Have a happy and safe new year celebration. We hope 2013 brings you all the best.

We will see you again on Wednesday January 2, 2013.

The Wall Street Journal published this nice comparison of the powers that be on the Internet.

Let’s face it, if these services went away today would the vast majority of the world find the Internet as useful and manageable? Of course, one could argue that other players would ‘fill the void’ but imagine that there weren’t those either.

Imagine there was always just average search engines (if any at all). Imagine if you had to go everywhere for everything instead of landing at Amazon and shopping for it all. Imagine no Facebook (that one is a little easier to do I must admit) or that Apple and its app world didn’t help make sense of it all.

Hmmm. What do you think?

Merry Christmas to all of our readers. We will be back on December 26th.

16 “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.

John 3:16-17 (NASB)

If you want to know what’s happening in the social video space, look no further than Unruly’s Viral Video Chart. This constantly changing Top 20 list is a window into the wacky world of online video but it’s also proof of the enormous power behind this new kind of media.

Take a look at this chart which shows the most shared social video brands of the past year.

I was surprised to see Google on the top of the list because I couldn’t think of a single “Google brand” video. So I went searching and found. . . ironically, that they just released their annual Zeitgeist 2012: Year In Review. This video encapsulates all of the most searched stories of the year in under 3 minutes. It’s very inspiring. So here’s one more share for Google who climbed six places to make the top of the viral chart.

I have to admit that this news doesn’t surprise me at all. It’s a little disconcerting because once Google gets away from the free model on anything that is already large and still a lot of room to grow, like Google Apps, the rest of the freemium world will follow suit. Actually, if the paid version of the suite of productivity gets what is being promised as a result of generating revenue it would be a good thing.

The Wall Street Journal tells us

Sundar Pichai, Google’s senior vice president in charge of Google Apps, said Google wants to provide small businesses that use the free version of the software with dedicated customer support—something only paying customers currently get. “We’re not serving them well,” he said of the free users.