I watched the launch live on one of NASA’s UStream clannels. At the time I tuned in there had been over 4 million views of the stream and there were 800+ of us watching the event at that moment.

The folks at NASA are committed to letting us know what they are doing. One glance at the text on the bottom of their UStream page gives an idea of how wide their reach to teach is.

They are also committed to connecting and communicating with both the scientific and non-scientific communities via social media. You can join their many circles on Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Gowalla and SlideShare. If you want to follow NASA through any, or all, of these services go to their connect page.

I kept open tabs with the Twitter and UStream conversations as the launch progressed. At least I tried to. The streams were moving very fast with comments and well wishes.

This is one of the many reasons I am such a fan of social networking. People from around the world came together to witness, converse and just plain share a momentous piece of history in real time. That couldn’t have happened five years ago.

The NASA Shuttle Program is in its 30^th year. Now the last bird has flown and the nostalgia begins.

One of my favorite tweets came from Dr. Wernher Von Braun @DrVonBraun, ‘Well NASA, if you wanted to make the world’s foremost rocket scientist cry, then you have succeeded.’

You can follow the four Atlantis astronauts on Twitter; Chris Ferguson @Astro_Ferg, Doug Hurley @Astro_Doug, Sandy Magnus @Astro_Sandy,  Rex Walheim @Astro_Rex.

Even though most of us have moved over to the digital world, some more willingly that others, the power and reach of the Internet in numbers seems almost unbelievable.

For example, the number of emails sent over the internet in 2010 was 107 trillion. This and a whole slew of other internet usage statistics was reported by Royal Pingdom, a web performance and monitoring service out of Sweden.

So what other interesting facts did they uncover?

1.    As of June 2010 there were 1.97 billion worldwide internet users – a 14% increase over the previous year

2.    The number of Tweets in 2010 – 25 billion

3.    The number of new Twitter users in 2010 – 100 million

4.    By the end of 2010 there were 600 million people on Facebook

5.    The number of new Facebook users – 250 million

6.    There are 20 million Facebook apps installed each day

7.    There are 2 billion videos watched on YouTube EVERY DAY

8.    35 hours of video is  uploaded to YouTube every minute

9.    As of September 2010 there were 5 billion photos hosted on Flickr

10. The per minute Flickr upload rate is 3000

To see the whole roundup of numbers head over to Pingdom.

“Sources said the San Francisco microblogging service is also adding two new board members: Flipboard’s Mike McCue and David Rosenblatt, whoran DoubleClick until a bit after it sold to Google” writes Kara Swisher from AllThingsD.

What will Twitter do with all of its new found wealth? One idea might be to figure out how to leverage its 175 million (and growing)  user base to make some money.

conditions including wearing an electric tag, a  daily call in to the police, a 10:00 pm curfew and surrender of his passport.

Unless you don’t give two hoots about the news you know the purpose of Wikileaks is to expose the secrets of governments worldwide, in particular those of the United States.

According to CBS news, “Assange will be staying with [Vaughn] Smith on his 650-acre estate in a Georgian Mansion, called Ellingham Hall leading many to label his current internment ‘mansion arrest’ over ‘house arrest’.

Assange has been declared both exhaulted hero and terrorist-villain. After his arrest a worldwide group of activists-anarchists calling themselves Anonymous disabled a number of large websites in support of Wikileaks and Assange. These sites included some biggies – Mastercard, Visa and Paypal each of which had denied services to Wikileaks’ contributors.

Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow sent a tweet on December 3rd declaring the first infowar had begun.

To that Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram says, Let’s Be Careful About Calling This a Cyber-War.

The Guardian’s Josh Hallidy and Matthew Weaver said, ‘Zuckerberg beat a string of notable personalities to the accolade – including WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange and the president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai. The 33 rescued Chilean miners and the rightwing US Tea Party movement were also named as runners-up,’

At 26, Zuckerberg is the second youngest to receive the nod from Time (Charles Lindbergh was 25). On his Facebook bio he states, ‘I’m trying to make the world a more open place.’ In doing so he has unleashed the ire of millions who accuse him of severe invasion of privacy. Still his gang of 500 million plus marches on with millions of ‘likes’ here and million ‘status updates’ there.

So was it wrong of Time to elect Zuckerberg as person of the year ‘for changing how we all live our lives’? Would Julian Assange have been a better choice? They are both certainly changing the world in mighty big ways. I’m just not too sure if it is for the better.

Once in a while though the little kid in me just jumps up and down for joy and say, ‘Looky, looky, LOOK!  This is soooooooooo cool!’

It happened to me when I started using Twitter and it happened again today when I previewed Qwiki.com. As is often the case, the site was introduced in a Mashable tweet (you may have seen it on Facebook as well) titled 5 New Online Services Perfect for Small Business. Four of the services were interesting, indeed but when I viewed the interview with Qwiki’s founder, Doug Imbruce, my Wow-ometer blew through the roof.

They label their service (software) as, ‘the world’s first information experience, powered by a technology that transforms static information into interactive stories.’

It is wiki-like in that its algorithm gathers great amounts of data stored on the internet and magically brings it together on the screen for searches on almost anything. And it is quick because it doesn’t depend on individual contributors to add content. Rather in a very sophisticated way it blends photos, videos, maps and animations along with text which is read to you in a pleasant female voice.

Qwiki.com is still young so we need to give it time to grow. But hot, dang it’s exciting and it could just turn out to be one of the best new search tools, er ‘information experiences’ of 2011.

I can’t do service to Qwiki by trying to explain it here. You just have to give it a whirl yourself. Do it!  Qwiki.com cuz it’s waaaaay cool!

For anyone who would like to know more about how the internet works but was afraid to ask there is a new shining light. It is a nifty interactive picture book titled 20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web. It is written in plain old English and adeptly explains how the web works, what cloud computing, cookies, phishing, malware and a host of other things are and why it is almost ok if a truck runs over your computer.By far the most important message it delivers though is this one -  ALWAYS UPGRADE TO THE LATEST VERSION OF YOUR BROWSER…words to live by.

If you give it a quick look through you might get an idea of what we do here at good old Asia Studio and why it is a bit more complicated than putting pretty pictures and words on a page.

Following Google’s announcement of Google Instant Preview last week, this week Yahoo announced that it is soon to introduce Yahoo Rich Search Assist. They are rolling out the beta version slowly and we don’t seem to be among the chosen who get to play with it in the early phases. So we will just have to wait and see. What we do know is these advancements in search are making the already slippery SEO slopes just a little bit slicker.

And last but not least Google is planning to change the way we shop for clothes. It has launched its very own fashion site Boutiques.com. It is at the intersection of sheek fashion geek super skill – a junction that rarely comes together.

On its blog Google explains, ‘The new website will be a personalized shopping experience that lets users to find and discover fashion goods, by creating their own curated boutique or through a collection of boutiques curated by taste-makers – celebrities, stylists, designers and fashion bloggers.’

In other words, as with all other things Google, they learn what you like and at least in theory they serve up results that match your preferences.

I’m sure Google is monetizing the heck out of this new offering. It is an interesting concept though, one that will be worth watching (probably a lot more worth watching for Google than for us ever so fashionable geeks.)

I’m one of those Twitterers who like to share links to meaningful content. That endeavor requires me to read articles, watch videos and look at photographs – lots of them. So during the day if a couple (or a couple hundred) potentially interesting emails flows into my inbox. I don’t delete them. not I leave them there for that magic time when I ‘will have time’ to read them. Regularly Outlook locks down my account with it’s threatening dialogue box, ‘Get the party back under control or its email jail for you toots.”

The clutter doesn’t end there though. I have been a big fan of the bookmarking site Del.icio.us for a long time. It is a great way for me to keep track of my favorite topics, writers, artists, techies, cooks, political pendants, marketers, comedians etc. Since I finally ‘GOT’ Twitter last summer my Del.icio.us account has ballooned in size the way I imagine I might if I lived in New Orleans (crayfish pie anyone?). I have bookmarked thousands of pages and my tags list is frightening in length.

And then there is my RSS feed reader. It used to house the downloads of a few dozen blogs. It was a manageable list. Last time I looked there were fifty four. They are all nicely organized in neat well titled folders. However most of the bloggers write at least once a day. Some of them crank out up to ten well thought out, thought provoking posts a day. I confess, it is RSS gluttony at its worst.

“At least it is all digital”, you might say. “You’re not polluting the environment with all of that unread material”. Wrong! Printouts, all smartly stapled and stacked go with me to the grocery store (hey, there might be a line), on road trips and to restaurants when I go for lunch appointments just in case the person I’m meeting is late or gets a better offer.

It’s sad I know. I have learned to stop listening to the scratching-scratching voices of the Keepers-of-the-Undone. These are the voices that used to drive my stress level smack into the red zone. Now there are just too many zombie citizens in the land of the Undone for the Keepers to track. Yes, it is clutter but I don’t ever have to scratch my head and say, ‘What should I tweet about today.”