Finding myself in China over the holidays has severely limited my blogging options.  With all the restrictions to such sites as Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, along with Internet connection slower than a snail, makes it difficult indeed to blog.  Therefore I have decided to take few days off while enjoying the hospitality of my in-laws.

Interestingly there are few websites dedicated to help us learn new skills as the Internet is mostly populated by articles and wikis rather than tools that utilize the web to teach us. With all the studies out there on how we best adopt new knowledge, specialized websites could greatly increase our ability to learn from the comfort of our homes.

Now we all love seeing the most popular videos often as a link on Facebook or even as some hardcore users looking for them directly on YouTube or similar services. Compiling these videos in some meaningful way is not easy, especially if you take into account the appalling way both YouTube and Facebook display the history of your favorite ones. A new service called VodPod is a step in the right direction at least for the bloggers out there.

We have recently seen amazing increase in ways to share our opinions and commentary to the world. With Twitter and Facebook at the forefront we end up posting about most things we do and see, comment on what our friends are saying and distributing what we find on the Internet. There are however more ways to burden the world with our wisdom than the traditional ways of writing.

Now almost every website has been so kind to post the top YouTube videos of 2009 and clearly if only to take part I post them here as well.  However, I will also include further 5 YouTube Videos that I have come across during this year.

Haven't we all at one time or another planned a party or some sort of an event paid for by many? It often lands on one person to plan the whole thing, and in the end it becomes difficult to monitor who has paid for what.

We all think of ways to make our family and friends happy over the holidays (or I hope so) and one way is to compile a video with your photos with some nice music.

It is almost sad how the digital age of photography has turned mass production of wonderful photos into side notes on web pages. Though wonderful that almost everyone can now photograph their experiences, the value of a good photograph has somewhat dwindled as we flickr or Facebook through hundreds of photos.

Haven't we all at one time or another goggled subject in an effort to research a giving topic? There are surely countless tools out there that will make the experience more useful and provide the ability to extract an accurate result.

With the recent privacy changes on Facebook the question of our privacy on the internet is being asked on countless blogs and social networks. It is interesting how our personal world has gone from being few friends, family and coworkers to reaching out to thousands of people all over the globe. With websites like Facebook we are no longer bound to actually knowing our audience (in order to be heard), but rather to have something interesting to say.