I was reading that Microsoft is valuing Facebook at around $10 billion.  The kicker?  Facebook is holding out for a $15 billion valuation.

I’m not an expert on web 2.0 values, however I do remember the web 1.0 bust (just in time for my college graduation with a shiny degree in Computer Science… but bitterness aside…).  I think Facebook is awesome, that it’s much better than MySpace, and possibly one of if not the gem of the current web 2.0 crowd (bigger than del.icio.us and/or Digg).  However, that just seems way too much.

The good news though is that if they’re worth that much, then my stock options with Helium will probably we worth a decent amount.  We’re no Facebook but the totals are only going up.  Barring another bust - which is always a possibility - I think I chose the right horse (my only other option at the time being Eons, which is laying off people).

Random Tidbit: Google has several new ideas percolating including a possible competitor to Second Life.

I’m a big enough man to admit when I’m wrong. Well, sort of. Almost since I began this blog, back when it was hosted on wordpress, I have been singing the accolades of del.icio.us. Recently I had begun to expand out and see what else there is in the social bookmarking field. I had tried Blinklist and wasn’t too impressed. They imported my del.icio.us links but lost my privacy settings and the interface was not very pleasing to me.

Then I discovered ma.gnolia. I had written it off as a sort of neat little lower 2nd or higher 3rd tier entrant into the field but had heard good things about it. After signing up and using it for a week now - I’m hooked. It has a much better UI than del.icio.us or blinklist, it imported all of my links no problem, it generates your own link blog that you can claim on technorati and just overall I am really impressed. It’s designed by the smart people at Happy Cog Studios who employ one of my favorite web designers / developers / people - Jason Santa Maria. If I could half the design skill and coding expertise (along with a little Meyer knowledge) I wouldn’t be half bad.

So feel free to check out my link blog or my about me - and yes, that picture with the two people is me and my girlfriend. More on that later in the week.

Sorry I’m not better looking. Don’t judge me.

Random Tidbit: Check out the LEGO Digital Designer.

TechCrunch reported the other day that Ebay has acquired StumbleUpon.  They are definitely one of the more interesting web 2.0 social networking / bookmarking / etc sites.  I have not played around with them much but I have tried to follow them since I got listed awhile back for one of my posts and saw my two biggest traffic days.  Unfortunately, I guess my content was sparse at the time since most of them didn’t stick (thanks to the 2 that did).

If you’re not familiar with it, StumbleUpon let’s users save sites which then other users can, literally, “stumble upon.”  It’s a unique way to find good sites out there without resorting to the sometimes slanted opinion of sites like Digg and Reddit.  I heard not too long ago that they were adding features to allow users to focus on certain tags - web design, politics, etc.  That would set them apart from a feature like the del.icio.us randomizer which has much of the same functionality as the StumbleUpon I first encountered.

It will be interesting to see where Ebay, a company not really focused on this type of service, will take it.

Random Tidbit:  Two for your viewing pleasure.  Summer is upon us and theme park season is in swing - I wonder how many people will try this?  Also, remembering my younger days, this might have been a fun, if mischievous, game to play with my brother.

At work we recently instituted social bookmarking and networking at the bottom of our items. Apparently our users - while smart, resourceful, motivated and on a web 2.0 site regularly - were in many cases unaware of the phenomenon. While the values of Reddit and Digg are well known - though in the case of Digg not very useful in my opinion based upon recent stories of gaming, mass exodus (over the HD-DVD key issue) and the simple fact that similar stories always seem to populate the front page - social bookmarking seems to be less widely known, used and understood.

It has many uses and benefits that are worth looking into. I will focus on my personal choice del.icio.us - however other sites such as blinklist and ma.gnolia do almost exactly the same thing (and in some cases better from what I understand).

First, and most important to me, they serve as a central hub for all your bookmarks. Once you become a regular web user and get past the 20 or so range for bookmarks it becomes cumbersome to sync your home, work, laptop, etc. bookmarks. With del.icio.us you can post them in one place and access them from any computer anywhere. And using their tag feature you can sort your bookmarks easily so that you, your friends and even complete strangers can find them. You can add notes - which I need to do more of - to remind yourself why you bookmarked the site. For anyone that is into tech news, web design or blogging having this resource is a must.

Second, they’ve become a social search engine. I saw an interesting article about the new search engine that’s better that Google. Basically, it’s about using tags on del.icio.us to find interesting and relevant sites. There are some issues - recently I’ve noticed spam trickling in - but overall it’s a great way to find cool new sites and articles. Add the fact that you can get feeds from it - giving you SEO or CSS content daily right to your RSS reader/site of choice - and it’s almost a no-brainer. Will it ever replace Google? Probably not. But it’s an awesome substitute especially for cutting edge and web related topics.

Third, they allow you to increase your audience if you’re a blogger or webmaster. Basically, by bookmarking your own pages you are indexing your site the way you want it to be. The loss is so is everyone else, however, for a new or smaller audience blog/site it’s a great way to expand your audience and pick up potential regular visitors. It’s something I’ve always meant to do with my site but never gotten around to. If you use Wordpress, your tags naturally flow with the tags on del.icio.us - so someone should (or likely already has) invent a plug-in to do this automatically.

Finally, they allow you to share your bookmarks. You can build friends on del.icio.us (they call it your network) and when you tag something one of the tags will be “for:<username>.” So if find that awesome new CSS site and want to share it with your designer friend - you can. You can even give links to people not in your network (as a reader of my blog did in the past).

You can also share your bookmarks through tag and link rolls - which is how I built my interests, web design and graphic design pages. They also have released an API I believe to be used in mash-ups.

Random Tidbit: I found an article awhile back about 37 Steps to Perfect Markup. Pretty interesting.

Came across a YouTube video that has been out for awhile that talks about Web 2.0, what it is and how we are a part of the web now - collaborating, sharing and building it to our wants and needs. Pretty interesting. This will probably break my validation but here’s my attempt at adding video to my site:

Random Tidbit: More food for thought - 100 Things We Didn’t Know Last Year