There can’t be much doubt that the mobile web is exploding in popularity. From the first mobile web access offered commercially with the Nokia 9000 Communicator phone in Finland in 1996, things have moved fast.

Today we’re seeing increased sales in smartphones and tablets, faster mobile data connections, apps, and more. Basically, we’re accessing Internet services more and more from something that is not a PC.

We’ve put together some numbers to attempt to show a picture of what the mobile web was like so far in 2011, how it is has developed, and perhaps take a peek into the future as well.

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It’s always interesting when Google decides to push something on their main property, the Google search page. Considering how ubiquitous Google is, this is such a power move.

What we mean is that no other company can cast its net this wide by just modifying its home page. We all use Google. It’s like your TV remote suddenly coming alive and telling you that yeah, you should check out that Google+ thing.

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Here’s a thought, or rather a theory, that we’d love to run by you.

It starts with a little piece of irony. Most advertisers want people to buy their product, i.e. pay for it. When an app (on any platform) is free and sponsored by ads, a large portion of its user base will be people who want something for free. If we’re allowed to generalize here, they don’t want to pay if they can avoid it.

Spotted the problem yet?

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User behavior differs greatly between websites. We wanted some hard data on what kind of websites get the most page views out of their visitors, and examined the top 1,000 websites on the Internet to find out.

What we specifically looked at was monthly page views per unique visitor. We calculated this number using traffic data from Google Ad Planner, then sorted the list by that number to create a “page views per visitor” top list.

The results, although not entirely unexpected, are interesting.

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The Facebook engineering blog often presents interesting findings about the nuts and bolts of Facebook and the technical side of running that enormous service. The latest post is about Facebook’s experimentation on how site speed affects the behavior of its users, called “Every Millisecond Counts”.

One thing that struck us as extremely interesting was the following findings about site speed.

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In June Google launched a Web community with the specific long-term goal to make the Web faster. The tone of Google’s presentation when launching this initiative was very much “let’s do this for the good of the world”.

Although we like the altruistic aspects of this, it’s worth noting that Google is looking out for number one here. Google is doing this because it’s good for Google.

And here is how.

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Dr. Pepper decided to offer everyone in America a free bottle of soda (something they had promised to do if the new Guns n’ Roses album was released this year). All people had to do was to register for a free coupon on the Dr. Pepper website.

Now here comes the twist: Dr. Pepper had time limited the offer to just one day, and there are more than 300 million people in the United States. And we all know people love free stuff.

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There are lots of vintage ad collections out there, and it’s always a fun to look through them. For your viewing pleasure, we have handpicked nine of the most fun, creative or just plain weird computer ads we have ever seen.

Inside you will find classic ads from Apple, Texas Instruments, IBM, BASF, Honeywell, Maxell and more.

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Google Chrome has its “incognito” mode, IE 8 has its “InPrivate browsing” mode and Safari has its “private browsing” mode. It’s only a matter of time until Firefox adds one as well. These new privacy modes in the various web browsers will create serious problems for site owners that rely on revenue from affiliate programs and targeted advertising. It will also change the landscape for web statistics software and skew visitor statistics for websites.

Why? Statistics software (for example Google’s own Analytics), affiliate tracking, and targeted ads all rely on cookies to work. People have been able to disable cookies for a long time, but this is the first time that people will be able to enter a browser mode that prevents cookies from being stored with just a simple click.

In this article we focus on the site owners’ perspective and will cover three main areas where the browser privacy modes will hurt them.

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Text ads can be smart, funny, and sometimes unintentionally hilarious when they show up in the wrong context. David, our web designer and marketing maestro here at Pingdom was surfing the web last night and put together a list of really funny and original text ads from Google Adwords. We liked them so much that [...]

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