Hitwise has just released a brief report examining the spending habits for web users over the holiday season. Using traffic data from its Retail 500 index, the site found that traffic in 2008 was lower than it was last year, but was (perhaps surprisingly) higher than it was back in 2006.

The study also found that the biggest drop off in traffic was among shoppers that fell under the ‘high-income’ demographic, which is classified as households earning more than $150,000 per year. Traffic from these upper-class buyers dropped 12.33% comparing December 2007 to December 2008, versus a drop of around 1% for those making less than $30,000 a year and an increase in traffic from everyone else. The report doesn’t make any guesses as to why this happened (perhaps the more wealthy users were losing more money in the stock market?), but it’s an interesting trend nonetheless.

Techmeme, a popular partially-automated tech news site, has released a list of its top 10 stories from 2008. Megan McCarthy, the site’s recently appointed human editor, has published the list on the Techmeme blog. McCarthy writes that headlines were determined using Techmeme’s internal data, which allows it to generate what is at least a somewhat-objective list of the year’s most widely read (and written about) stories.

The year’s top story was Microsoft’s proposed takeover of Yahoo (in classic Techmeme fashion, McCarthy includes two ’sub-headlines’ under this one, one from the Wall Street Journal, another from Google).

iSkoot is moving beyond Skype for mobile phones with the release of a more general mobile application called Notifier on AT&T’s Media Mall. Notifier lets users read RSS feeds and interact with Facebook, email (Gmail and AOL mail) and IM (AIM and Google Talk).

This isn’t an iPhone/Android application, it’s made for users who don’t have those kinds of fancy phones. It currently works with a variety of LG, Sony, Samsung and Motorola handsets, and it costs $2.99/month.

Why this is interesting: this is the productization of the technology they acquired with Social.IM, one of the first chat applications for Facebook. It also makes iSkoot less reliant on the whims of Skype – today their primary product is a technology and application that lets people use Skype from mobile phones.

Diversifying their business is probably one of the arguments they made in justifying their recent $19 million funding. Perhaps they can spend some of that money and invest in a new logo.

At the 25th Chaos Communication Congress (CCC) today, researchers will reveal how they utilized a collision attack against the MD5 algorithm to create a rogue certificate authority. This is pretty big news, so read on.

When you make a secured connection to a website via HTTPS, a public key certificate is sent from the server to your computer. This certificate contains a digital signature which your computer uses to verify the identify of the site to which you’re connecting. Certificates are “signed” by a Certificate Authority (CA), which acts as a kind of middle-man: you trust the CA, so you can trust the certificates signed by the CA. Anyone can create a certificate authority, though, so most browsers have a list of known reputable and trustworthy CAs. When your computer gets a certificate from a server, your browser checks the CA that issued it to determine whether the CA is trustworthy. If the CA is trustworthy, your browser assumes that the certificate being presented is trustworthy.

Yammer definitely started something. The enterprise Twitter service has more competition today from Wizehive, a Web-based group messaging and task management service for businesses. WizeHive just launched in beta. We have 500 invites (just enter “TC2009″ when you sign up).

Although it is similar in many respects to Yammer, Present.ly (our review), Basecamp, Central Desktop, and even in some ways to Producteev (our review), WizeHive is a worthy competitor and adds a few twists of its own.

At last night’s meet-up I met a guy named Todd Sharp who created SlideSix.com, a presentation sharing system that supports PowerPoint/PowerPoint 2007, PDF, OpenOffice, and MOV files. It supports uploading and embedding of slides in any web page. It’s not much to look at right now, but I works correctly and it’s a testament to what one man with a dream can accomplish in this dirty, harsh world.

AT&T’s YellowPages subsidiary purchased the two-letter domain name YP.com (now redirects to yellowpages.com) last month from the company LiveDeal (formerly YP Corp.).

A SEC filing has now revealed that YellowPages acquired the domain name for a cool $3,850,000 in cash payment. That’s a lot of money for an admittedly valuable domain name, especially during this economic downturn. It probably didn’t hurt that YP.com was actually operational and generating revenue for LiveDeal, but we should also note that this amount is roughly half of the publicly listed company’s current market cap.

If you enjoyed visiting DMFail, which surfaced Twitter messages intended as private messages on a public website but ultimately failed, you’re bound to get a kick out of this: F*** My Life is a service in beta where registered users are given a public platform to complain about just how screwed up their lives are and why.

In true Web 2.0 style, other users can comment on the short revelations and indicate that they in fact agree about the fact his / her life is f*cked up, and/or if the submitters actually deserve it. Thanks to those groundbreaking features, you can filter down stories based on the number of people who agree or think it’s well deserved, and you can also get a top-down list of the most discussed or most favourited life stories.

Where are the best and worst places to work? Glassdoor, the site that surveys employees about workplace conditions in great detail, has issued lists of the best and worst 50 companies as rated by employees out of the 11,000 in its database (see below).

There aren’t any startups on these lists because Glassdoor does better with larger companies with more employees. Topping the list of best companies is General Mills, but tech companies make a decent showing as well, with Netflix, Adobe, Google, SAP, and NetApp making the top 10. Apple is No. 19. Amazon and Microsoft didn’t make the list. Neither did Yahoo, but it escaped the worst 50 list as well. The same cannot be said for eBay, IAC, and AT&T

Demotix, a new startup coming out of London, is taking a pretty raw approach to reinventing the newswire and with the wave of news coming out of the Israel/Palestinian conflict right now it is coming into its own. If you ever wanted to know what life and death was like on the ground in the middle of a war this is it, direct from ground zero. The idea is simple: anyone can shoot video or photos at a news event like a protest and upload the content to the site. The site only takes photos right now but text and video are due soon. Everyone who uses Demotix will keep the copyright and the right to remove the images from the website. The non-exclusive images will be sold for anywhere from between $150- $3,000, and videos will be sold by $500-$1,000/minute. Demotix shares 50 percent of the revenue from each sale with the person who contributed the content. Demotix has six-full time staff members and six full-time interns. The site has launched in Beta but in the next fortnight launches a full version, along with an Arabic version. (Please note that the images used in this post may be distressing to some).

TipsBase is a new social network centered around sharing tips and tricks about a wide variety of topics, counting on user-generated content to populate the community site with interesting tidbits on why and how to do (or not do) certain things. The team behind the website likened it to a ‘YouTube for tips’, but that’s quite the overstatement.

TipsBase says it’s different from the crowded space of How To websites and other social networks where tips are shared via message boards and the likes, by providing a centralized platform where registered users can share short, practical advice about any topic ranging from business, computers and video games to fashion, pets, gambling and health. There’s also a social layer on top of it, where you can do classical social networking stuff like befriend people, subscribe to their tips, comment on articles, send direct messages, rate content, etc. This is similar to what Tipstrs is all about.

The U.S. economy has likely been in recession for a year, and tech companies have been bracing for a big slowdown in growth. But the fact is that revenues for most Internet-based companies haven’t dropped yet. Amazon, in fact, was able to issue its annual “best year ever” press release the day after Christmas.

That’s all about to change, at least for content sites, starting this week. Display advertising revenue is going to fall of a cliff in January according to a number of content sites I’ve spoken with who rely on advertising for revenue. “Sales through December were mostly strong as advertisers used up their marketing budgets,” said one sales exec. But, he added, “there are few buyers for this next fiscal quarter, and those few that are buying are looking for steep discounts.”

Just how bad will it be? I’ve heard estimates of 30%-80% revenue drops over the next three months from companies that serve a variety of content (games sites, tech news, celebrity news, political news, etc.). The median pessimism point is around 50%. The people I’ve spoken with work at large public companies and small one-person blog shops. Absolutely no one I spoke with said they expect an up quarter.

So we had about 45-50 people at the event tonight and I was amazed at the energy and excitement here in my hometown, good old Columbus. I met the guy who sold me a car (seriously: I guess his Dad owns the dealership and he’s a huge gadget geek) this weekend along with the guy who invented the PowerSquid. There are a few start-ups and products I’m going to highlight this week and I’m pleased to say that these folks are amazingly excited and enthusiastic, even in a down economy.

Click through for a full gallery.

Back in October I wrote about a new iPhone app called RjDJ, which I described as “An Awesome, Trippy Soundtrack For Your Life“. The application includes a set of entrancing songs that go on forever, using the iPhone’s internal microphone to ‘listen’ to the noises and voices heard in your proximity to dynamically create music. It’s a bizarre and totally unique experience that you should try if you haven’t already (you can grab the full version here or a one-song trial here).

Tonight the RjDj team has released a followup to its original app called RjDj Shake. The application has a similar purpose, using external input to dynamically generate music. But instead of using sound, Shake relies on the iPhone (or iPod Touch’s) accelerometer to adjust the audio any time the phone senses movement.

As bloggers continue to debate the finer points of nothing, yet another entrepreneur has gone out and just built a filtered search engine for Twitter. A couple of days ago Twitority launched (although it appears to be down now). Today, it’s Twithority, by the same guys at Tsavo that created Daymix.

Twithority is notably faster in returning results, and it looks farther back (1,000 results v. 50). It ranks results by rank (highest ranking users first) and time (most recent first) by the top 10,000 Twitter users.

Some people will continue to hate the debate over Twitter authority, but ultimately the market will decide if there’s demand for this kind of product.

Borange, a new app that just went live on Apple’s App Store, is looking to turn your iPhone into a casual social planner. The application effectively adds a basic calendar function to the iPhone’s address book, allowing users to view a timeline that details when their friends will be free to hang out that day. You can download the 99-cent application here.

Borange is very well designed, and feels like a natural extension to the address book. To get started, you scroll through your list of contacts, checking off the ones you’d like to send your availability information to (you can also send out mass notifications to groups or your entire contact list). Contacts that are Borange members will see your available times listed as part of a comprehensive timeline that also includes schedules from their other Borange-using friends.

Say goodbye to the fun of reading private Twitter messages sent improperly and gathered on DMFail. Sometime today, Twitter says in an email, they’ll change the way private messages are sent so that you can use either [D + username + message] OR [DM + username + message].

It’s a subtle feature change, but one that will avoid embarrassment for people who’ve accidentally made their private messages public.

Over the weekend a lot of tech bloggers got into a tizzy over a suggestion that Twitter search should rank Tweets by authority, with Tweets from people who have the most followers coming up first. Some bloggers quickly objected that this was somehow undemocratic or would give spammers more of an incentive to trick people into following them, and thus would be easy to game. One developer went ahead and created exactly that search experience with Twitority anyway. (Update: Make that two, check out Twithority also). While others didn’t understand what the big deal was in the first place because their relatives in Scranton have never heard of Twitter (sigh).

One thing that is clear is that there needs to be a better way to filter Twitter as it grows into a broader public communications and publishing system I like to think of Twitter as public IM. But with possibly more than one billion Tweets out there, how do you know which ones to pay attention to? What is the best way to measure the authority of a Tweet (and, thus, where it should rank as a Twitter search result)? A better proxy for authority than the absolute number of followers someone has on Twitter may be how many times their messages get retweeted.

Someone at InformationWeek could probably use a vacation right about now.

Earlier today the site ran a post titled “BlackBerry Storm Causes Major AT&T Outages“, in which it described the network issues the telecom giant has been having over the last day. The title refers to BlackBerry’s recently-launched (and widely panned) touchscreen handset that is supposed to take the iPhone head-on. It might even make sense – perhaps enough people bought the phone over the holiday that a traffic spike took the network down.

Unfortunately the story is about a weather-related power failure that took the network offline, and appears to have nothing to do with BlackBerry.

Here’s a head scratcher. BusinessWeek named search engine Cuil, which launched prematurely, lost their VP Product and now has near zero traffic, as one of the most successful U.S. startups of 2008.

Why? They say it attracted lots of attention when it launched (true, but it wasn’t positive attention), and they say that Cuil has a larger search index than Google (which doesn’t appear to be true). They miss Cuil’s big possible tech advantage, which is IP on how they handle search queries that may be much cheaper than the way Google and others do it.

BusinessWeek generally has intelligent coverage of startups. This time, they blew it. Cuil may yet live to see success, but 2008 was a bad, bad year for them and they had no place on this list.