I keep arguing in conversations with friends that – once some solid metrics start emerging about the cost/benefit of investing in social media – I think we’ll see cooler heads prevail.

This sort of sets the stage for that kind of scrutiny. Business Insider has an article about some Twitter API data that someone collected and analyzed. Twitter boasts 175 million registered users, but according to their own measure of an “active user” (following at least 30 accounts with a third of those following back), the API data showed that less than 21 million Twitter accounts are active.

The data from the API also showed that 56 million Twitter users are following zero accounts, while 90 million users have zero followers.

I think it would be interesting if someone figured out how to sort by type of user – whether they’re essentially selling or buying. I think that if you were able to pull the sellers out of that pool of 21 million active users, you’d see a dwindling audience that is actually listening.

I’m not saying it’s useless. But it’s a tool, not a solution.

Justuno offers a widget-based tool that allows retailers to promote their active coupons with a coupon button embedded on their websites. The beauty of it is, since it’s essentially a widget, any updates in coupon information are made on the Justuno website, and the changes show up immediately in the retailer’s coupon button, already embedded on their site. No need to change any code.

Research shows that consumers who arrive at a retail website after googling “[retailer's name] + coupon” are ten times more likely to complete a purchase than the average customer. And the most common reason cited for abandoning shopping carts – something I’ve come to learn is a huge issue in online retail – is the cost of shipping. So using Justuno to promote even simple discounts like free shipping seems like a no-brainer to me. If the numbers are correct, the increase in sales should far outweigh the discounts offered. It’ll be interesting to see how well Justuno is adopted into the online retail world.

talk about putting it into perspective

Dimensions offer a wide variety of historical events, environmental disasters, spectacles and festivals whose geographical areas you can overlay over any location using Google Earth. What if Burning Man took place in your town (I bet it’s a lot bigger thank you think)? What if the Great Wall of China started in Texas? (It would stretch from the Gulf of California to Kentucky.) What’s the flight range of a Predator drone?

Pretty cool stuff.

photo by Dundas Football Club, used under Creative Commons License

There’s been plenty of talk – rightfully so – of the annoying swarms of bees that are the Vuvuzela horns you hear during the 2010 World Cup.  There reportedly have been more than one million sold since the Cup began last week.

Nothing short of a ban on the horns (it’s not going to happen) would help the players, broadcasters and fans at the matches, but as TV viewers, we thankfully have technology on our side.  A German sound engineer has created a 45-minute sound file you can buy and play during broadcasts.  It’s supposed to cancel out the sound using active noise control, the same way noise-canceling headphones work.

But thanks to another more industrious method, also originally posted by a German (Google translated page), you can just set your computer, stereo or TV equalizer to filter out the sound of the Vuvuzelas.

Apparently, all you have to do is duck your equalizer by at least 40dB at 465Hz and 235Hz.   If you are using your TV equalizer and it doesn’t offer those specific Hz levels, you can probably get away with approximating.

If you really want to get nerdy with it, here’s a video from Lifehacker that shows the before and after results:

Cheers to everyone involved, including our web producers and editors, interactive developers and, of course, our dedicated newsroom staff.

Now, where’s my congratulatory hot dog?

The flight data used to create the animation was taken from New York Times reports and eyewitness testimonies.

I expect to see in the near future this kind of infographic/animation reporting more frequently on news sites.