static4Tools: Alan Wolk writes an opinion piece for Brandweek that rightly says widgets too often resemble the old way of thinking about advertising, in that the product being marketed gets in the way of the message. The best widgets are those that are fun for the user and actually do something interesting ASIDE FROM marketing the product or brand.

Metrics: When it comes to video marketing efforts it’s a mistake to look to old metrics to define success. While substitutions for those metrics are still being fleshed out, it’s important to look at brand engagement and such to gauge the success of your campaign.

About half of marketers aren’t using analytics at all to measure their online campaigns and many of those that are are using multiple platforms, something that can lead to confusing conclusions.

Social Media: If you’re just beginning with social media Matt Dickman recommends you spend at least two hours a day listening, engaging and discovering and then expand from there as you feel you can or want to.

David Griner shares a slideshow on social media marketing he presented to a trade group recently that’s filled with good nuggets of wisdom, both anecdotal and in the form of hard statistics.

Email, social networking and SEO are the three common themes hit in the MarketingSherpa report outlined here.

The list of companies who are tops in terms of social media executions according to Abrams Research shouldn’t surprise anyone.

Fantastic chart of how many PR agencies who are promoting themselves as being social-media savvy are engaging in social media themselves.

Demographics: Wii is more popular among women and young children but not hard-core gamers. Xbox360 tends to attract those looking for additional features like social interaction and movie downloading. Playstation3 is most likely to be owned by the same people who bought previous versions. All this and more here.

Media: Nielsen has released its report on how the top 15 newspaper websites did as measured by unique visitors in 2008.

Advertising: Yahoo has begun introducing video and image ads in search results. Yahoo has long counted on their image ad abilities to keep them afloat, which makes me wonder why it took this long to get this rolled out.