This past Christmas, I was lucky to get a BlackBerry 7105t under the tree. This was, I thought, a great phone. Nice and small, good bright screen, and a well-designed address book with Outlook syncing. SureType is nothing short of magic and email via a cheap T-Mobile account worked pretty well.

Four months later, the 7105t met a watery grave at the bottom of the San Francisco Bay after a nighttime sailing mishap. I got sad. Then I got an 8700g.

Now I understand crackberry addiction. The full keyboard is a big part - SureType is very good, but just doesn’t compare. Whatever Intel xScale processor they crammed into this thing is fast, far faster than the 7105t. Web pages scream via EDGE and T-Mobile’s unlimited data plan price is right - $19 a month. But with both the 7105t and 8700g I struggled to figure out what apps I needed to get, what my best option was for setting up email forwarding, and what tricks I could use to be more productive. I read forums, I read blogs, I scoured search engines, and I came up with only a few answers.

What’s still missing on the web is a great reference site for all things BlackBerry. BlackBerry Forums is the closest thing - a great discussion site, but reference information is lost in a sea of comments and sticky posts.

So I’ve started a wiki over at Wikispaces to gather links, pictures, tips, and anything else BlackBerry users deem important in one easy-to-edit spot.

Got a BlackBerry? Join in.

This week over at Wikispaces we launched support for embedded media. This means you can put YouTube videos, Google Calendars, Odeo podcasts, Flickr slideshows, and just about anything else you can imagine in your wiki page.

Now you might be thinking: “well, duh - I can do that with any wiki that supports HTML.” But we chose to do embedded media in a smarter way.

If you’re just pasting HTML in your wiki page, you’ll see something like this when editing your page:

<embed
style=”width:400px; height:326px;”
id=”VideoPlayback”
type=”application/x-shockwave-flash”
src=”http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-8224040487342942414″>

Not so pretty, and really confusing for other people who might be editing your page. Put ten of these on a page, and you’ve got a real mess.

Here’s what the same embed looks like on Wikispaces:

[[media type=”google” key=”-8224040487342942414″]]

YouTube?

[[media type=”youtube” key=”UnFV-fvgOu0″]]

Nice and clean. Paste in a URL instead of the embedded HTML code and we’ll convert it automatically into the correct tag. Paste in something we don’t yet understand and we’ll add it to our database for the future.

Long-time Wikispaces user Sean FitzGerald has a great demo page showing what happens when you unleash media on wiki pages. Awesome!

A few months back, Alex Bosworth asked a good question: with millions of active users, why was LinkedIn’s Alexa traffic graph so low?

I suggested in a comment that the issue might be LinkedIn’s exclusive use of SSL, where Alexa doesn’t track impressions. A few months later I noticed that the SSL had gone away, and LinkedIn’s Alexa traffic has gone from a dribble to a torrent:

I thought of this today as I read a pretty hyperbolic Hitwise headline: “MySpace Moves Into #1 Position for all Internet Sites“. By any reasonable definition of “MySpace”, “Yahoo”, and “internet site”, this just isn’t so. Jeremy Zawodny calls it “Apples and Oranges“. I’ll go with lies, damn lies, and web traffic statistics.