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Prior to 2001, gilded hard cover encyclopedias were cracked to fact check everything from raptor names to State capitals. Today the world's most popular English encyclopedia is more often used to identify pop culture icons and social media companies. A recent Telegraph article listed the 50 most-viewed Wikipedia articles of 2008 and 2009 and while the results are slightly inaccurate, they're pretty interesting. Below are this year's most visited Wikipedia pages measured in hits per day.

There are thousands of Google gadgets you can add to your iGoogle pages, from email checkers, games, even (wow, over 70) Twitter clients. The framework for these gadgets is flexible, allowing most of them to work not only in iGoogle but also on your PC using Google Desktop and in Gmail as a labs plugin. So when we write about a particular gadget, although it may not get as big as an iPhone app, there's still a lot of potential there.

The Google gadget called What's Popular came to our attention thanks to Steve Rubel's blog Micro Persusion. His take is that it has the potential to rival Digg. While we think that might be a bit ambitious, we definitely think the gadget is a lot of fun.

Connecticut software developer Jake Luciani has run 10k items on Del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit and Mixx through the API of popularity ranking engine AideRSS to analyze the connection between popularity and timing. He determined the best days and times for a blog post to be submitted to those sites if its author wants it to receive the maximum number of votes, comments and inbound links.

Luciani's conclusion: between 1pm and 3pm PST (after lunch) or between 5pm and 7pm PST (after work) are the best times and Thursday is the best day. The worst time to post? Between 3 and 5 PM PST on the weekends - nobody cares. See the graphs below.