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Skill building, tracking and optimization, knowledge retention and measurement of workplace effectiveness - those are the aims of some of the software industry's hottest companies. SuccessFactors got bought last year for $3.4 billion by SAP. Taleo got bought by Oracle for $1.9 billion last week. Salesforce bought Rypple and Workday is one of the hottest companies in the world.

Why is this sector so on fire? I presumed it's not just because everyone is suddenly excited about personal professional development, so I asked a few experts in the field. This is what they said.

OnWardSearch releases an infographic showing the typical salaries for social media professionals. This and more in today's Daily Wrap.

Sometimes it's difficult to catch everything that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well.

Like a certain social network that came before it, Pinterest already appears to be doing a few things behind the scenes.

CNN reports that the popular virtual pinboard social network site has been "appending affiliate links to some pins," particularly those featuring goods from Amazon, eBay, Target and thousands more merchants. If someone clicks on one of those affiliate links and buys a product featured in one of the pins, Pinterest makes money. But no one would have known this if the following blog post on LLSocial.com had not appeared.

I took a business trip recently, and it was a big deal. Even if it was nothing major for anyone else, it was a big deal for me. The trip was full of promise and opportunity. I made sure to capture all its key moments with my phone. When I got back, I didn't want to stick all those photos into a bland, blue Facebook album.

I used Jux, because it lets me design the whole experience out to every edge of every screen. Jux just launched crop control for photos, so the Jux album of my trip looks just right on every device. A Jux isn't a blog. It's more like a portfolio. Each piece stands on its own.

Sometimes we have bad days. It's a part of being human, part of working in a stressful time and place. Among the problems of being a blogger are that it exposes one's weaknesses, magnifies the limits of one's personal perspective, and often amplifies our feelings beyond what we might have intended. I have avoided being a blogger in the traditional sense partly because I'm fairly certain that you don't care - nor should you - about these things as they pertain to me.

Andy Rooney was among the greatest news writers of his generation. But during the latter stages of his life, he complained about how awful life had become, about how things had ceased to be familiar any more, about how disruption had left his world a blur. Rooney's complaints had become emblematic of what has been perceived as the decline of the role of television as an information medium. So when M.G. Siegler spends a few minutes with us in the same vein, complaining about how the object of his career up until recently has been "bulls---," one wonders whether this should be emblematic of the end of something else.

Katy Perry's got nothing on Nicki Minaj.

At the 2012 Grammys, Perry rolled on-stage with a blue wig and her hit song "E.T.", then abruptly transitioned into "Part of Me," which pop news sources have attributed to her break-up with Russell Brand. (There are lines like "So you can keep the diamond ring," for example.) Things just haven't been the same since Perry's religious parents have tried to hook her up with Jesus-lovin' Tim Tebow.

Yet Perry was formerly the queen of cotton candy cloud sensuality, of references to sucking Snoop Dogg's lollipop and a hyperfemininity that only a white girl of pastor parents could muster. Sweet and adoring in her innocence, Perry doesn't stand a chance against hardcore female rapper Nicki Minaj, who stole the 2012 Grammys with "Roman Holiday." Both a tribute to and a pushback against the movie "The Exorcist," Minaj's performance engaged the short attention spans of social media users, compelling them to post their own thoughts on Minaj's "interpretation" of Catholicism, exorcism and the use of highly charged religious imagery in pop culture social media spectacle.

Catching up to Chrome is just part of the Firefox roadmap for 2012. Mozilla's Asa Dotzler has updated the strategy and roadmap for desktop Firefox in 2012. While the Mozilla folks have several original ideas and goals, there's a lot in the first half of the 2012 roadmap that looks very familiar to Chrome users as well. The really interesting features come in the second half of 2012, and relate to user privacy and account management. Third party cookie management and tracking could be a killer feature for Firefox later this year.

If you have a look at the desktop feature roadmap, you'll see that Q1 and Q2 have quite a few features that are either already in Google Chrome. For example, there's sync for add-ons, assuming add-ons work across releases, silent update and a redesigned new tab page.

Google has taken an important first step towards finalizing its acquisition of Motorola Mobility. Today the European Commission, the European Union's version of the Federal Trade Commission, approved the merger. The commission granted the approval, "mainly because it would not significantly modify the market situation in respect of operating systems and patents for these devices."

The rest of the regulatory chips should fall in line for Google and Motorola after E.U. approval. The merger still needs to be approved in the U.S., China, Israel and Taiwan, but the logic of the European Commission is sound. Motorola only took 2% of profits from the entire mobile industry last year. From an anti-trust perspective, Google could buy Sony Ericsson and LG and still not come anywhere near the combined market share of Samsung and Apple.

Update: The U.S. Department of Justice has also approved the acquisition. See below for details.

Last week, after VMware introduced businesses to the idea of an automated cloud service portal called vCloud Integration Manager (vCIM) that could give private cloud consumers a way to become public cloud providers, the question was: How many small-to-medium enterprises would jump on board? Interrupting the answer to that question today is AT&T - arguably still one of the world's largest public corporations - which has itself become a vCloud customer in a retooling of its Synaptic cloud services to include VPN access.

It's a move that could not only help AT&T gain parity, or something approaching it, compared to cloud giant Amazon, but could also help even the stakes between VMware and Citrix in the one field where the latter's Xen has a market share advantage: the private cloud.

Microsoft demanded the takedown of a phony Twitter account purpoting to be that of Windows Division President Steven Sinofsky.

Over the weekend, Microsoft used its @BuildWindows8 account to send a message to the account owner, saying "@StevenSinofsky please see guidelines on parody and impersonation. Your account is not following them them and has been reported."

Last night's Grammy awards was not the Super Bowl, which broke a tweets-per-second record, but it was still a chance for advertisers to tap into an audience watching the event on television and using second screens to discuss the event on social media.

But, much as they did last week, most brands scored a big swing-and-a-miss: big, because Twitter was already super-charged with Saturday night's death of Whitney Houston, meaning some people who had no plans to watch the broadcast were tuning in after reading tweets about the 48-year-old singer.

The social Web space is abuzz with new developments and entrants these days. Facebook's IPO. The explosion of Pinterest. The rapid evolution of Google+ into a place where the President of the United States hangs out. One name you never hear is one that was all the rage just a few years ago.

MySpace has been losing traffic since 2008, when Facebook first surpassed it on Alexa. Last year, the company was sold for $35 million by News Corporation, who bought it for $580 million six years earlier. Its new owners, Specific Media, have tried to reposition the site as an online entertainment hub rather than a full-fledged social network. If early numbers are any indication, the refocus appears to be working.

Hamza Kashgari, who fled his native Saudi Arabia, has been sent back to face a possible death penalty. He left the country, intending to seek political asylum in New Zealand, after a series of tweets on the Prophet Muhammad's birthday resulted in hundreds of death threats.

Kashgari was apprehended at the Kuala Lumpur airport Wednesday by the Malaysian authorities, at the request of Saudi Arabia, with whom Malaysia has no extradition treaty. Sunday morning, Saudi officials took custody of him at the airport and flew him back to Saudi Arabia in a private plane, according to a source close to the situation.

As anyone who has ever had a valid credit card charge questioned knows, there is a lot of fraudulent use of cards, and the Internet has made it even easier for the bad guys to exploit them. According to comScore, last year ecommerce in the U.S. reached record levels of spending with more than $160 billion in transactions. With all this activity, it is like looking for the proverbial needle in a very large haystack to try to track down fraudulent transactions. But a look into a couple of new fraud detection and prevention technologies shows that perhaps the good guys are making some inroads in this war.