Adobe has released an update to Flash 9 that allows it to play HD video. This has been a long time coming and allows Flash to go places that other vendors have yet to reach yet. Being able to watch HD video on the web is a huge step forward for Netflix, Vongo, MovieLink, CinemaNow and others. Hopefully Adobe’s push forward with high definition video will increase interest in the subject and improve the availability of legitimate video services on the internet.

Currently most of those sites only offer old and very bad B movies for watching online. Which of course makes it a less viable option. The original press release can be found from Adobe. You can upgrade your current flash player over here from Adobe also.

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I came across a cool little web site that will count the number of tags that you have for a given page. It will tell you how many divs, h1, h2, h3, spans and more you have on your site. It will also tell you if you have any that are not closed. Not exactly a useful tool but an interesting time waster click.

Random, I know.

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Back in April, A List Apart did a survey of web designers and asked them questions about their jobs to get a better idea of the web industry as a whole. There were some interesting finds in the survey. It seems that 60% of freelance web designers make under $20,000 a year.

It also found that there are a lot of older people in the field that still refer to themselves as Webmasters.

At any rate I don’t consider myself much of a data-nut but I thought all the graphs in their PDF were very interesting. All of the different titles that people give themselves web director, creative director, web designer, web developer, information architect, etc.

Anyway, I can’t wait to compare next year’s data with this years and see what has changed. I also hope that I’m part of the % that are making over $100,000 a year.

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It looks like the popular user published news site, Newsvine has been acquired by MSNBC. The site which launched in March of 2006 and now receives millions of page views a month. Currently the Newsvine team consists of 6 people. Newsvine had raised $1.5 million in capitol before it had been bought out. The figures of exactly how much the purchase price were haven’t been released, some speculate that it was as high as $54 million. This news is groundbreaking as of yesterday. The deal, however, was finalized on Friday, October 5th 2007. Mike Davidson the co-founder of the news service has detailed the release of this information on his blog.

Apparently it has been in the works for a few months now and the deal was finally at the point to make it public. You can find out more over at Mike Industries, on Newsvine , TechCrunchor even on the MSNBC web site about it.

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A lot of sites went pink last year to show their support for breast cancer awareness. This year there are over 500 web sites that have signed up on the Pink for October web site. I’ve obviously joined the crowd and intent on keeping my site pink for all of October to show my support.

If you have a web site you should also. No, really. Go now. Do it.

(update: i fixed the link, apparently I was linking to myself.)

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The birthday giveaway for the Problogger site is giving away $54,000 worth of cash and prizes to readers. There are simply small tasks you have to complete to qualify for some of the prizes.

This website birthday thing seems to be growing in popularity, where a website will turn 1 or 2 and celebrate by sponsors giving away donated prizes . At any rate, check it out over at Problogger.

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I found a great article today from Molly Holzschlag about split brain theory and the day-to-day lives of web designers. I found another gem at David Airey’s blog about following logo design trends. He asks his readers whether they follow any trends in logo design. I of course believe it is impossible to ignore any design trends.

I found a great article on blogging from ProBlogger and their guest speaker Kelly Phillips Erb, who talks about tax deductions that bloggers overlook at tax time. This article can be helpful for anyone that counts blogging as part of their business.

My last article that I want to spread for this week comes from SEOMoz about the importance in understanding that a link is just a link when it comes to SEO. Summarized, the article stresses the importance that one bad link isn’t going to kill you.

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LinkedIn, the professional social networking tool is said to be adding photos to its network on Friday. The social networking software for the professional industry has had a very conservative point of view in the past. However, recently Facebook has become very popular amongst industry professionals because of its less locked down approach.

LinkedIn has decided to go ahead and allow 1 photo per a user. Currently the network reports it has 14 million users and adds 250,000 new users every week. There are also reports of the service opening up its API to developers to custom design widgets inside and outside of the social networking service.

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It looks like the New York Times finally realized that charging for content is an out dated practice. They recently have opened up their archived news articles to the public. It has taken them awhile but I’m glad to see they have finally come to their senses on the matter.

I know this doesn’t seem like much news to those of you that don’t read the NY Times but it is a sign of the times. As some of the old media sites start to completely move to advertising based models you have to ask yourself what the next step is going to be.

There is always the fear that advertising is going to go further then it already is as far as intrusiveness goes. It is not that I am against advertising at all. It is quite the opposite, just curious to see the next phase in advertising that is going to keep all of the old and new media sites making money.

At any rate, I’ve got 100 years worth of back-dated stories to read.

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Check out FreelanceSwitch and take their Freelance survey. They are offering some cool prizes that will be awarded randomly. They intend on using the results to formulate a basic idea of the freelance community as a whole. They will provide the results publicly to everyone once they have commenced the survey.

I took it, it is quick and easy nothing too complicated to answer. I had some trouble with the how much profit I have at the end of the year thing. Which is just because I consider profit money left over after I buy all the cool things I want. Which was 0.

Take the freelance survey, it is easy and productive.

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