ReadWriteWeb

YouTube is, by far, the most popular online video service, but we actually know very little about how bloggers use the service to embed videos on their own sites. Sysomos, the Toronto-based social media analytics and monitoring firm, just took a closer look at how the blogosphere links to and embeds YouTube videos. Overall, the company analyzed over 2.5 million YouTube videos that were embedded in blog posts between July and December 2009.

A recent study from Ruder Finn revealed that Americans are spending nearly three hours per day on their mobile phones. And what are they doing there? Educating themselves, conducting business, managing finances, instant messaging, emailing? All of the above, as it turns out, and then some. But perhaps the most interesting finding from the new data is the fact that more people are using the mobile web to socialize (91%) compared to the 79% of desktop users who do the same. It appears that the mobile phone is actually a better platform for social networking than the PC.

As Internet users, we are becoming increasingly dependent on our social networks for a number of daily activities. We communicate with friends and family, share photos, invite and get invited to events and generally interact with the world around us. The social network is becoming the heart and soul of our Internet experience and Gigya will announce a range of new features this Thursday to help websites take full advantage of the roll of social media in today's online environment.

We spoke with David Yovanno, CEO of Gigya, this morning about the different ways people are using the Internet, how this has changed from the old model and how Gigya can help.

You can get paid to tweet. Average, non-celebrity users are making some decent pocket change using Twitter ad services like Twittad, Magpie, Sponsored Tweets, and Ad.ly. And while reports of $10,000 tweets abound, average users are pulling in much smaller amounts, usually three figures at most.

But aren't these programs rewarding scam artists who boost their follower count through artificial means or sneak in ads that look like regular tweets? Surprisingly, for the most part, the answer is no.

This is part 2 of a two part series on paid tweets. See part 1 here.

Here's a little secret about Twitter that you may not know: some people are getting paid to tweet. We don't mean it's their job to Twitter as the PR front-end for some large corporation, either. They're actually getting paid to post advertisements to their Twitter stream. When their followers click though, the end result is cold, hard cash.

The Twitter ad industry, an experimental playground where new ideas about making money on the Internet flourish, is made up of a handful of companies who work with advertisers to run in-stream Twitter campaigns. Surprisingly, it's not as unseemly as it sounds. For the most part, tweets are disclosed, backlash is minimal and the so-called "publishers" - the Twitterers, that is - are making a decent bit of pocket change. Just don't count on banking 10K per tweet like Kim Kardashian allegedly did.

Today at the Mobile World Congress 2010, Adobe announced several initiatives designed to cement their company's relevance in a world where Apple, one of the top smartphone players, has banned Adobe software from inclusion on all mobile devices including the iPhone, iPod Touch and the soon-to-launch iPad. Without Adobe's Flash runtime, thousands of websites don't work, streaming videos won't play and a number of online casual games are broken. Apple, of course, is fine with this, having worked around the issue thanks to the 150,000+ iPhone applications that deliver the same functionality...although sometimes for a fee.

Adobe, meanwhile, is focusing on the other up-and-coming smartphone platform, Google's Android OS, with the launch of their "AIR for Android" offering. With this and the newly announced Flash Player 10.1, wannabe mobile developers don't need to learn specialized code, but can instead leverage their existing development skills to build Flash and AIR-based applications. They can then have those apps run anywhere: PCs, Macs, Linux and mobile...including, surprisingly, the iPhone.

In only four short years, the worldwide mobile data traffic will reach 40 exabytes per year. This is according to new research from Cisco which sees the traffic jumping from 0.09 exabytes per month in 2009 to 3.6 exabytes per month by 2014. And in case you don't know what an exabyte is, it's 1 billion gigabytes. That's one quintillion bytes.

It appears that not only does the mobile web have a future, the mobile web is the future.

We all know that young folks use the social Web for personal purposes, from keeping tabs on family members to sharing party pics with friends. And yes, as we reported more than a year ago, they even use the social Web - gasp! - while at their places of employment. But they're also using more tech for work-related tasks, including interacting with customers and vendors and forming or strengthening new and existing partnerships.

According to a 5,595-person, 13-country survey from tech consultancy Accenture, since this generation has grown up with daily doses of technology in one form or another, "They don't see bright lines between work
and personal, virtual and physical, sanctioned and prohibited. It's not, 'Would you approve this, boss?' but, 'Whatever gets the job done.'"

Yesterday we posted a video from the Teens in Tech conference, looking at how teens perceive technology. Today we're co-launching a survey which aims to find out how children 12 years and younger use Web technology. We've partnered with Boston research firm Latitude, which developed the survey tool and will help us analyze the data. The survey will be open for 2 weeks, after which ReadWriteWeb and Latitude will list and analyze the results.

If you're the parent of a child 12 and under, then we invite you to participate in the survey by clicking here.

Is blogging for old people? Apparently so. Well, at least according to a new study from Pew Internet Project, that is. Today's youngest generation of online users are no longer interested in consuming long-form content like blogs, says the research. Instead, communication among teens tends to involve brief bursts of information, like a Facebook status update or a text message. Pew's findings state that only 14% of tweens and teens ages 12 to 17 now report that they blog, down from 25% only four years ago. They're also less interested in commenting on their friends' blogs, too, with only 52% reporting doing so, down from over three-quarters back in 2006.