Oh reader, where have you been? Social networking has made the art of finding the perfect gift oh, so much easier. Check out these great networks:

ShopWiki is another community based wiki – all about products. It’s a good resource for quick background and price information on a wide-range of items. Prepare to waste some time here! It’s fun to explore…

Crowdstorm is where you make better-informed purchase decisions based on the crowd’s advice and recommendations.

ThisNext is real recommendations from real people.

Kaboodle is a social shopping community where people discover, recommend and share products. Kaboodle’s powerful shopping tools allow people to organize their shopping through lists, discover new things from people with similar style, get discounts on popular products and find best prices. It works because it has over 2 million monthly visitors!

Etsy is a social marketplace for handmade items. The selection of items and active community contribute well to the overall shopping experience. Check it out for unique handmade art, jewelery and much more.

Wishpot allows you to easily create product wish-lists and share them with the community. Add items while you surf. Shop from the site. Really cool is the mobile integration so you can add items to your list from your cell phone, or take a photo of an item and add it that way.

Buzzilions is one of our favorites. It’s a a shopping review site based on reviews real buyers. It’s easy and intuitive. We like the search engine and the tag-like method for drilling down.

Osoyou has personalized product suggestions and other elements of social shopping. Drag and Drop stuff. Explore. It’s fun. It’s still pretty new, but we like it.

And if you just want a deal, check out:

Woot

Woot provides you with one product daily for sale, and people in the forums participate in active feedback and comparisons using the available product allowing you to make educated shopping decisions. The active community contributes to your shopping experience.

And Wendy swears by her RETAILMENOT extention on her Firefox. It shows whether there are coupons for any shopping site she comes to. Cool, huh?

Stealing music is a serious crime. But your daughter might be on the up-and-up. Read on.

Hitting the bigtime on college campuses – Ruckus\. Ruckus Network, Inc., the provider of a multimedia network that supplies free and legal music downloads specifically for college students. The website is…

LOUD!

Okay, that’s our age talking. But seriously…

On member campuses, students can access the Ruckus service anytime – on or off campus – to enjoy the full-featured music service. They can access the first, college-only service that blends social networking features with a massive and continuously expanding library of free, legal and safe music downloads. Ruckus has already proven successful at more than 120 colleges and universities across the country, including Brown University, Duke University, Georgia Tech, Indiana University, North Carolina State, Princeton University, University of California-Berkeley, the University of Denver, Penn State University and the University of Pennsylvania.

I’m sure there is no ulterior motives here. Righhhhttt……

But still.

Glad you asked.

There’s a new application called Who is Sick? It’s kind of neat. A little creepy? Maybe.

“Who Is Sick was started in 2006 with a mission to provide current and local sickness information to the public – without the hassle of dealing with hospitals or doctors. With a strong belief in the power of people and a faith that user generated content can be extremely valuable, our team set out to create an entirely new system for tracking and monitoring sickness information.”

All of a sudden, I feel a little under the weather.

The system needs to be more populated. I put in my sniffle symptoms and now it looks like an epidemic in my zip code!

You ARE full of questions! Or something… (hee hee)

Here goes:

Steve Rubel pointed out a report recently from Microsoft. It says that almost 75% of Blogger’s blogs are Spam Blogs or splogs. Yikes. That is a lot. And while the methodology is disputed by some, there is no arguing that there are a lot them – splogs, that is.

According to David Sifry (founder of Technorati) last October (new report in new format coming soon):

• Technorati is now tracking more than 57 Million blogs.
• Spam-, splog- and sping-fighting efforts at Technorati are paying dividends in terms of the reduction of garbage in our indexes, even if it does seem to impact overall growth rates.
• Today, the blogosphere is doubling in size approximately every 230 days.
• About 100,000 new weblogs were created each day, again down slightly quarter-over-quarter but probably due in part to spam fighting efforts.
• About 4% of new splogs get past Technorati’s filters, even if it is only for a few hours or days.
• There is a strong correlation between the aging and post frequency of blogs and their authority and Technorati ranking.
• The globalization of the blogosphere continues. Our data appears to show both English and Spanish languages are a more universal blog language than the other two most dominant language, Japanese and Chinese, which seem to be more regionally localized.
• Coincident with a rise in blog posts about escalating Middle East tensions throughout the summer and fall, Farsi has moved into the top 10 languages of the blogosphere, indicating that blogging continues to play a critical role in debates about the important issues of our times.

We believe that there are substantially more than 57 million blogs. A year ago, The Blog Herald said there were 200 million. Wow. But there are few new reports about this and, frankly, it’s just so hard to get accurate statistics when it changes by the minute and there is no one way to count.

How to find the good ones? Well, Technorati has a good tool. You do the search and then choose how much authority you want to filter by — little, none, a lot — and it narrows the search. We’ve found it to be very useful.

Or you could ask us. We’ll help you find the relevant blogs you need. The best way we’ve found is to use great search techniques to narrow and then read, read, read.

Genealogy and How – Daily blog of online genealogy records and databases
Genealogy Blog – Genealogy on the Internet :: Today and Everyday
Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter – The DAILY newsletter for genealogy consumers, packed with straight talk – hold the sugar coating – whether the vendors like it or not! Check…
RssGenealogy.com – Latest Genealogy News – One source for all the latest genealogy news
The Genealogy Guys Podcast – George G. Morgan and Drew Smith discuss genealogy! Their podcast is the longest-running, continuous genealogy podcast

Then, when you start reading the first one, Genealogy and How, you’ll see the blogroll is:

Dick Eastman
GenealogyBlog
GenealogyToday
RSS Genealogy
About Genealogy
Olive Tree
The Paper Trail
Ancestors at Rest
Family Bibles
Canadian Lib Genie
Family & Local Histories
Interment.net Blog
Death Records Blog

If you go to RSS Genealogy, you’ll find 63 feeds. Wow.

You get the picture. What takes time is figuring out which ones matter. Which are worth reading. But if you pick a trail and follow it, you are bound to find some interesting and worthwhile sites.

There are other ways to go about this, as well. You can find articles in trade publications, consumer magazines…even newspapers…that talk about respected blogs.

What you’ll find is that in any category, there are blogs that are linked to most often. These are worth checking out, for sure.

You can go to Alexa and see what the traffic is for specific blogs. If it’s wildly popular, check it out.

(And of course, there are many blog search engines and directories! So don’t get too tied down to Google. Some swear by Technorati, some Blogdigger. And some really interesting metasearches like Talk Digger. I bet we revisit that one soon – it’s really neat.)

So go crazy! And try not to get too distracted by all the interesting things you find off-topic!

One great place to start is The NewPR/Wiki’s CEO Blog List. Listed by country, this list is constantly updated.

You can check out the CEO Blog Watch blog…..

The Fortune 500 Business Blog Wiki… or the Fortune 500 Blog Project.