I may get more value out of Twitter than anyone else on the planet because I use Twitter as a tool—specifically as a marketing tool—for my website Alltop and my book, Reality Check. If the concept of using Twitter in a commercial manner interests you, keep reading. If it doesn’t, then you can continue to send and receive tweets about how cats are rolling over and the line at Starbucks.

The experts are promulgating many esoteric ways to determine the financial condition of the economy. It's irrational to base one's mood on the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA). After all, (a) what does that have to do with the real world? And (b) it reflects the buying (and selling) decisions of the same investment bankers who got us into this mess.

In this interview Dave Balter explains word-of-mouth marketing. Balter founded BzzAgent in 2002. His company has provided word-of-mouth media services for dozens of Fortune 500 companies and has been featured in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and on National Public Radio. He is also co-founder and current board member of The Word of Mouth Marketing Association. Balter earned a B.A. in Psychology from Skidmore College. He recently published a book called The Word of Mouth Manual, Volume II. You can download a full (and free!) copy of the book here.

1. Barak Obama and Hilary Clinton proposed the creation of the office of the co-president of the United States.

2. Dave Winer joined Mahalo as the vice-president of marketing.

3. Michael Arrington announced a conference called Kemo featuring startup life-science companies demonstrating medical cures in six minutes.

4. Steve Ballmer donated $100 million to the Jane Goodall Foundation.

There is an art to sucking up. Done too blatantly it will backfire. Done too weakly, you won't get what you want. The perfect suck up contains the following elements:

• Credibility. No matter how good your suck up, if you don't meet the requirements for placement, a job, an interview, whatever, it won't matter, so you need to show why you deserve what you're asking for.

I love Sk*rt. You can think of it as "Digg for chicks" (in the words of QueenofSpain), and it features the user-selected stories in topic such as Arts & Entertainment, Design & Crafts, Family & Parenting, and Food & Home.

Avenue A Razorfish released the 2008 Digital Outlook Report yesterday. The purpose of the report is to help Avenue A's clients understand consumer behavior in the digital space. In the report experts cover topics such as media spending, mobile web usage, social influence marketing, the state of search, and behavior targeting. Here are some tidbits from the report:

Day -1095: Waiting for a Macintosh that comes close to a Vaio in size, weight, and, most importantly, battery life. Day -60: Rumors start circulating about a super-cool, super-thin MacBook. Day -30: Go into Apple store and tell them to put one of these rumored super-cool, super-thin MacBooks aside for me if the rumors are true. Day 0: Steve announces MacBook Air at Macworld Expo in San Francisco.

A site's signup page is the second most important page on a site (the most important is the home page itself) because this is where you're asking for committment. Everyone worries about the home page (and still don't do a good job), but most companies do a poor job with the signup page. For example, HAMweather's is aesthetically-challenged, and Last.fm's doesn't convey enough information. This article about signup pages by Tim Bednar is a good read. His list of important signup-page elements is:

Dear Santa: 2007 was a great year and I thank you, but I want to provide you with my Christmas list for 2008. I’ve worked with so many engineers that I know that a 363-day lead time should be sufficient.

Here’s the next trend to study: Free. This is a video of Chris Anderson discussing his next book. Chris is the editor of Wired and author of The Long Tail. Kudos to whoever at Nokia decided to put this keynote online for the rest of us. And kudos to Core77 for finding it via Nova.

This summary of an article from the December issue of the Journal of Advertising Research (good luck finding the issue online because I couldn’t) says that common word-of-mouth advertising by regular folks is more powerful than “key influencers.” Which is to say that sucking up to A-list bloggers may not be all that it’s cracked up to be. It seems like it’s a bad day for celebrity endorsements.

Today Amazon announced its foray into selling hardware with a data service. The device is called “Kindle,” and it represents a daring move for an “online bookstore.” You’re going to see two kinds of reviews: bad ones from people who haven’t used it and good ones from people who have. It’s that kind of product—plus Jeff Bezos’s reality-distortion field isn’t as large as Steve Jobs’s. I have used it and if someone gave me a choice of receiving an iPhone or a Kindle, I’d pick the Kindle. Here are the reasons I like it so much:

Here are the top-ten Leopard tips from my friends, Adam Engst et al, at Take Control Books. They’ve already released five ebooks to help people upgrade to Leopard. Take Control publishes minor updates for free, so the authors can revise their books on the fly. These guys are the experts, but I have two Leopard tips as well, more about them later.

A few weeks ago Chris Brogan published a list of the 100 blog topics that he wished people would cover. One of them was, "How Twitter Improved My Blog," and I accepted the challenge to write something along these lines. (For those of you who are unfamiliar with Twitter, you can read "The Tao of Twitter," "Newbies Guide to Twitter," or "Ode to Twitter.") Here is my answer to Chris's request.

Fred Greguras is a partner at the Silicon Valley law firm of Fenwick and West. He is also a buddy of mine, and I asked him to answer the most common questions of newbie entrepreneurs. His clients have included BioMarker Pharmaceuticals, Excite, Kintana, and Speedera Networks. It’s very important to make the right decisions in these areas at the start of a company, so I hope you’ll heed his answers.

Frank Warren started PostSecret as a community art project in November 2004. Since then people have sent in one hundred and seventy-five thousand anonymous postcards. They are featured in art galleries, a music video, and Frank’s bestselling books: PostSecret, My Secret, and The Secret Lives of Men and Women. His new book is A Lifetime of Secrets.