will impact search results.  Wikipedia is already dominating the Google results pages, often coming up #1 for countless queries.  Will Google now “demote” the authority Wikipedia entries carry?  Will Knol entries now be placed across the top of the results?  It’s a slippery slope to allow your own money-making encyclopedia to overpower other sites in the rankings.  Knol will allow multiple articles for the same topic–they claim more is better and that this will allow for maximum overall accuracy, and they may be right–and that voting system will impact which entry on Knol shows up the highest on Google’s results pages.  So what about the secodn-most-voted-on entry for a topic?  Will it still be in the search results too?  Will the top ten results for a query eventually be the top ten entries for that topic on Knol?  When does “providing the best results possible” become “blatantly skewing results to advertise your own product,” you know? 

Anyway, Google is clearly bent on world domination.  I’m not one to rock the boat.  All hail Google, our information overlords!

Has your new Windows Vista operating system annoyed you?  Enough to write a book about it?  Because that’s what this guy did. 

Actually, Windows 95 annoyed him–back in the day–and it was enough to cause him to write out all the various bugs and glitches as well as work-arounds for each. 

13 years later, and he’s turned it into a full-time job.  David Karp has written a book of annoyances (and fixes) for every version of Windows since, and Vista is no exception.  There are, in fact, over 600 pages of annoyances in this book.

One of the more interesting things he says is that our perceptions play tricks with us, perhaps making us think that XP is better than Vista.  Karp claims that XP had just as many annoying bugs when it came out.  So it is the freshness…the newness of the Vista annoyances that make us overinflate the greatness of XP.  Users all over the world have been clamouring for XP on new PCs, forcing Mircosoft to extend XP’s availability many times.  But Karp reminds you that XP–however great–is still a piece of software written in 2001.  Vista, for all its bad press, will slowly iron out its bugs….as all Windows incarnations have.  Don’t let it frighten you too much; even a buggy new OS is probably a better long-term option than a seemingly-smooth 7-year-old one. 

Unless you’re like my uncle, who is still using Windows Me.  Let it go, man…let it go. 

According to Hitwise–a web metrics firm–Google accounted for 65% of internet searches in November.  And all the Google employees chant, “We’re #1, we’re #1!”  Actually, I have this feeling that Google doesn’t pay attention to this stuff.  They’ve been #1 for so long that a new survey showing them as the top dog is just business as usual. 

Now, as our clients know (and are probably tired of me telling them), Google has long been the dominant player in the field of search.  These new Hitwise numbers serve only to show that the dominance continues. 

New marketing efforts from Ask (formerly AskJeeves), along with continued efforts by Yahoo and Microsoft to grab more of the search market share, have made virtually no dent whatsoever in Google’s armor. 

Yahoo is number 2, with 21%.  Microsoft follows in a distant 3rd, with 7%, and Ask is holding steady in the 4th position with 4% of the market. 

Some quick and complicated math tells me that these four companies account for 97% of all internet searches.

This might be a good time to remind you about the shady SEO scam firms, who often pitch their services (via email) by touting the fact that they’ll submit your site and secure you great rankings on “thousands of search engines.”  Yeah, there are a few problems with that kind of boast, namely that there simply aren’t “thousands of search engines.”  Also, as this new survey shows us, no matter how many engines there may be…only four matter.  And of those four, only one really matters. 

If you’re site isn’t being found on Google, you’ve got a problem, because you’re missing out on 65% of your possible customers. 

If you have questions about your website’s search engine rankings, or are interested in seeing how Keystone might help you improve your search presence, check out our Search Engine Services page on our official site.  Chances are, you’re not doing all you can to let the engines know what you’re really about, and we’d love to help you out.

Identity theft is a growing problem…a rapidly growing problem.  As USAToday reports:

“More than 162 million records have been reported lost or stolen in 2007, triple the 49.7 million that went missing in 2006, according to USA TODAY’s analysis of data losses reported over the past two years.”

Wow.  That’s… alarming.

So now is as good a time as any to brush up on some basic identity protection tips (actually, it’s way past the time to brush up on this, but if you’ve had a hard time getting motivated, allow this new report to wake you up and help you smell the coffee).

Identity theives operate in a varitey of ways, but one of the most common is also the easiest to guard against:  unattended laptops, mail, computer equipment, disks, and flash drives.  Apparently, the section of the population most prone to leave their computer lying around unattended are also among the most likely to have their sensitive information on said computer, in easy to find places.

Another problem is employees skirting the rules:  the study finds that 35% of empolyees felt compelled to end company rules on internet and email usage just to get their jobs done.  So these folks end up emailing things from work to their home or to friends–things they shouldn’t email such as account numbers and passwords. 

Phishing is another trend on the rise, where thieves create copycat websites that look and behave just like the real ones.  So you think you’re logging into your Yahoo mail account, but you’re really just giving your account information and password to the bad guys.  Yahoo and many other online firms have taken steps to help avoid this problem, by having users choose a Site ID Key or unique color scheme, so that users can quickly know they are logging in to the correct place.  Unfortunately, millions of users simply don’t take advantage of this technology, further opening themselves up to attack. 

While identity theft’s rise has been sharp, the fact remains that the majority of instances of this crime are avoidable with proper planning and precaution. 

Words can’t really describe this video. 

Okay, maybe they can:  Jetpacks are real now, and in 2008 you can own one. 

Jetpacks International is the company that has spent millions of dollars and five years developing their Personal Flying Machine.  Granted, some of the models will only fly for 30 or 45 seconds.  But the consumer model they plain to sell next year can fly for 10 miles (I certainly hope that it’s not 10 miles in 30 or 45 seconds!). 

I think I speak for men everywhere when I say, “Where’s the line?”  I mean, seriously, who hasn’t dreamed of owning their own jetpack?  The only trouble I can forsee is how we’re going to regulate these things.  Sure, the price tag is sure to serve as a regulation method all its own for quite a while.  But once these things come down in price, how are we going to keep any sort of order in the skies with hundreds of these things flying around?  Oh well, I’m sure we’ll all just get along fine, politely waiting for other jetpacks to pass.

Go here to see Jetpack International’s website.