Wow! It would appear that we’re all tweeting mad. Recent news from TwitterWorld reveals that Twitter has topped 10 billion tweets.

Given that Twitter recorded one billion tweets in November 2008 and five billion only four months ago it’s clear that the infectious art of social media is growing at an extremely fast rate.

We’re presuming that as an on-line business you’re already on to this highly effective form of marketing. If not, why not employ one of a growing number of social media training professionals to show you the ropes?

Hi all, it has been a while but I am now back and have chosen a new member of the team to pose my questions to.

This week – Kelly York…

Q: What is your role at WebCreationUK and what do you do?

A: Project Allocation Manager – I read through clients’ creative briefs and delegate projects to the most suitable designer for that particular type of website.

Q: Have you ever googled yourself?

A: Once, a long time ago and it listed an Escort Agency

Q: Name your 3 favourite website designs by WebCreationUK.

A:

1) http://www.francescaneill.com/ – I like the flash work on the gallery section where images can be flipped over like a page in a book.

2) http://www.minifest2008.com/ – The homepage is very creative, well designed and eye catching.

3) http://www.jolaby.co.uk/ – I think the white noise television effect is pretty cool and gives the site an edgy feel.

Q: What have you been listening to recently?

A: I listen to The Maccabees, Bloc Party and The Cure religiously but lately I have been listening to Hot Chip’s new album and Delphic. Excited about the new Foals album which is being released soon.

Q: Which sites do you use the most?

A: Facebook, NME, ASOS and Halifax – I need to check my bank balance after visiting ASOS

Q: What do you spend your time doing outside of work?

A: Hanging out with my friends, listening to music, watching movies, going to gigs, exercising *cough* and eating hummus

Q: And finally…who is your idol?

A: I don’t have an idol that I aspire to be like but musically I admire Kele Okereke and Orlando Weeks. Johnny Cash and Morrissey are legends. And I do buy Cliff Richard’s racy calendar every year – he looks quite buff in his old age.

Interesting answers from Kelly and I hope you all enjoy it!

Back soon, and I promise it will not be such a long wait this time!!

Another major high street retailer is aiming to grab their share of the on-line sales market. News has just been revealed that UK fashion retailer Gap is to launch an e-commerce store in the UK later this year.

The on-line store, which will cover Britain and nine other western European countries from a distribution base in the UK, will sell Gap-branded fashion items and its Banana Republic clothing.

Gap has already dipped its toes in the e-retail marketplace after debuting via major ecommerce retailer Asos in 2009. It clearly liked what it found and is now keen to expand its on-line sales.

So, another positive story in the fast-expanding world of on-line sales stores and ecommerce sites.

Businesses will be interested to read about the claimed success of DiggAds. This comes on the back of the debate about how websites, web owners and advertisers can make revenue via on-line ads. Especially when so many of these ads seem to annoy users.

Now it seems that Digg may be approaching something of a winning formula after it launched in-line ads that users can dig or bury. Four months into the project and DiggAds is apparently proving a success for users, advertisers and, of course, Digg itself.

Another interesting point is that Digg displays ads to site users in the same format as other Digg content. So the ads are part of the Digg stream like other stories.

The way the DiggAds work is complex but it’s essentially this:

DiggAds is powered by an auction-based system that aims to serve users with the “highest quality ads” (according to a Digg rating) while factoring in the advertiser’s bidding price. It’s similar to Google Adsense but with quality scoring.

The idea is to reward high quality ads with lower Cost Per Clicks (CPCs). So, crucially, the more Diggs an ad gets the less the advertiser pays.

DiggAds also plans to start including a system whereby users can make comments about ads.

According to Digg this system is working. The company is reported recently as saying: “From a revenue perspective, things have been great.”

Now it will be interesting to see how Twitter’s new ad platform will operate when it launches soon.

News of a milestone in the big wide world of “search”. The European Commission (and the US Department of Justice) has just given its approval for a proposed Microsoft and Yahoo search deal. The 10-year deal will see Yahoo’s search engine powered by Microsoft’s Bing.

What this means, of course, is that Microsoft and Yahoo will have a much greater chance of being able to compete against Google, which currently has a huge 90% share of the UK search market.

The new “alliance” agreement will see Yahoo taking 88% of revenue from all search ad sales during the first five years, while over the next five years Yahoo will get its hands 93% of revenue earned.

A new report has revealed that Facebook has overtaken Yahoo in America’s top website charts. The date, from web analytics company Comptete.com comes as another blow for yahoo, which for many years was the world’s most popular site.

It was only two years ago that Google became the number one most visited site in the world, knocking Yahoo down a peg in the world stakes after a decade of domination. And now Yahoo has had another nudge downwards thanks to the rising popularity of Facebook.

In January 2010 the stats showed that Facebook’s traffic in America grew to 133.62 million visitors, compared to Yahoo, which saw traffic drop to 132.00 million.

The question is can, or when will, Facebook hurdle Google?