Sprinkles from around the web: Interesting links 5/07-5/13/10

Interesting links I found around the web. Apparently, I had a very tech-heavy reading list this week.

Fandom

• Darth Vader vs. a Unicorn. How can this not be awesome?

• SNL Hosted by Betty White. Run, don’t walk, to watch this. Hilarious. “I haven’t had a cherry in my muffin since 1939.” What a dirty, awesome old woman Betty is.

Political

• That’s Gay: Faking It. How faking being gay is offensive, an explanation which uses a montage of TV shows in which characters have pretended to be gay. Brilliant.

Technology

• 30 SEO Problems & the Tools to Solve Them. A great list of tools, both free and paid, to use with SEO work.

• Determine Your Facebook Page’s Value. A new company called Virtue is measuring how much money your Facebook fan page is worth.

• Does Facebook Really Want a Semantic Web? How Facebook’s lack of web standards, even when it comes to their own apps, is not helping move toward a semantic web.

• Facebook Privacy: A Bewildering Tangle of Options. A very interesting infograph on all the choices one has for privacy on Facebook.

• Finding Gaps and Opportunities: Step 3 of the 8-Step SEO Strategy. A good technique on identifying long-tail terms based on one desired keyword and opportunities.

• Firefox 4 Plans: Faster, Friendlier, More Secure. It looks like they’re finally tackling the memory-eating problem Firefox has.

• REVEALED: How Today’s Twitter Bug Was First Discovered. Make anyone follow you on Twitter. Oprah won at following the most new people due to this bug.

• Translate That French Menu With Your Android Phone And Google Goggles. I can’t wait to use this in a restaurant where the menus not in English and impressing everyone.

• Why the Fashion Industry Loves Foursquare

As more fashion brands start to use location-based services like Gowalla and Foursquare to drive online customers into retail locations, it’s important to remember that location-based marketing efforts can and should be used to accomplish more than one marketing goal. Brands should strive to not only engage customers, but to enhance their shopping experiences.

• WordPress 3.0: The 5 Most Important New Features. I’m rather looking forward to the changes as I’ve been planning on doing a makeover on this blog for a while.

Writing

• Fan Fiction: It’s What’s for Dinner. If you missed it, author Diana Gabaldon goes off on fan fiction writers. In fact, she accuses them of raping her family members, err characters. Author Chuck Wendig explains why people writing fan fiction about your stories is an awesome problem to have.