It takes a while to plow through all the new features on each of the updates of the now 135 iPhone Apps that I've downloaded.

While I am busy risking my life attempting to become the Mayor of the Golden Gate Bridge on Foursquare,  Yelp may have driven right around all four squares.

If you have not been in San Francisco or Austin lately, I suppose it is possible that you are not already "playing" Foursquare on your mobile phone.  This is the app where, for seemingly no good reason, you and I are pushing white rimmed notifications at each other all day long telling everyone that we've a) bothered to show up at work b) have traveled somewhere semi-exotic (like Sunnyvale) or c) we are at the latest, hippest, happening bar with hottest, hippest girls or boys (take your pick) within thousands of miles.  For this effort we win "badges" when we don't crash our cars.  The only problem is that nobody, not even your best friends really cares all that much.  Yes, they do care a little (but have you ever asked yourself why?).  Yes, my "friendroll" has grown exponentially in the last seven days.  Yes, it's fun in a vicarious sort of way to watch the kids in the office traipse their way through the Herpes Triangle on Friday night, but other than that, who are we all really kidding?

 Along comes the latest Yelp iPhone update which not only allows you to tell your "friends" where you are –but it comes with the stunning innovation of giving you very useful information about where to go.  So, instead of gunning for "badges" I can find a list of nearby bars with user ratings included while I tell you the location information that you don't really care about anyway.

So, you have to wonder, where does FourSquare fit in?  Will the "game" trump the utility inherent in the Yelp location based services?  If the past is any guide, there will be room for both –but this does put the onus on Foursquare to get useful fast.

Mobile Social Networking site and Thief Notification Service, Foursquare, has cut a small (dollar-wise) but big (brand recognition-wise) deal with a Rye, New York manufacturer of carbonated soda.

I've been using Foursquare for about two months and  I am so very proud to be the mayor of my own company. How badly would it suck if I wasn't?

Why do I use Foursquare?  Well it's my job. I'm supposed to be an early adopter. So, now we have a bunch of internet consultants, agency people and marketing types, 300,000 of them evidently, all following each other around.  Like all new things on the web which will someday be huge, it is still a mystery to me as to whether this will take off (which means that it, no doubt, will). 

I can see the benefits of knowing who is where and who is around you and when.  But, I have to admit that, however respected an industry denizen he might be, I do not need to have my iPhone tell me where Cory Trefilletti is every moment of the day.  All I know is that Cory gets to work earlier than I do (or at least he remembers to check in earlier) although I will say is not making it to the gym any more than I do.  Come on Cory, you can do better than that.

The other problem, coming soon to a hysterical Nancy Grace show near you, is that Foursquare seems like an invitation to tabloid hell. When Cory checks in at the gym, were I an axe murderer or second story man, that would be my cue to head over to his house (I know where that is because he checks in there) and treat myself to a nice evening of axe murdering or cleaning out his stereo equipment. Not that I personally have the time or inclination but, I'm just saying.

Anyway, Like Twitter, Like Facebook, Like everything else, this will take off if and when everybody buys in — I'm just not completely sure they will. Unlike Facebook which invites TMI that won't affect your health and home, Foursquare provides TMI which could be physically dangerous in the wrong hands.

The latest in
video is not Adotube’s
in-stream rollover ads, nor Ooyala’s
embedded wizardry. It’s not even Google’s brand-spanking new fingerprinting
system for YouTube videos – though it was about time. But we’re getting
closer. All the talk about local search, or even more personalized
search, as being the wave of the future, leads us in a certain direction.
People are going online to find what they want, and if a well-placed, relevant advertisement
comes their way while they’re on the hunt, they’ll pay attention.

In addition,
although we’re seeing a unique consumer-led customization of goods and services
that incorporates different brands, we still appreciate continuity and
compatibility of our choices. If I, for example, had the opportunity to
streamline my working life by using the same brand for all my applications,
instead of the current hodgepodge of tools, I would hop on that bus faster than
you can say “monopoly.” And as we know, Google has become a strong name as a brand, through
very little marketing effort of its own.

A door is
opening that involves local search, geographical targeting, online video, and
Google. As Reuters reports, Google Earth has added video.
Microsoft and Yahoo already have systems in place for linking websites, photo,
and video to their mapping programs, but Google holds the big gun of YouTube,
the largest source of online video.

Producers can
now “peg” videos set in specific locations to maps in Google Earth. The first
use of this would obviously be in tourism, because you could look up a certain
location of interest and immediately find information about it as a vacation
spot. We’re not sold by textual descriptions of the seafood buffet at a
Mediterranean resort or a traveler review of a fun horseback ride in Cabo.
We’re sold by photographs of a Bali sunset or a video of an African safari.

But the
possibilities are endless. What if, the next time you Google-earthed your house
(admit it, you do it) you found a clever video spot on a new restaurant that
just opened up around the corner? You’d take a peek in on your way home from work, I bet. And that’s exactly what they’re hoping.

Top Ten lists are lame, which is why you should read this one.

In a shameless effort to make money, we took to researching the Highest Paying Keywords on AdSense. With the top ten containing such catchy phrases as "peritonial mesothelioma" and "structured settlement" we are realizing that not much has changed – it’s still the doctors and lawyers who are holding the keys to the Lexus.

But it’s not all boring. Below are our favorites, presented Letterman-style (which doesn’t really mean anything except they’re in reverse order):

10. Online defensive driving – is this really something you can learn online?
9.  Consalidation / Consoladation / Cosolidation 
     We’re pretty sure this is an effort to spell "Consolidation", which is an actual high-paying search term, worth $25.90 per click.
8.  Wrongful Death
7.  Canadian pharmacy – not quite as popular as a "Mexican pharmacy."
6.  Adult diaper – no comment.
5.  Egg credit – a close second to "Frozen Eggs Fertility Treatment – home delivered."
4.  Vasectomy reversal
3.  Alcohol Treatment / Drug Rehab – now attend AA meetings online.
2.  Jesus is our homeboy – I don’t make these things up.

and our Number One Highest Paying Keyword of 2006 is…

1.  AdSense.

Tagging is building momentum – this time it is an AP news story. Mainstream media is catching on to the hip technology of the moment, and it’s darling sites – Flickr, Technorati and deli.cio.us.

Conceptually, the idea of tagging things for easier retrieval and sharing seems invaluable, but the beauty of heirarchies and categories is that so little effort is required upfront. In contrast, there are so many ways you would have to tag something to make it useful in the future – not sure how this could be managed? Consider this post – we would need a tag for "tagging," "tags," "Flickr," "Technorati,""del.icio.us," etc. – if we wanted to be comprehensive as to all of the ways in which we may want to find information in this post in the future.

As far as usefulness of tags for marketers – once they’ve been assigned, the applications are pretty amazing. For example, if you’re the owner of a company and you visit del.icio.us and found users who have tagged your company’s name – you could get invaluable – and specific – insight into your customers (based on other tags that they have assigned).

And speaking of marketers – there is always the danger of marketers getting in to the tagging mix and mucking up the purity.

We’re open to being convinced about the future of tags – but there is some work to be done.

Kevin Ryan’s not buying the tag advertising revolution in this iMediaConnection.com article.

Tagging, tagging, tagging – getting a lot of press these days. Steve Rubel – iMediaConnection – wrote a fantastic article on tagging. Here were the highlights:

• Marketers should monitor how consumers are tagging their product, service, etc.
• Tagging may provide marketers with potential to launch viral marketing campaigns
• Search engines (Yahoo!, Google, etc.) will begin to sell keywords across tags
• Someone’s going to launch a tagvertising network

Steven Levy – of Newsweek – writes about the emergence of "tagging," and its potential; most likely its potential as a new and eventually efficient way to organize information on the web, with an acknowledgment that just the opposite result is possible.