If you’re like many of us, you’re home for the holidays. Rather than complaining about the springs in the pullout couch or watching endless television reruns, consider rediscovering your hometown. Featured on today’s Noticings is a location-based game similar to Foursquare that forces you to discover new gems in your old haunts. Sponsor Each day Flickr users upload 3 geotagged photographs with the tag “noticings”. From here they receive points for game-related activities including finding misspelled signs, being the first to tag a photo in a particular neighborhood or for noticing something everyday for a week. Users upload photos via the $3 Noticings iPhone application or through Flickr’s regular desktop, web and iPhone tools. Just imagine the possibilities of capturing your hometown. Document the visual parfait of the abandoned fish cannery, drink in the chaos of the strip mall parking lot, and of course, don’t forget to snap the fine public art displayed in your local pub latrine. This service is a great way to keep you sane in your hometown while literally putting it on the map for its unique features. ReadWriteStart’s Chris Cameron recently profiled Stalqer – a service that maps your friends based on their geotagged Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare status updates. In a similar vein, Noticings leverages an existing service to create a completely new experience. Coupled with augmented reality mobile applications, location-based services like Noticings and Stalqer have done much to get geeks out of their homes into the real world. To join Noticings, check out the game rules at http://noticin.gs/rules . Discuss

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Noticings: Foursquare for Photographers

Your web marketing strategies are something that you need to seriously think about in order to be successful. If you don’t have plans in place already, you aren’t going to get very far in business or in marketing your business. You need to think about a lot of things, but you just need to take it one by one and figure out what works best.

Professional marketing services are often the best resource for your web marketing needs. There isn’t a limit on what you can do as long as you find what works. You definitely need to find marketing services that you can rely on so that you can get the best results every single time.

Professional marketing services will be able to help you look through all the marketing tools that you can use and figure out the best way to get your business noticed. They can help you understand each different strategy and how it works. With so many different marketing tools to consider, you have to make sure that you’ve got a working plan that will be effective.

What are you trying to accomplish? This will make a big impact on your web marketing choices. You can rely on tools such as link building, keyword optimization, and article marketing to make the most of your business no matter what your intentions might be. There are also other tools to consider, though, so make sure you check out your options.

When you work with a marketing company, they can help you determine which methods or web marketing tools will be best. They will be there to help you along the way, and can be an invaluable asset.

You really need to focus on finding relevant keywords in your marketing. No matter which tools you use, this can be helpful. You should also find the audience and different venues that can most benefit from your product or service. Targeted advertising, as this is known, is a successful tool for any business.

Having a blog will also make a big impact. Blog marketing can be essential in your advertising and traffic generation. Other tools will be successful as well, but blogs are your way to communicate with customers in an informal and personal manner, give you the upper hand in marketing your business successfully.

To learn more about web marketing and find solutions for your business marketing needs, visit www.Majon.com today.

Twitter just announced that it has acquired Mixer Labs , the company behind GeoAPI.com . GeoAPI is a service that allows developers to easily add geolocation data to their apps. Twitter just launched its own geotagging API a few weeks ago. Even though a number of mobile and desktop Twitter apps like Seesmic Web and Birdfeed support Twitter’s geotagging API, only a very small number of users is currently making use of this feature. Sponsor According to Twitter founder Ev Williams, the company “will be looking at how to integrate the work Mixer Labs has done with the Twitter API in useful ways that give developers behind geo-enabled apps like Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid, Twittelator Pro and other powerful new possibilities.” It’s important to note that the Mixer Labs GeoAPI is not tied to Twitter. GeoAPI offers tools like a reverse geocoder that can take GPS coordinates and turn them into human readable information and a service that can find media files and status updates related to a specific place on Flickr, Twitter or YouTube. Mixer Labs also offers an iPhone SDK. Judging from Twitter’s announcement, the GeoAPI will continue to work while Twitter figures out how to best integrate its current geotagging API with Mixer Labs’ GeoAPI. Discuss

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Twitter Acquires Geolocation Service Mixer Labs: Plans to Enhance Its Geotagging API

If you’ve ever believed that semantic search is meant exclusively for researchers, then Meaning Tool might prove you wrong. Through Popego , the semantic search engine allows you to add your online profile and interests such as “gadgets” or “current news”. From here, Meaning Tool serves you entertaining content from across your social graph. ReadWriteWeb took a look at how the tool works and how it just might bridge the gap between scholars and social media junkies. Sponsor Meaningtool – Demo from Popego on Vimeo . Meaning Tool is a semantic engine that offers users a chance to extract concepts from text using specific semantic trees. As mentioned, you define your categories of interest by creating search parameters and training them with related websites or RSS feeds. Similar to Open Calais , the service appears to use the linked data standard to retrieve data via dereferenceable URIs on the web . From there you can search text in any romantic language to produce relevant words and categories. Categories such as “technology” and “security” are then shown in a pie chart to represent the percentage of relevancy the text has to these key categories. The system also offers a tag cloud of relevant keywords and key concepts. And finally, Meaning Tool extracts entities such as mentioned companies, people and places. Unlike many other semantic search services, your satisfaction with results as a researcher, marketer or general consumer weigh heavily on how you train the system. To find out more about the semantic web, check out For more info on the semantic web, check out our article on semantic search’s myths and realities . To add some of your own interests to Meaining Tool visit

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Meaning Tool: Training Semantic Search With Feeds

The ReadWriteWeb team will be live today for a 45-minute discussion about the year’s best products and biggest trends. You can listen to the show at noon today on Blog Talk Radio . We will post the recording after the live event. Show Details: RWW Live Special: 2009 Year in Review Time: Noon PST, (GMT -8) Link: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/readwriteweb Sponsor

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ReadWriteWeb Live: 2009 Year in Review (Today at Noon PST)

Since 1995 , when Sears mistakenly printed NORAD’ s phone number in its catalog instead of the number of its Santa hotline, NORAD has offered an online Santa tracker during the holidays. Now, working together with Google, NORAD continues to offer the same service during the holidays. Starting at 2pm ET on Christmas Eve, the newly enhanced Santa Tracker will go live. Sponsor This year, Google will use the Google Earth plugin to power noradsanta.org . According to Google, over 8 million people used the site to track Santa in 2008. In addition, Google also now offers a mobile site ( m.noradsanta.org) . In keeping with the times, NORAD also offers a Twitter account this year where “you can keep up with news about Santa’s flight.” Discuss

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A New Holiday Tradition: Track Santa Online

In 2009, the average U.S. Internet user spent 13 hours per week online. This number is down slightly from last year. Thanks to the large interest in the presidential election and financial crisis, the average Internet user was online for roughly 14 hours per week in 2008. According to a new poll from Harris Interactive , users between 30 to 39 are the most active Internet users. On average, this group is online for 18 hours per week. Sponsor Overall, the average time online for U.S. Internet users has gone up from 7 hours in 1999 to close to 9 hours in 2003 and up to 11 hours in 2007. We should note that these numbers only include adults. According to Nielsen , which looked at all U.S. Internet users, the average usage per week is closer to 17 hours. 98% of All Computer Users in the U.S. are Online The number of adults who are online has not changed since 2007. In total, 184 million adults regularly surf the Internet at work, home or at school. While the number of adults who are online has not changed, the number of adults who access the Internet at home has increased from 66% in 2005 to 76% in 2009. Ten years ago, only 56% of all adults accessed the Internet from home. In total, 98% of all computer users are now online. While users between 30 and 39 are the most active Internet users, those between 25 and 29 are the most likely to spend more than 24 hours per week online. 25% of 25 to 29-year-olds surf the Net between 24 and 162 hours per week – sadly, Harris Interactive doesn’t tell us how many of these users actually spend every minute of the week online. Online Shopping With regards to online shopping, Harris found that 50% of adults bought something online in the last month. Not surprisingly, 30 to 39-year-olds are the most active online shoppers. How High Will These Numbers Go? Given how popular online video and social networks have become over the last few years, chances are that the average number of hours spend online will continue to grow up slowly over the next few years. U.S. Internet users who watch TV online watch close to 18 hours of online video per week already. In the U.K., the average Facebook user spends close to three full days per year on the site. Without doubt, however, there will be a natural limit to how much time per week people will spend online. Discuss

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U.S. Internet Users Spend 13 Hours a Week Online