Today was a day of firsts: Andy's first day of Kindergarten, Carol's first day as the new broadcast journalism teacher at Frisco Centennial High School, and - two outta three ain't bad - Mitch's first sick day of the year. :(

"What you can find out now on the Internet - it's remarkable."

John McCain might be on to something. With the launch of Google Insights for Search on August 6, you can not not only find a running mate, you can see where he or she is a hot search term.

Despite some valid concerns with the data in the early going - some tests conducted on different days with the same criteria returned markedly different results - the potential for Insights to become a game-changing tool for for SEM/SEO strategists is clear.

But wait! There's more!

Social Media is Core to Dell's Marketing Strategy

The video is from an Uberpulse interview conducted at a Dell event in San Francisco. Another blog called Open (minds, finds, conversations) highlighted a quote from Andy underscoring the enormous opportunity social media represents for marketers:

The social media stuff is probably the most important thing we do today, from a marketing standpoint. A lot of the other elements of our marketing mix has sort of become more and more transactional and more and more tactical in nature. The social media stuff is much more strategic... It's about how to use social media to power the fundamentals of the business. That’s what we’re focused on.

America's Finest News Source sums up the essence of social media: Local Idiot To Post Comment On Internet.

We've all heard the cliche "if you fail to plan, you might as well plan to fail." Now comes this sobering piece from Overcoming Bias, by way of 43 Folders on The Planning Fallacy, "a common cognitive bias... which is a repeatable, documented error in thinking that apparently explains why we all tend to underestimate task-completion times."

Interesting piece on the "rapidly evolving landscape for social tools, services, and networks" and a "graphic that helps chart online conversations between the people that populate communities as well as the networks that connect the Social Web" made freely available by Brian Solis on his PR 2.0 blog.

Mashable today profiled the launch of Userplane Boards, "an innovative new message board product (that) combines aspects of Userplane’s other services like chat and IM with threaded message board discussion, creating a real-time environment that makes following conversations much easier."