Google had a big year in 2009. The Droid won gadget of the year from TIME. Over one million invites to the Google Wave platform were sent. The Google Chrome web browser increased its market share, and even a Chrome Operating System for netbooks was released.

Google Zeitgeist is a year end summary of trends that Google tracks, based on the billions of search queries that Google servers execute. The word zeitgeist means literally “spirit of the times.”

Google trends can be traced across a variety of subjects, and filtered by country.   It is certainly worth checking out the Google Zeitgeist page for the full picture.

Google had a big year in 2009 and I’m sure we can expect more big initiatives in 2010 from the worlds largest search engine.  Google’s continued dominance of the web is one of my ten tech predictions for 2010.

What trends do you predict will rise and fall in 2010?  Do you think Google will lose market share to competitors Yahoo and Bing?

The following 10 free resources are the best ways to shorten and customize links on the web. With the link shortening services below you will be able to make links really short, customize them, track their analytics, and share them easily. Not all link shortening services offer all of these features. Read the list below and let us know in the comments what your favorite link shortening service is!

1. bit.ly

bit.ly is the default url shortening service offered by Twitter. It is my favorite url shortening service since it offers built-in link tracking and analytics, a cool sidebar bookmarklet, a firefox extension, native Twitter posting support, and more!

Example: http://bit.ly/gar1n

2. j.mp

j.mp is owned by the same company, and by the same technology as bit.ly. The difference is the name. j.mp is 2 characters shorter than bit.ly for the Tweets that are cutting it close to the 140 limit.

Example: http://j.mp/vanhalen

3. 3.ly

3.ly offers the “worlds shortest” URLs. Since they are less well known than j.mp they offer more availability for custom domains. To view the hit count of a 3.ly link simply add a minus sign – to the end of your URL.

Example: http://3.ly/googleapps

4. Tinyurl.com

Tinyurl.com was the standard url shortening service before bit.ly was developed. They have already shortened over 400 million links. The downside to this is that many custom urls are already taken. TinyURL offers a browser bookmark button that will provide a TinyURL of the page you are on. TinyURL also offers a preview feature for your browser that will allow you to preview where a TinyURL will go, before you click on the link.

5. Su.pr

Su.pr is the only URL shortening service that also helps your content get more traffic! Every Su.pr URL you create exposes your content to StumbleUpon’s nearly 8 million users. You will need a StumbleUpon account to access the Twitter integration, traffic analytics, and custom URLs.

6. TinyURL.com

TinyURL is a URL Shortening Service that offers a browser bookmark button that will provide a TinyURL of the page you are on. TinyURL also offers a preview feature for your browser that will allow you to preview where a TinyURL will go, before you click on the link.

7. Is.gd

Is.gd is a good URL shortening service.

8. URLcut.com

A simple service that you can use to shorten long URLs and password-protect them.

Example: http://urlcut.com/1tvaf

9. Goo.gl

goo.gl is a URL shortening service offered by Google. To use the service you must download the Google Toolbar.

Example: http://goo.gl/l6MS

10. Youtu.be

YouTube links can be shortened by editing the URL. For example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEDOXHEfxrw can be shortened to http://youtu.be/PEDOXHEfxrw. Both links direct to the same video.

Feedback

What is your favorite URL shortening service?

I just upgraded to Wordpress 2.9 and after reviewing a few blog posts about the new features I have created my own post with the three features that are the most vital to Bloggers.  This latest version of Wordpress is named “Carmen” and can be downloaded here.

1. Image Editing

Image editing is my favorite new feature of WordPress 2.9. The new image editing features allow bloggers to scale and rotate images, as well as crop, without having to open another image editing.

Note the “Edit Image” button in the screenshot below.

The crop feature (to use just click, and drag):

The cropped image, seconds later:

As I tried to show with the screenshots above image editing, such as cropping, is exceptionally easy.

2. The Trash Can

The trash can is designed to save you from deleting things you never really wanted to delete. The below image is where you can access the trash, from posts/edit.

The trash is emptied every 30 days as a default setting, but you can change this by editing your wp-config.php file. Add the following text to your config file to change trash collection to every 7 days:

define(‘EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS’,7);

The above script can be modified so that the trash can is emptied on whatever interval you choose.

3. oEmbed

oEmbed, allows media providers like Flickr, YouTube and the others listed below to provide data for platforms like WordPress to import media.  By including an Embed URL and pasting the link to the page that contains the media, WordPress can retrieve the media file associated with the url and insert the media into the post accordingly.

The list of supported oEmbed sites in WordPress are as follows:

• YouTube (via oEmbed)
• Blip.tv (via oEmbed)
• Flickr images and videos (via oEmbed)
• Hulu (via oEmbed)
• Viddler (via oEmbed)
• Qik.com (via oEmbed)
• Revision3 (via oEmbed)
• Google Video (via an internal handler)
• PollDaddy (via an internal handler)
• DailyMotion (via an internal handler)

{embed}http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRdxXPV9GNQ{/embed}

Using the exact code above, except with [] brackets instead of {}, I embedded the trailer for Avatar below.

Summary

If you are a plugin developer check out this post which covers seven of the new features that I did not mention.

What is your favorite new feature of Wordpress? Let us know in the comments below.

Tumblr and Posterous are two of the easiest and most powerful blogging platforms on the net, and that makes them awesome. In this post I am going to examine the commonalities, strengths, and weaknesses of each platform so that you can decide if either (or both) are right for you.

Tumblr

Tumblr has been around since 2007, and is based out of New York. Tumblr has been able to attract some high profile Bloggers such as Katy Perry and Gary Vaynerchuck.  These Bloggers, combined with a well designed iPhone app have helped the platform generate over a million bloggers.

Tumblr has a unique community that features both types of bloggers; content creators, and content sharers. The average Tumblr Blog has more shared, than created, content. The reblog feature of tumblr has encourages sharing, by simplifying it into a single click, much like how the new retweet button of Twitter works. Tumblr blogs imitate twitter, in how they have a follow feature, and twitter even has a tumblr blog for status.twitter.com.

Tumblr supports auto-posting to Twitter with the custom url service http://tumblr.com/

Custom Domains

Tumblr supports custom domains. Configuring a tumblr to use your custom domain simply requires changing your ip address with your registrar to tumblrs ip. I did this in less than five minutes for my Canadian tumblr blog at garin.ca. The default tumblr domain naming system goes: www.yourdomain.tumblr.com. I was lucky enough to snatch up www.garin.tumblr.com and I use this as my main tumblr blog, and I use it for sharing cool content I find around the web.

Themes

Tumblr has a variety of Themes, and it helps to have a theme with built in reblog abilities. If you want to install a disqus commenting system to your blog, this is also possible, however I have noticed that comment engagement is very low with tumblr.

Strength

Tumblr has an iPhone App that allows you to post to your tumblr blog, view your dashboard, or adjust settings.

Weakness

Email Posting is offered with tumblr, but it involves a unique email address that is largely random and not easy to remember.  I do not know my custom tumblr email address and I don’t make an effort to remember it since posterous simplifies this process.

Posterous

Posterous has the motto the dead simple way to blog and that statement is not misleading. Posterous simplifies blogging by allowing posts to be made via email, or on the web. Most people use posterous by emailing posts to post@posterous.com, then posterous responds by posting the email with the corresponding posterous and then sending a return email notifying the sender that the post was made. Posterous allows users to subscribe to other posterous blogs.

Auto posting to Twitter is supported and Posterous uses the shortening url service http://post.ly/ to append urls.

Custom Domains

Posterous supports custom domains, and offers step by step instructions, if your registrar is godaddy, for adjusting your ip address to point to posterous. The default url for posterous is www.yourdomain.posterous.com and since I was happy with my url www.garin.posterous.com I saw no need to use a custom domain.

Themes

Posterous does not have the theme selection like tumblr does, but they do make it rather simple to customize the colors, and offer a few themes.  They also offer advanced themes for those who want easy access to the css and html so that the design can be seriously modified.

Strengths

With posterous email posting is simplified, by having a users posterous account linked with their email account.

Commenting is integrated as soon as you set up your posterous, and allows for people to login with posterous, facebook, or twitter to comment on your post.

Another Posterous strength is support for auto posting from posterous to a variety of other sites, such as facebook, twitter, flickr, delicious, and more.

Weakness

The weakness of posterous is that it is new and still has a relatively small community.  This is an advantage for some bloggers since many of the popular posterous domains have not yet been claimed.

Posterous has no iPhone App, but the only reason why they don’t is because they really don’t need one, since posting is done through email.

Conclusion

Both Tumblr and Posterous are great ways to blog.  If you want to share I recommend Tumblr, whereas if you want to post via email Posterous is the way to go.  Let me know what your favorite is in the comments below, and include your blog url if you have one!

KickYouTube.com is a free service that allows you to download any embeddable YouTube Video into a variety of different formats, such as mp4, and mp3, for playback on iPods, mp3 players or directly from your hard drive.

This site works allows you to “kick” any video on to your hard drive by adding the word “kick” immediately before “youtube” in the url field of your web browser.

Once you have reached the kick site for the video select the video or audio format you want to use and click “GO.” After about a minute, depending on the file type, the “GO” button will change to “DOWN” and you are able to right click this button, click “Save file as,” and specify where on your hard drive you want the file to save.

Some awesome videos worth “kicking” are Battle at Kreuger, Her Morning Elegance, and 40 inspirational speeches in 20 minutes.

Note: You cannot “kick” videos from a YouTube channel, it must be the stand alone video page url that you are “kicking”

Enjoy!

You can import a larger image, and even preview your favicon as you edit it.

This is a great tool, and I have used it for all of my Websites and Blogs.

What do you think?