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Time magazine recently announced the top 50 websites for 2009. The criteria to be on this list are ones which will make your online life more efficient - or just more fun.

First place went to photo-sharing giant, Flickr, who increased its popularity over the years by introducing collaborative tagging. Twitter managed to go up to 6th position while Skype landed right behind them at 7th position. Whereas giants such as Google and YouTube came 11th and 12th. Although Facebook has the largest user base than rival Twitter it ranked 31st.

When you have time check out the below top 50 websites.

1. Flickr
2. California Coastline
3. Delicious
4. Metafilter
5. Popurls
6. Twitter
7. Skype
8. Boing Boing
9. Academic Earth
10. OpenTable
11. Google
12. YouTube
13. Wolfram Alpha
14. Hulu
15. Vimeo
16. For a TV
17. Craiglook
18. Shop Goodwill
19. Amazon
20. Kayak
21. Netflix
22. Etsy
23. PropertyShark.com
24. Redfin
25. Wikipedia
26. Internet Archive
27. Kiva
28. ConsumerSearch
29. Metacritic
30. Pollster
31. Facebook
32. Pandora/Last.fm
33. Musicovery
34. Spotify
35. Supercook
36. Yelp
37. Visuwords
38. CouchSurfing
39. NameVoyager
40. Mint
41. TripIt
42. Aardvark
43. Drop.io
44. Issuu
45. Photosynth
46. OMGPOP
47. WorldWideTelescope
48. Fonolo
49. Get High Now
50. Know Your Meme

Back in the old days, executives relied on newspapers and information traded among each others for the latest information. As internet boomed and grew, executives are heading online to find the most up to date information. Why? Because its fast, cost efficient and less time consuming.

As shown in the table below, a research conducted by Forbes Insight and Google, found that the internet has become the most valuable information resources for executives, followed by at work contracts, personal network. Newspaper and magazine dropped to the bottom.

Search Engines is rated the most popular tool for executives to locate its information, followed by blogs and social networking sites.

Source: eMarketer

In most families, mums are the decision makers for family purchases. In order to keep up with their children, mums are going online and are now among the most savvy users of all online users. From statistics, mums are one of the largest online user groups.

As all marketers should know, mums not only holds the key to purchase decisions but they are also quite influential:

They shop for their kids—and themselves, and when they find something great for their family, they talk about it, not only with their family and friends, but often with a much broader online audience.

I am sure you have or have met or even as a mum yourself, seek advice and share information. The internet, as you can see in the above image, is influencing moms in turn influencing others. So what sources are mums using to research information? From a survey by Cafemom, the top three information sources moms uses to make a purchase decision are general websites, referrals from friends and families and search engines. Mums are now less likely to use TV, magazines, newspaper or radio.

What will mums mostly likely purchase online? According to Cafemom, moms are most likely purchase clothes/fashion accessories, then secondly, food and cooking items, followed by baby and parenting gear.

Source: eMarketer

Ever wondered what sort of Google penalties are there? What are the major penalties?

When Google penalizes you, most likely you will see a major drop in rankings. By how much will they drop your ranking? Well that depends on how serious you been spamming your website. For serious spammers, Google will ban these sites and remove them entirely from the search index.

The two major penalties are listed below:

-30 penalty
A penalty that affects the whole domain and decreases a website’s ranking positions by 30 places. These are websites that have been part of guestbook spamming, use of inappropriate redirect instead of the 301 redirect and/or uses doorway pages.

-950 penalty
Unlike -30 penalty, this penalty only affects specific URLs for specific keywords. However the -950 penalty is the most severe one. Penalised websites will be dropped to the last page on Google. This penalty is known as “An end results” phenomenon. Websites that do not pick up their act will then be wiped off Google’s index and ones that have ‘cleaned’ their website may recover but in worst case scenario it could take many months to undo the damage caused.

Website that have been hit with a -950 penalty are sites that may have taken part of affiliates linking, aggressive link building and keyword stuffing etc.

So how do you prevent your website being penalised? Well, basically do not take part of any unethical SEO tactics, such as Keyword stuffing, link farming, putting invisible text, use doorway pages which are pages that users cannot see but search engine spiders can.

A new search engine came to surface last weekend and provides better searches than Google, Microsoft and Yahoo combined. The creator of this search engine is a computer scientist whom designed this computational knowledge engine to answer people’s questions. This search engine computes it own answers rather collecting information from a big database, as what Google and all other search engine currently do.

This search engine provides answers to questions like the distances from one city to another, any scientific questions or mathematical equations. It also provides informative answers about names, cities etc. The creator says the purpose of this search engine is not to compete against Google but to create a new types of questions, answers and computations that normal search engine cannot handle.

They’re saying they’re not trying to wipe out Google, but they feel they do the kinds of searches that Google doesn’t handle. If you’re trying to get facts, this might be a handy kind of encyclopedia for you.

Please take a look at an earlier post when Wolfram Alpha was still an unborn search engine

We all know when is peak hour traffic and we all know when is television’s primetime. So, what about online?

Well according to Internet Advertising Bureau and Lightspeed Research, they found that UK internet users from all age groups, will notice online advertisements more after 6pm.

In which make sense because people tend to log on the internet after work, school or university for their own use. There will be a good amount of people who will surf online just to research a product/service and/or shopping for a product/service and it does not surprise me they are part of the percentage. From the results found from these sources, there is indeed a larger proportion of UK internet users that will pay more attention to online ads while they are ‘researching the best deals’, followed by shopping, gambling and searching online. Whereas people who are emailing or playing instant message are unlikely to notice online ads.

Source: eMarketer

According to some reports, Apple is offering Twitter USD $700m for the takeover deal. Sources revealed Apple is in advanced negotiations with Twitter and hope to close the deal by early June. Apple is waving USD $700m in cash in order to compete against Google and Microsoft who are also interested in this micro-blogging website.

Late last year, Twitter has turned down Facebook’s US $500m deal, in which the deal composed of Facebook stock.

Yes that’s right, there are people out there being sacked for surfing on Facebook. This time it happened in Switzerland. A woman took time off work because she could not work in front of the computer and needed rest in bed.

Coincidently the employer found out she was on Facebook and took action from there because she had broken the trust between the company.

“This abuse of trust, rather than the activity on Facebook, led to the ending of the work contract,” the company said.

The woman said she was on Facebook with her iPhone and claimed that the employer have been ’spying’ on her. This was rejected by the company and said her profile was found by a colleague in November.

Google’s contextual advertising platform, Adsense, is introducing a new feature - “Category Filtering”. This feature allows users to block any advertisements that are unrelated to what they are searching. This is done by blocking any ads that fall under a particular category such as religion or politics.

This feature is currently in testing mode and is being tested by a small group, so you won’t be seeing anything at the moment unless you part of the test group.

Let’s take a look at the screen show of how the feature looks:

Social networking sites are massively growing and so has the micro-blogging site, Twitter.

From a reliable source, CommScore, they found that the number of visitors using twitter has increased from 5 million to 9.3 million in February. A total increase of 131%. Rumors are surfacing around, claiming that it will be soon Twitter will surpass other social network giants such as Facebook and MySpace.

A ComScore’s industry analyst claims that Twitter’s growth rate is mainly contributed by media attention:

“There may certainly be some merit to that,” he said. “It seems you can’t get through a typical newscast anymore without some mention of Twitter.”