Come to the nation's capital and join us again this year at the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in Washington, D.C. from October 19-23. Ah, The Fall Classic. If you're stateside*, you may be aware that the baseball playoffs are in full swing. Full swing. Bear with us here. Are you familiar with the expression, "Right in your wheelhouse "? In baseball, a wheelhouse is a hitter's powerzone .

Image by Getty Images via Daylife This this handed to me, Newsknife has just published a ranking of the Top News Sites of 2009. The big story is that Newsknife's combined figures for sites owned by Rupert Murdoch put them in second place at a time when Murdoch has declared his unhappiness with Google News. (Methinks the media mogul doth protest too much.) The Top News Sites of 2009 is compiled by Newsknife from its analysis of more than 311,000 listings by over 7,

Long URLs cut into character limits, are difficult to remember, and simply look awkward. Quite a little industry has sprung up in response. Only it looks like a major player is now entering the game, as a URL shortener created by Facebook has been sighted. Ryan Spoon first wrote about links built around the characters "FB.me" this weekend. Since, then, more and more examples have been found, and although Facebook has yet to announce anything official,

Most holiday shipping offers are set to expire on or before December 18, according to a new study by Shop.org and BIGresearch. Nearly two thirds (62.3%) of retailers' shipping deadlines for Christmas delivery will fall on or before December 18, with 34 percent of shipping deadlines occurring on December 18 itself.

Google made a couple of announcements today that actually combined for perhaps a more interesting announcement than either of them as stand-alone news items. First, Google has added a new share button to the Google Toolbar , which allows users to share any site on the web via their social network of choice. Second, Google announced that with Feedburner, you can now set your feeds up to post to Twitter .

Hi, it's Eric with the Mobile team. I just read about a new iPhone and web app from Shutterfly called Wink that I look forward to using with the holiday pictures I'll be taking this year. It's a cool new technology that turns your pictures into those that look like .

You've told us that you really liked the fast photo uploading feature on the new orkut, and we're thrilled! So, recently we turned our focus to revamping your photo viewing experience. In-line photo browsing When you receive a photo upload update from a friend in your activity stream, now all you have to do to see the full-sized photo is click on the thumbnail in your update. You can also comment on the photo and see comments by others in your activity stream.

The order of battle for Google this week seems to be on URL shorteners. This has been quite a trend on Twitter and Facebook with various third-party URL shortener sites offering this kind of service. But while others offer it as a stand-alone service, Google is taking the URL shortening thingie on a different approach - via Feedburner and Google Toolbar . As mentioned by the a post from the Official Google Blog ,

Couldn't decide on what to get for your techie friends who got almost all the gizmos released this year? Google has a solution for that. How about giving them the gift of Google Chrome instead? Google quietly rolls out this new marketing campaign for its Chrome browser. It's actually a neat and clever way of marketing the Chrome Browser, tying it up with the Christmas festivites. The idea is,

An advertising program that gives marketers access to little or no popular content isn't worth much. Fortunately for Google, Google TV Ads is moving further and further in the opposite direction, and today, an announcement concerning yet another well-known network was made. John Saroff wrote on the Official Google TV Ads blog, "We're happy to welcome A&E Television Networks (AETN), one of the largest cable programmers in the US, as our newest inventory partner.