I use a cellphone. It's not attached to my ear, as they seem to be for every student here at Colgate, but I use it fairly often. It's a lame phone; I still use a pay-as-you-go plan, but it works for me.

On The New York Times site there is a Most Popular section that lists the 10 stories or columns most e-mailed, blogged, and searched.

And at No. 1 today is this story: Experts Revive Debate Over Cellphones and Cancer

So I had seen these URLs -- http://tinyurl.com/6l8d5f -- popping up all over Facebook pages and on Twitter, and wondered how they came to be. Now I know. It's the TinyURL.com website, where you can quickly transform a long torturous URL into something short and sweet.

I don't think I'll use this for everything, but I can see some value here.

We're looking at modifying our content management system during the summer, and one of the things we're looking at is the ability for the user (me) to create web redirects on the fly. I'm dying for this feature because now I need to put in a formal request to our IT crew to do that. Not a difficult process for them, but not one they jump on the minute the request comes in, either.

Redirects obviously give more control and are better for links on print publications that tip to the web, and we're doing more and more of this. But these tiny.urls have come in handy for quick posts here and there.

Try it if you haven't used it yet, and see what you think.

Facebook provides some interesting analytics for 'pages' that anyone can easily create. We created one for Colgate University in early May, which I wrote about in an earlier post.

We're now up to 1,599 fans as of this morning, and it continues to grow each day. What the Facebook "insights" shows me is that many more women are fans of our page than men: 62 percent to 38 percent. Not quite sure what to make of that yet.

I also can see the age breakdown, and that data are less surprising:

Quick, what is the most read and used website on the planet? It’s not Google, it’s Yahoo!

What is the most read news website on the planet? It’s not Google News, it’s Yahoo! News.

Despite its position as media darling, Google trails is competitor (and advertising partner) Yahoo! in many respects. Not only does Yahoo! beat them on total aggregate traffic, but its news site has more than three times the traffic of Google News (35 million monthly, unique visitors compared to only 11 million). In fact, Google News sits in eighth spot, right behind the lowly Gannett Newspapers and flounders with the lowest growth of all the top 10 news sites.

Perhaps a key reason for Google’s fledgling traffic status when compared to Yahoo! (though they are often rated as the 2nd most used website on the planet so they’re still doing fine thank you very much) may be the nature of its websites. In short, Google lacks original content. While Yahoo! not only compiles news from other sources, it also creates its own content with expert columnists.

Additionally, Yahoo! uses real humans to aggregate and promote news, Google relies completely on computers. Google crawls news websites and compiles the news articles automatically. This automated, no human process doesn’t always work. Case in point: when news anchor Tim Russert died recently, the story quickly became the top news story on many sites including the #2 news site, MSNBC. The New York Times was quick to point out that Google News didn’t list it as a story until an hour after it broke on MSNBC (see At Google, Slow Growth in News Site).

But content is more than just static text – it also includes multimedia such as photos and video. All of Yahoo’s top features have links to video, compared to only two headlines on the first screen of Google News (Noon PST, June 24, 2008) with links to video. Readers love video, and Yahoo! has understood this for some time. Google News is playing catch-up.

Speaking of video, while Google presently holds the overall #2 traffic spot behind Yahoo!, a couple of months ago it was supplanted by YouTube and bumped to #3. Social media sites representing “user generated content” are also putting the heat on Google. Other social media sites in the top 10 most visited websites include MySpace, Facebook, and Wikipedia – all are gaining traffic faster than Google.

Yes, Google is still great, but content is still king.

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