During the Traveling Geeks trip to the UK I had the good fortune of having a Flip Ultra HD recorder in my pocket when I bumped into Jim Sterne. Jim runs the Emetrics Marketing Optimization Summit and is also chairman of the Web Analytics Association.

Our interview took place on the third story of the historic Globe Theatre overlooking the Thames during the Econsultancy Roundtable on our last day in London, and the 5-minute video came out fairly well, considering the lack of fill lighting, the lack of a tripod and some audio artifacts from the Flip.

Sterne, head of Target Marketing of Santa Barbara, breaks down analytics into three main buckets:

1Website ratings: What's happening on the Internet in general? Which websites are the most popular? Popular services include comScore, Nielsen/Netratings, Hitwise as well other tools like Quantcast and Alexa.

2Advertising: The ad industry needs to know how many ads are being served and whether they're being clicked. Doubleclick is the giant of the field; the Atlas Network, 24/7 Real Media and Right Media are other players.

3Web analytics: At each website, what is the user's behavior? Are they arriving on the landing page? Do they bounce off (hit one page and go no further)? Can I tweak the persuasion process to improve the conversion rate? What's their demographic and behavioral makeup? Customer satisfaction and tracking social media traffic also tie into this. Measurement tools and firms include Google Analytics, Omniture, Web Trends and CoreMetrics.

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Back in the earlier days of 3rd party Twitter apps (just a few months ago, actually), a few very effective web-based services got my attention: SocialToo, TweetLater, and HootSuite. Sad thing was, while they were all very powerful services, they were all poorly designed, very hacked together, and fugly.  Enter the elegant, sexy, feature-rich HootSuite 2.0 (no matter what you think about all the controversy and extortion — see below).

Everyone's talking about HootSuite 2.0

Today, while I was monitoring my stream-o-tweets, I noticed that every third person of the 2,587 I currently follow were tweeting that they "upgraded to #HootSuite 2.0 because it works http://hootsuite.com/upgrade." HootSuite — pronounced like it sounds (HOOT-sweet) and a play on the French phrase tout de suite — was the first online player to offer multi-Twitter-account management and Twittering, an essential tool to any business application of Twitter that required the management of more than one Twitter account, such as @marcon, @abrahamharrison, @chrisabraham, etc.

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At the Fortune Brainstorm:Tech conference in Pasadena, Calif., on July 22, 2009, one of the lighter moments came when Internet pioneer Marc Andreessen spoke on stage about "one of the defining experiences of my career" when he spent 9 months as an intern at IBM in 1990-91 when it had 400,000 employees. He used a program in the office that determined the number of layers of management between him and the CEO was 17, "from which I concluded that it was unlikely I would make a career at IBM. … It was essentially like working for the Soviet Union at the time."

He had a great experience at IBM, but that serves as his internal reference for big companies. In this three-minute segment, recorded with a Flip Ultra HD recorder, he compares the culture of small and large companies and concludes, "Startups are where a lot of innovation happens. … But you have to get big to have a big impact. I've always thought an entrepreneur needs to think in terms of getting to a large size in scale in order to have a big impact."

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The Emo Girl Talk podcast from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Here's a 4 1/2-minute video interview I did with Martina Butler after her appearance on a panel at the Teens in Tech conference in San Francisco this past spring. (Now that my schedule is clear, you're going to see a truckload of interviews from past weeks.)

Martina has been host of the Emo Girl Talk podcast for the past four years — since she was 14. That's 183 episodes. What's most interesting is that this has blossomed from a hobby into a popular young person's lifestyle podcast with several corporate sponsors — enough to help Martina pay for her college tuition.

On the show she talks about her life, her favorite bands (mostly indie-rock) and TV shows, and she and co-host Peter Jacobsen also offer tips on topics such as how to live a green lifestyle. About half of each show is devoted to answering audio comments from listeners who call and leave a message asking for advice or telling about their day.

Martina is not particularly tech savvy and has some help putting her podcast together, but says that other young people should feel daunted by the technology. It's not that hard to do, and if you podcast about a topic that you love and that you find interesting, you'll build an audience. "Even if you don't get a lot of response right away, don't give up, keep going," she says.

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Disclaimer: Donanza is a client of my firm, Blonde 2.0, a one-stop-shop for all your social media needs.

People don’t look for jobs in the newspaper classifieds anymore. Instead, job postings are dispersed through a variety of niche networks, from groups on LinkedIn, tweets on Twitter, and widgets and search engines on a variety of sites.

While increasing the ability to network — one of the most important factors in finding a job — the growth of niche job sites can sometimes make it hard to find time to search for jobs. One often has to go to multiple sites just to find social media jobs, for example.

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While the majority of traffic still comes through search engines, that's all poised to change with these three trends:

1. Connect your content to existing social networks

Almost every Web 2.0 application and community requires users to sign up and register. If you want to leave a comment on a blog, you need to register, sometimes every single time you leave a comment. With all the times you've registered on sites, you probably have hundreds of accounts that you've completely forgotten. Instead of creating your own community, simply latch on to existing communities.

Social networks such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter began reaching outside of their four walls and letting any site or content provider use a conduit tool to connect their content to their social networks. Examples include Google Friend Connect (video), Facebook Connect (video), and Sign in with Twitter.

These conduit tools offer quick authentication, commenting, and other conversational features. More importantly, once these connect tools are installed, every interaction a person has with your site can be broadcast to that individual's entire social network, giving you access to their audience.

2. Distribute content through advertising networks

With fractions of a percentage click-through, banner ads are on the verge of being completely useless. Some companies have tried to attract more attention with pop-ups and animation. In those cases, click-throughs may increase, but that may be by accident. Ever try to close out a window and miss? People do want to click, but not on static advertising. They want to click on information.

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Here are 32 Flickr photos of participants in the Fortune Brainstorm:Tech conference late last week in Pasadena, Calif., with images of actor Ashton Kutcher (3 million Twitter followers), Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, Bill Gross, John Chen, CEO of Sybase, Mark Hurd, CEO of HP, Jeffrey Katzenberg of DreamWorks, and others.

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• Ashton Kutcher, the world's most popular Tweeter, on Twitter (dailyfinance.com)

Howard Dean on Internet disrupting politics from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

One highlight of the three-day Fortune Brainstorm:Tech conference, which just wrapped up in Pasadena, came when Howard Dean, former presidential candidate and former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, began riffing on the Internet's impact on national politics.

Some highlights from the 11-minute video:

• Howard Dean: "The technology is moving so fast and it's having an enormous, enormous effect." He briefly traced the influence of the Internet on U.S. politics, citing YouTube flipping the U.S. Senate to Democratic control in 2006 because of Va. Sen. George Allen's Macaca moment.

• The 2008 campaign by Barack Obama made spectacular use of social networking. "2008 was the first election in the lifetime of everyone in this room in which more people voted who were under 35 than over 65," Dean told the audience. "This is the president of the younger generation."

• Dean: "Then along comes the 2009 Iranian election and they could shut down the Internet but they couldn't shut down their cellphone network without shutting down their whole country. How did information get out? Twitter."

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Here is part 3 of the series I will post over the next few months based on chapters from my new book, A Survival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Optimization.

This book is meant to be a guide to building an optimized foundation in the Social Web for beginners and advanced users alike.

Chapter 3, the longest chapter in the book, is about RSS feeds and blogs. This chapter is packed with information and useful tips about content preparation, feed readers, optimization, and much more to ensure maximum exposure in the Social Web.

The following excerpts are from A Survival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Optimization:

Chapter 3: RSS Feeds and Blogs

Optimizing Your Blog And RSS Feed

Your RSS feed or blog will do you little good if nobody knows about it or cannot subscribe to it. This section highlights ways for you to optimize and promote your feed. Most of these tips are for both blogs and RSS
feeds, but some of them only apply to blogs. It is made clear if something only applies to blogs....

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