You might be surprised at how much your nest egg has rebounded as the DJIA has climbed back above 10000, especially if you've got a healthy mix of stocks and bonds and you've continued to make new contributions.

Bacardi recently launched its latest campaign, called "Islands," which is poised to make a splash (pun intended) in the world of social media -- but in the end, what is the company trying to accomplish? Like any successful marketing campaign, a social media push should do two things: build the brand and sell more rum. The real question social marketers want to know is, how does Bacardi go about dropping a good amount of marketing money in social media and drive sales?

And, do big, consumer-facing businesses have even the slightest idea of how to synthesize the "information" provided to them by all of these newly empowered whiners? The answer to the first question is "yes." And to the second? No.

“The important takeaway for web developers in all of this is that WebKit is winning and that that is a good thing. The dynamics of the marketplace have thus far ensured that we don’t get “stuck” the way we did on the desktop. That is real progress.”

- Alex Russell on PPK’s recent Mobile WebKit study.

If self-regulating were entirely up to advertisers, that would be one thing - I'm normally a supporter of self-regulation. But in social media, as we've learned time and time again, the message is essentially out of advertisers' control.

Gnome 2.28 was released this week, and one of the more interesting changes was the switch taking place in Epiphany, Gnome’s default web browser. There’s been a change under the hood, with Mozilla Gecko being replaced by Webkit.

WebKit claims another browser

Showcase of Designs Optimized for iPhone:

Smashing Magazine has a great roundup posts of iPhone-optimized websites. Includes some of my favorites, like Nike Lab and Volkswagen.

“All 10 mobile WebKits I’ve identified so far are subtly or wildly different.”

- QuirksBlog: There is no WebKit on Mobile

jQTouch Beta 2:

jqtouch:

The new beta of jQTouch is ready for download with a ton of enhancements and fixes. For those who don’t know, jQTouch is a jQuery plugin which helps create immersive experiences on the iPhone and iPod Touch. New in beta 2:

• 8 core page animations (including several 3d options) and the ability to easily add your own. See the animations running like butter in a demo video.
• Support for custom extensions, including 4 built-in sample extensions for geo location, offline support, a “floaty” menu, and automatic title creation.
• A public object now allows you to manipulate jQTouch dynamically with functions like goTo(), goBack(), and submitForm().
• A “fast touch” feature is enabled by default, improving responsiveness up to 500% in some cases.

Check out the new preview on your iPhone and download a copy to play with today!

Have you heard the one about the hare and the owl, or the watering hole, or the Hall of Wonders? These are no ordinary tales. In fact, they're of an entirely new genre: folktales for social media marketers.

Per usual, I wasn't invited. In this case, I wasn't invited to test out Google Wave, the new communication and collaboration tool (with the badly timed name) that Google dispersed to 100,000 developers and invitees yesterday. I did, however, look at the video of most of the one-hour-and-20-minute presentation Google gave to developers back in May It got me thinking about how Google Wave further flattens the distinctions between email and IMing, blogging and collaborating, while also expanding the definition of social media, and media itself. Whether this particular platform catches on isn't exactly the point. It's a significant step down a path that is becoming more heavily traveled every day.

“Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript”:

Jonathan Stark has posted the manuscript to his forthcoming O’Reilly book, Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, online. I’ve been helping proof the book so far, and I have to say: It’s an incredible resource for anyone interested in WebKit on the iPhone. He clearly describes a variety of new features in CSS3 and HTML5 (including the elusive Cache Manifest), and also explores the use of iPhone web app frameworks, using jQTouch specifically.

It's time to atone. Some may appreciate the timing, as it coincides with yesterday's observance of Yom Kippur, Judaism's Day of Atonement, the climax of a period of repentance. Everyone has some sins to atone for, including marketers and agencies trying to engage consumers through social media. Today, we'll confess.

“The Page Cache makes it so when you leave a page we “pause” it and when you come back we press “play.””

- Brady Eidson in the first of a two-part series on the WebKit Page Cache.

Being out at Advertising Week events this week proved to me that I'm not the only one obsessed with the fact that a business model needs to be developed for media companies and advertisers to make real, bottom line-lifting hay out of random, lightning-in-a-bottle media phenomenon. Things like Susan Boyle, Kanye West's MTV diss and other events that are increasingly huge reach vehicles, but exponentially less predictable than big, annual media events like the Super Bowl. In fact, their power and their problem is that they aren't predictable at all.

Introducing Google Chrome Frame: ”an early-stage open source plug-in that seamlessly brings Google Chrome’s open web technologies and speedy JavaScript engine to Internet Explorer.”

Not all mobile applications are social, but those with social elements will keep pushing social media's boundaries forward.

Thin Text in Safari with Snow Leopard:

Steve Smith shows how to fix the bulky sub-pixel text rendering in Snow Leopard’s Safari, now that the text-shadow trick no longer works.

New tax rules are about to give more people access to a Roth IRA, one of the best savings plans for later life. (See the full report)

Google releases Chrome version 3:

The new version brings big speed improvements, HTML5 support, a simplified New Tab page, and stable theme support.