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If you’re curious why we here at thinks take such a bullish outlook on the mobile, social, local web, here’s a simple answer. Clive Thompson points to a technology survey from Amherst College that shows 1% of first-year students have landlines while 99% have Facebook accounts. Sure, the folks in Thompson’s article are college freshman and may not reflect your customers today. But, their behaviors represent what we’re likely to see from this demographic throughout their lives, and also how those around them likely will change.

One example:

“Students in the class of 2012 who registered computers, IPhones, game consoles, etc. on the campus network by the end of the day on August 24th, the day they moved into their dorm rooms: 370 students registered 443 devices.”

That’s 85% of the students registering about 1.2 devices each to connect to the Internet. Laptops, iPhones, game consoles. And 99% of these kids had Facebook accounts. They live their lives on the web. And they have the tools to do it.

What does this mean? For one thing, it means your customers increasingly won’t be looking up your business in the (print) Yellow Pages. In the spirit of being “fair and balanced,” it’s worth looking at the comments in Chris Silver Smith’s critique of Yellow Pages usage stats and Ed Reese’s excellent SuperPages case study at Mihmorandum before deciding what to do about online Yellow Pages advertising. Still, notice how Idearc (publisher of SuperPages) has bought domains like Localsearch.com and Switchboard.com. They’re convinced something’s changing. Given their past connection to Verizon, it seems like they’d know.

The point here is that the ways your customers find you and reach you have are changing. First it was the phone book. Then the PC-based web. And now the mobile web is on the horizon. The great thing is you can account for those last two by following a series of best practices.

So. What are you waiting for?

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Apart from the U.S. financial system melting down, the big news this week was all about mobile. Mashable thinks the Google G1 is a game-changer. We’re confident they’re right. For one thing, this is as close to a computer (as an extensible platform) we’ve seen in a phone so far. So, has Google’s G1 broken the last barrier? Will the mobile web explode next week? Probably not. But it’s not so far off for many folks, either. Here’s what has to happen:

• First, bandwidth has to get cheaper. And that’s not likely to happen. Not right away, anyway. Judy Breck at Smart Mobs notes,
  

  “the spectacular increase of data use on smartphones — the industry’s “dream come true” — is creating a need to moderate consumer use”

• Om Malik picks up the ball with insightful reasons why mobile networks cost more for less
• Second, more applications have to appear. Customers increasingly use their phones for data access, music and other services. And some truly useful services are on the way. Things like mobile payment services from Billing Revolution, Zong, and Opobay. Never heard of them? That’s OK. Visa and Chase are testing mobile payment, too. Maybe you’ve heard of them. Once customers have easier ways to pay for things (like Amazon’s TextBuyIt), expect a big jump in adoption of the mobile web.
• Other applications that may spur usage include mobile barcode readers within phones. But, as Frommer rightly points out,
  

  “Getting something like mobile barcodes to work requires buy-in from a lot of parties.”

• Finally, we need mobile-friendly pages. David at mobiThinking.com offers suggestions on how to build them. Worth a look.

That’s it for this week folks. Hope your mattress is sufficiently lined with small bills as we wait out another week of Wall Street whiplash (or, better yet, large bills). But, as the saying goes, that which doesn’t kill us, makes us stronger. So, get strong. Get ready. And go get ‘em.

Are you getting enough value out of your small business website? Want to make sure you’re ready for the mobile, social, local web? Subscribe to thinks today and get more than the news. Get understanding.

Hmm… let’s see… any big stories in the news this week? Lots? And all about the mobile web? Cool. What’s going on?

First, we had the release of Google’s first mobile phone earlier this week. Now Opera has released its latest State of the Mobile Web report. The most interesting stat for me:

“Mobile Web users spend a significant amount of time browsing less popular Web pages in addition to the most popular ones…in general… they are accessing the full Web, including niche sites that do not individually generate massive amounts of traffic.”

The report continues,

“This is in direct contrast to WAP browsers, where the content available to users is limited by the confines of the “walled gardens” within which users are forced to stay. As users get more comfortable with the idea of browsing the full Web on their handsets, we expect that the Long Tail of the Web visited by Opera Mini users will continue to grow, both in each country and globally.”

Admittedly, in down economies (what, you thought mobile news was the only thing going on this week?), you’re best playing to your core strengths, avoiding short-lived fashions, generally not taking big risks. At the same time, ensuring you have a presence on the web - and increasingly that means the mobile web - must be a core strength.

How do you know you’re ready for the mobile web? Check out thinks’ past coverage of the mobile web and e-commerce, for one.

Tip o’ the hat (thinks-ing cap?) to ReadWriteWeb for the original link to the story.

Are you getting enough value out of your small business website? Want to make sure you’re ready for the mobile, social, local web? Subscribe to thinks today and get more than the news. Get understanding.

Obviously, we here at thinks are bullish on the potential for the mobile web. And, it’s no secret Google is too. What impressed me most, of course, is Google’s observations “…mobile phones are more prevalent than cars (about 800 million registered vehicles in the world) and credit cards (only 1.4 billion of those)“.

Google wants to add to those numbers. To do so, it’s launching its first Android phone, the G1, today. London’s Telegraph newspaper (How ironic is that? 2 obsolete technologies for the price of one) offers a preview of what the G1 must do to unseat the iPhone.

The point here isn’t that you need to worry about which phone is newest, hippest, coolest. The point is the mobile web is here. It’s more common every day. How can you be ready? Make sure you’ve got a website. Make it findable, browsable, reachable. Follow standards. That’s a good start. Don’t worry about being too far in front if you address these items today. They’ll help you in both the PC-based and mobile web. Because, as we’re learning, they’re increasingly the same thing.

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Stowe Boyd points out Twitter redesigned their site somewhere in the last week. Whether this spurs more usage among your customers remains to be seen. But, wouldn’t you like to know what’s going on there - and elsewhere in the social sphere - for your brand? Here are three excellent overviews wo help you find out:

• Chris Brogan suggests “Five Tools I Use for Listening”
• Dave Fleet provides a “How to Set Up a Simple Online Monitoring System” tutorial.
• CPN Marketing Blog offers “10 Steps to Tracking Your Social Reputation.”

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OK, fancy folks might prefer “distributed intelligence.” But why worry about semantics? Gobs of knowledge exists out there about everything. It’s all available, often for free. Whether it’s asking experts on LinkedIn or tweeting tutors on Twitter, MIT’s OpenCourse or capturing context through Zemanta, the Interwebs put immense amounts of information at your fingertips. Here are 15 tools I use almost daily for keeping on top of the World Wide Web of information.

1. RSS feeds. I couldn’t live without them. But getting through a few hundred feeds requires time - or tools that make it easy to sort, search, scan and skip. I particularly like NetNewsWire as my main newsreader, but also make heavy use of Google Reader. Why? Because of a cool trick Steve Rubel demonstrates to help you become a “knowledge management ninja.” It’s the single best way to stay on top of things.
2. Twitter and Summize. Longtime readers know I think Twitter rocks. But what if you don’t have time to engage in conversation there every day? Or if you just need to know what’s buzzing there? That’s where Summize (now owned by Twitter) comes into play. Set up searches for terms you care about, subscribe to feeds for those results and you’re immediately in the know.
3. Blog search feeds. Just as with Summize, I subscribe to a series of blog search feeds using IceRocket, Regator and Technorati. Plug in your favorite search terms, subscribe to the feeds and you’re off to the races.
4. Wikipedia. While academics have mixed views of Wikipedia, it always offers a strong jumping off point to find detailed information. If the results leave you with more questions, explore the links within its footnotes for deeper context.
5. Google. Um, yeah. You’re likely familiar.
6. Flickr. Need an image? Check out Flickr. Seth Godin even suggests a cool tip for finding commercially useful photos on Flickr. For free. Cool beans.
7. Thesaurus.com and Dictionary.com. No, I don’t know another word for “thesaurus.” But if one existed, you’d find it in these useful online guides.
8. LinkedIn, Especially LinkedIn’s excellent Answers section. Sure, I use LinkedIn as an online Rolodex. But being able to ask people I know and trust and the people they know and trust for advice and opinions is an enormous benefit.
9. IMDB.com and Baseball-Reference.com. OK, it can’t be work all the time. These two reference tools help me find out not only who played the fearsome Yankees slugger Heywood in “Major League” (Peter Vuckovich), but whether he, too, was a “Wild Thing” (Vuckovich, in real life a Cy Young award-winning pitcher, threw 46 wild pitches in 11 seasons). See? Fun and useful.
10. SEO tools. A big part of my job depends on sites showing up in search engines. 3 tools help make sure that happens: SEOmoz, Wordtracker and Google’s Keyword Tool. For real.
11. Quantcast and Compete. Absolutely invaluable for inexpensive competitive research.
12. Del.icio.us. Whether you prefer the old style del.icio.us URL or the new delicious.com, Delicious makes for one tasty treat (Sorry. Couldn’t help myself). Lame jokes aside, after Google, it’s my personal favorite search engine. And, just like the Twitter and blog searches above, subscribe to RSS feeds for key tags and the search results come to you.
13. News aggregators. Everyone has a favorite, whether Google News, Memeorandum , what-have-you. Me? I like Hacker News.
14. The Economist. I don’t read too many magazines these days (something’s got to give). But I do read the Economist regularly to get its perspective on the world at large. Bonus: their online style guide is must-read for anyone developing style guides, especially for companies doing business around the world. And on the web, that’s everybody.
15. You. Emails, tweets, comments, etc. all help me understand things more broadly and more deeply every day. I learn as much from the people around me (online and offline) as any other source.

Those are my top 15 tools. But, I’m sure I missed something useful. What helps you search, sort and scan the Web? Tell us about it in the comments below.

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