Analysts and researchers are constantly studying how and why we all spend our time online, and how many hours of days—our lives, really—are spent surfing the net, viewing and reading content, buying, and interacting.

It’s a tremendous amount of needed information when you think about it—either socially, commercially, ethnographically, and politically, such studies are used and are useful to various organizations, brands, and entities, and where there is a need, there will be those enterprising companies that will provide for it.

Such is the case with San Mateo-based Integrated Media Measurement Inc. The company has launched a next generation media measurement platform to monitor consumer behavior across televisions, PCs, netbooks, and mobile devices. The company has been issued a U.S. patent for its proprietary mobile media monitoring and measurement platform, which uses an audio matching technology to passively gather data about panelists’ media consumption…

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The creative process has its own meaning and function for everyone. There is a general structure we like to adhere to, but almost every design problem we face presents a new issue to work against. It’s exciting to tackle these brain teasers and see the possibilities that come forth after getting lost in the problem for a while. As some of this tinkering is unavoidable, the creative process can’t be avoided for too long or nothing will ever get done. As far as interactive design goes, one of the first things that happens once we’ve opened Fireworks or Photoshop is setting up a grid. READ MORE

Feeling nostalic and analogue, the days a large arcade games, Texas Instruments and 3×5 floppy disks with 20 kb? Sure, we can all use some fun and games this season, which is why Infogrames Entertainment’s old school v-game label Atari — remember Atari, kids? – is relaunching Atari.com as a free arcade portal.

That’s right — log on and play, once again,  “Asteroids,” “Battlezone,” “Lunar Lander” or “Yars Revenge” to your heart’s content while the company markets geek-tested merchandise and more current console games like “Ghostbusters: The Video Game” and the MMMO game “Champions Online.”

Hear those classic 1980s sounds of a triangle blasting away floating rocks!  What looks low buget, written in C+ and no color was, back in the day, considered high tech genius game coding.

We’ve all come a long way, and yet…these games are still fun as heck to play.

Or…head over to Adult Swim’s web site and for a little twisted holiday cheer – they have a Christmas-themed version of its hit zombie game.

ISM: a community project is a non-profit “inspiring innovative interaction and conversation both online and offline,” which is why Ninthlink is happy to have been working with them for a few years now. Ever since Craig’s initial designs manifested themselves, there was the idea floating around of how rad it would be to get artists to contribute backgrounds for the ISMcommunity.org site. Now that we finally had a few minutes to spare leading up to this holiday weekend, I was able to implement the first round of backgrounds, provided to ISM by Aaron Jasinski, which just a little bit of pre-Thanksgiving goodness. READ MORE

There’s some cool changes over at YouTube, folks, and it makes the world of online video even more accessible to the masses.  Accessibility is everything!

An automatic captioning/subtitling feature, once only available to a few educational partners, will soon be available to YouTube’s general audience. Choose “transcribe audio” from the captioning menu of any video and you’ll be able to use Google’s speech recognition software to place captions or subtitles at the bottom of the screen so that viewers who are hearing impaired can follow along. READ MORE

Over the past week and a half, I had the privilege of building out a WordPress site to support Adidas Golf’s Wear In The World endeavor. The design is based off the flash site at www.adidasgolf.com, but translated in to html to allow the two most lucky Adidas employees / contest winners to get their blog on as they travel the glove to five of the most exotic golf locations. READ MORE

After spending the past … 7? months working in Drupal, I found myself thrust back in to the wonderful world of Wordpress. And now that the dust is settling at least a little bit, after cranking out what seems like 5 sites since the start of November, I am able to look back and truly appreciate some of the goodness from this open source community. While its not (yet?) as easy (for me) to accomplish some of the heavy-lifting that Drupal lends itself to, I think what WordPress is is a nice clean user-friendly Content Management Solution, pretty much right out of the box. And for even more functionality soon after it comes out of that box, here is my list of Three Plugins that I couldn’t live without. READ MORE

All the News Fit for the LCD Screen

Critics of how people use the internet to access information initially balked at the idea of paying for news access on the web.  Why would anyone fork over money when the free flow of news items can be found in any number of free avenues?

However, a new survey from The Boston Consulting Group contends the notion of charging for news online may actually fly with many online users. The amount news-savvy peeps are willing to pay differed by country. BCG’s findings show that the average monthly amount that consumers would be willing to pay ranges from $3 in the United States and Australia to $7 in Italy…

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With the sluggish economy still an uncertainty, and banks slowly getting back into the credit-giving mode, one might think there would be a lull in funding for new internet brands and ideas…factoring in that the jury’s still out on whether or not social networking applications can trulybreak through and generate profitable sponsorship revenue.

But one would have another think coming.  From what we’ve seen lately, the venture capitalists are making bold moved and the money is flowing in the millions…

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In 2010, Coca-Cola as created a campaign to launch “Happiness Ambassadors” throughout the globe to visit 206 countries in 365 days. Ninthlink loves this stuff as it reinforces our new offerings of getting clients engaged in “Ethnographic” research and cultural projects. What makes this such a cool project is that the mission of this campaign is to “find out what makes people happy”.