“Email, text messaging, cell phones and iPods along with PC’s are causing a global epidemic of shyness,” reports Australia’s Sunday Telegraph.  According to psychologist and Harvard Business School researcher Robin Abrahams, who is conducting a case study on the Worldwide Epidemic Of Shyness, she reports shyness in social situations now affects about 50% of the population, which represents a significant rise over past levels. 

“Technology is enabling us to opt out of difficult situations and causing people to become more insular,” says Abrahams. “What we have is an increasingly complex social environment, combined with less practice at dealing with it because of technology.  People . . . email or text one another rather than talk. ”

Interesting.  What do you think about this subject? [Please text or leave a comment.]

You have to check this out! This video is off the hizzy, nizzy ma-nizzle! His name is Mo, and he works for an internet marketing company called Poplabs, and is known in the YouTube community, and SEM field as the Poetic Prophet (AKA The SEO Rapper).

It was announced today by Google and Matt Cutts blog that they are going sell the Internet Marketing aspect of Performics to a third party to avoid a conflict of interest.  Woo Hoo!!  I think we are all glad to hear about that.

Read more about this below:

Google’s Blog

Search Engine land

Skype has announced the beta version of Skype 3.8 for Windows, which contains an improved and optimized audio library. No need to lower your voice here. Let rip, for speaking your mind never sounded so good on Skype before.Here’s the main improvements:

— Significantly reduced background noise
— Less delay
— Fewer call drops
— Fewer cut-outs
— Change your headset, headphones or microphone without having to fiddle with settings

Now, give the new beta version a try (if you have a VOIP phone) go ahead and download it.

For some time now Google has been showing that it is, indeed, serious about being a (if not the) major player in the mobile advertising market.  After launching the mobile advertising platform (which is like AdSense for the mobile), Google is now dabbling in the mobile social networks market in a big way.

Google has their own SM site, www.orkut.com, but have also taken over www.zingku.com , a company that makes it possible for marketers to send advertising messages to mobile social networks.  Zingku allows users to share a variety of information like content, pictures, text messages, video, email and other activities all over your mobile device.

A very interesting feature that Zingku has introduced is the flyer function.  The function makes it possible for marketers to send promotional messages to Zingku members who can choose to receive these messages via a “zing code”.   The flyer function allows members to interact with these promotional messages by allowing them to travel through text and picture messages. (Welcome to the 21st century!)

Google is going full steam ahead with this and is tapping into the growing number of mobile users who seem to spend more time with their mobile devices than they do on a laptop with email.  Zinkgu take Google a step deeper into integrating themselves into the everyday lives of tech-savvy consumers.  (It won’t be long though until this will be common everyday marketing)

Saddle up!