The college basketball tournament is here and you can explore the games, schools, and 3D venues on Google Maps. Download basketball apps from the Chrome Web Store, set up your bracket with Google Docs and follow Realtime updates on the tournament.

Engage in some friendly rivalry with our College Basketball Brackets template. View the 2011 NCAA tournament bracket. Create and manage your pool in this online spreadsheet. Automatic scoring for up to 10 people. Publish a bracket as a web page. Both men’s and women’s tournaments.

Google also gives you access to get more from your game experience from the Chrome Web Store to get the latest content and games for your browser.

My favorite part of the website is the Hotpot Challenge, which is a simple game of click and shoot a basket. See if you can beat my top score of 220. Warning, this game can be addicting.

Addressing the problem of when someone is searching for a message from a friend, a link to a video, blog post, or a digital invitation to a party, Greplin can find that content whether it is in their Gmail, Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter account.

As TechCrunch points out: There are some really nice touches to the product. Search results are shown before you hit enter, much like Google’s instant search product, and you can also filter by a variety of message types and sources (by people, for example, or Facebook).

• Gmail (not gTalk Chats)
• Google Docs
• Google Calendar
• Facebook (your profile, events, notes, messages, friends, news feed and wall posts)
• Twitter (your tweets, timeline and direct messages)
• Dropbox (titles and filenames only)
• LinkedIn (your status updates, contacts)
• Evernote*
• Google Apps Mail*
• Google Apps Calendar*
• Google Apps Docs*
• Yammer*

With Google recently releasing Social Search, Search Engine Journal points out that:

Google has thrown its hat into the social networks ring. With social networks growing and expanding wildly, Google has decided to get its share of the action. It all started with the launch of Google’s Social Search as a beta for English speaking users. Social Search was previously in the Google Labs section. It displays its results at the bottom of the search window, and searches based on your list of contacts in Google, for relevant information to the topic you are currently researching.

It then posts whatever photos, posts, blogs or links the people in your social network have posted on your topic. An added feature allows your friends photos that relate to your topic to be published.

In a major update, Google has almost completely overhauled the Social Search network. The company has added Twitter, Flickr, and Quora to its servers, integrating all the information available on all those websites into one place. Now Social Search results will appear anywhere in the listing according to search relevance. Annotations will let you know when someone from your social circle has posted any kind of information relevant to your search, and on which website it was posted.

Mashable weighs in on Google’s Social Search by adding:

The first major change is that Google Social Search results will no longer appear only at the bottom of the page, but will instead be “blended” throughout the page. This is done through an annotation system that lets you know when a friend has shared a specific link or search result. If your friend writes a blog about how to create honey, that result will have an annotation that your friend has “shared this,” either via Google or through one of Google’s three major social integrations.

If you want to give Greplin a try I have 5 invites to give to the first five people who leave a comment.

What does it all mean? I leave that open to you for interpretation. As we go further into 2011, it will be interesting to see if Facebook continues it’s slow dominance of all social network traffic.

If you look at what the Top 10 Social Networking Websites at this time last year were, you’ll notice Myspace still having a 20% share of the marketplace. A year later they are scrapping for traffic and survival in the social media space.

Top 10 Social Networking Websites – 2009

Top 10 Social Networking Websites – 2010

The growth that Facebook has achieved in under 7 years has been incredible and to think that there are now more than half a billion users, is impressive to say the least. When we think of Facebook we typically think of users based in the United States (narcissistic, I know), but the growth of this top social networking site has been a global phenomenon.

Facebook’s current user base is more than 1.6 times the size of the entire US population. You’ve all heard by now that “If Facebook were a country, it’d be second only to China and India” but when you take a look at the Facebook economy, today’s valuation of the social network is over $10 billion dollars.

Top 10 Countries on Facebook

From Pingdom:

Since we don’t have actual user numbers and demographics from Facebook itself (only Facebook has those), we looked at per-country traffic estimates to Facebook.com. The result is quite interesting. (We used data from Google Ad Planner, which provides traffic stats for a large number of sites.)

Facebook’s international expansion is well under way, and it’s arguably the largest and most wide-spread social network that ever existed. As Facebook grows on a global level, the current US dominance of the social network will gradually diminish and become more similar to the general distribution of Internet users.

• The United States alone accounts for almost 24% of Facebook’s users.
• The United States has 4.6 times as many Facebook users as the second-largest country on Facebook, the United Kingdom.
• The top 10 countries on Facebook account for almost 58% of its users.

Best States for Business 2010

In Chief Executive’s annual survey of best and worst states for business, conducted earlier this year, 651 CEOs across the U.S. again gave Texas top honors, closely followed by North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. They gave the booby prize for worst state to California, with New York, Michigan, New Jersey and Massachusetts filling out the bottom five-a line-up virtually unchanged from last year. Florida and Georgia each dropped three places in the ranking, but remain in the top 10. Utah jumped six positions this year to sneak into the top 10 at No. 9.

The business leaders were asked to draw upon their direct experience to rate each state in three general categories: taxation and regulation, quality of workforce and living environment. Within each category respondents graded states in five subcategories, as well as ranking each in terms of its importance to the respondent and how individual states measure up.

From Chief Executive:

Texas fares competitively with Nevada and Delaware in terms of taxation and regulatory environment, but scored best overall, in no small measure because of the perception that its government’s attitude to business is ideal. Runner-up North Carolina edged Texas slightly in its living environment, but scored somewhat below the Lone Star state in terms of government attitude to business and work ethic, which is a sine qua non for the business leaders. After employee work ethic, CEOs most highly prize lower tax rates and perceived attitudes toward business, followed by living environment considerations, such as real estate costs and education.

Lone Star Leader

By contrast, Texas, the second-most populous state and the world’s 12th largest economy, is where 70 percent of all new U.S. jobs have been created since 2008. Unsurprisingly, it scores high in all the areas CEOs value most. “You feel like state government understands the value of business and industry to create jobs and growth,” observed one CEO.

Southern Smarts

With 6 of the top 10 states for business located in the South: North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Florida, Georgia and South Carolina rounding out the top 10, its clear that the main categories examined: Cost of Doing business, Workforce, Quality of Life, Economy, Transportation & Infrastructure, Technology & Innovation, Education, Business Friendliness, Access to Capital and Cost of Living are indications that we have it all.

America’s Top States for Business 2010

CNBC Also completed a special rankings report on America’s Top States for Business 2010 – They scored all 50 states—using publicly available data—on 40 different measures of competitiveness. States received points based on their rankings in each metric. Then, they separated those metrics into the ten broad categories, with input from business groups including the National Association of Manufacturers. They weighted the categories based on how frequently each is cited in state economic development marketing materials.

Maybe I’m biased because I have been living in the South for over a decade, but having visited 8 of the top 10 states (Utah & Colorado excluded) I can say without bias that North Carolina (Charlotte in particular) is a great location for entrepreneurs as I was able to start my own social media agency in this area in 2007 and have found great success not only for my business but for also the clients I do work with in the region.

Please leave a comment below as I’m interested to hear about your experiences in business and whether or not the regional landscape depicted where you founded or relocated your company.

(Image Credits: Tonyshi)

As Danny Brown commented on last month’s statistics:

The trouble with these stats (not yours but Compete and similar) is that they only take into account Twitter’s own API. It’s hardly used by the majority. Instead, it’s via smartphones and third-party apps by the likes of Seesmic and Tweetdeck. Gather that information and you’d have a far different graph, at least for Twitter.

I’ve searched Hubspot, Compete, Quantcast and others to find this data but to no avail, so this chart will have to do.

(Image via MarketingCharts)

Having a hard time coming up with that next blog post to publish?

Try social news aggregators. These websites are extremely helpful mashups of relevant feeds from social websites, popular blogs and news sources.

Most of the content on social media aggregators are freshly pulled from a wide variety of sources and can be a fountain of inspiration for anyone who is tired of blogging about the same things everyday.

The following news aggregators can be used daily/hourly to generate fresh and relevant content for your blog. Most news aggregators and meme trackers have search bars so this is the first place you want to start. Beginning with a search for you relevant keywords is the fastest way to come up with content ideas, and prevents you from being distracted by other material.

Once you find an article in your niche, make sure to add your own original take on the article so you won’t be contributing to the echo chamber.

Top 5 Sites for Social Media News Aggregation

1) PopURLS

One of my favorite social news aggregators on the web. This site replaces other online resources such as: Reddit, Del.icio.us and Digg. A one page scroll-friendly social news website that shows just the headlines and also includes news feeds from Google & Yahoo, videos from Metacafe and Youtube as well as blog posts from popular blogs like Boing Boing, this aggregation site is not to be missed.

2) Techmeme

My tech news site of record, these guys cover topics specific to the industry as a whole. If you are looking for breaking tech news this is the site for you. Techmeme arranges all of these links into a single, easy-to-scan page. Story selection is accomplished via computer algorithm extended with direct human editorial input. From Ars Technica to ZDNet these guys cover the spectrum for tech news.

3) Alltop

Displaying all the top headlines from popular topics around the web, Alltop Co-founder Guy Kawasaki has created a platform different from a search engine, The purpose of Alltop is to help you answer the question, “What’s happening?” in “all the topics” that interest you. They do this by collecting the headlines of the latest stories from the best sites and blogs that cover a topic of your choice. They then group these collections — “aggregations” — into individual web pages. Then display the five most recent headlines of the information sources as well as their first paragraph.

4) Buzzfeed

BuzzFeed Tracks the Web’s Obsessions in Real Time. Featuring topics from the outrageous video that’s about to go viral, an obscure subculture breaking into the mainstream, a juicy bit of gossip that everyone at the office will be talking about tomorrow, or an ordinary guy having his glorious 15-minutes of fame. This site feels more like a magazine including all the fluff, but the “Just Launched” section will get your creative juices flowing.

5) Google Reader Play

A newcomer to the scene Google Reader Play is a new way to read popular articles and an interesting interface for browsing web pages. “In Google Reader Play, items are presented one at a time, and each item is big and full-screen. After you’ve read an item, just click the next arrow to move to the next one, or click any item on the filmstrip below to fast-forward. Of course, you can click the title or image of any item to go to the original version. And since so much of the good stuff online is visual, we automatically enlarge images and auto-play videos full-screen,” explains Google.

The Google Blog points out that Google Reader Play doesn’t show your subscriptions. It only shows a list of recommended pages and Google uses your actions (starring, liking or sharing items) to improve the recommendations. If you want to read your subscriptions in Google Reader Play, use this URL:

http://www.google.com/reader/play/#stream

Do you use any of these social news aggregators or know of any other excellent social news websites that I’ve missed out?

Post your comments and let me know other aggregator websites you use for news aggregation. If you like this blog you can Subscribe my blog feed. You can also Follow me on Twitter.

Last year was my first exposure to the Social Media Success Summit Virtual Conference and I must say it was well worth it. This year I wanted to continue posting the keynote tweets from other marketers who were in attendance.

Guy is the co-founder of Alltop, a managing director of Garage Technology Ventures (an early-stage venture capital firm) and a columnist for Entrepreneur Magazine. Previously, he was an Apple Fellow at Apple. Guy is the author of nine books including Reality Check, The Art of the Start, Rules for Revolutionaries, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy, Selling the Dream, and The Macintosh Way.

Are you using Twitter to promote your business? Are you looking to create a large and raving fan base? If you answered ‘yes,’ you need to listen carefully to Guy Kawasaki. Guy is an entrepreneur, the co-founder of Alltop and has 218,000 Twitter followers. In this session guy revealed how he uses Twitter as a marketing super weapon and shared some of his tricks and tips. He’ll also gave a guided tour of how major brands use Twitter.

Tonight’s keynote by Kawasaki: “How to use Twitter as a marketing super weapon” was captivating indeed. Here are some of my favorite tweet crumbs from the stream during the call, I tried to keep them in chronological order. If you attended I would love to her your thoughts on the presentation.

If you are new to social media marketing, make sure to follow the rest of this conference here: http://wthashtag.com/Smss10

Would you believe that in this day and age of social commerce and instant payments, eCommerce only accounts for 5% of all retail sales? Because e-commerce is so big and still growing, it’s easy to forget that e-commerce is actually a very very small part of actual commerce in the United States.

Less Than 5% Of Purchases Happen Online

The infographic created by Milo; a startup that checks the inventory of real world stores to tell you whether products are in stock or not, points out that: The Bulk of Shopping Still Takes Place in Store.

It’s hard to believe it, but it’s true–less than 5% of retail sales are actually done online! The rest still happen on Main Street, at the mall, and at the big-box retailer down the road. So how does the Internet come in handy? It’s perfect for doing research before you hit the road so you know exactly what you want and where to get it.

With the Internet turning 25 year’s old this month, It’s good to know that there still lies a tremendous opportunity for people to sell items online.