Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg will keynote the fifteenth annual SXSW Interactive Festival, also known as South by Southwest.

I have this ongoing discussion with the development team of one of my clients. They insist on using relative URLs on their numerous development servers. Naturally, I tell them that those can lead to trouble when the pages go live and, of course, they do.

What is the difference between an absolute URL and a relative URL? For newbies out there, a relative URL points to links on a server in a local manner like this – a href="contact.html" – where you just point to the page link like you are right there working on the server.

Glenn Gow brought to my attention a post he wrote a few weeks back that should get us all thinking.

In it, he summarizes a recent MITSloan Management Review piece that upbraids most marketers for doing the easiest kind of market research: Listening to our existing customers.

Since Google largely tends to favor ranking informational websites over commercial websites, some authoritative blogs tend to rank for valuable queries based on posts they make in passing.

Even if you had no intent to monetize a post, it just became easier to monetize accidental rankings. If you use analytics to track your stats and notice that you start ranking for some good keywords you can use Triggit to embed links to merchant products directly in the text of your blog post.

Video search site Truveo opened a new page, featuring Presidential candidate campaign videos from the official sites as well as unofficial ones created by supporters.

Dirk-Willem van Gulik departs video service startup Joost for the warm embrace of Auntie Beeb as BBC Future Media & Technology Chief Technical Architect.

Another day, another Facebook controversy. At this point, as long as Facebook’s not directly responsible or in legal harm’s way, it’s just good publicity. Hasbro and Mattel have a beef with a Facebook application called Scrabulous, an online application knockoff of the classic game Scrabble.

And they want it taken down.

Of course, Facebookers are plenty upset about that, and are rallying behind the game.

Somewhere out there, at least one of Ron Paul’s followers is unhappy.  Why, you ask?  Because the presidential candidate has enjoyed an amazing amount of support from certain corners of the Web, and a certain search giant has only now launched something called Google Checkout for Political Contributions.

We’ve often teased YouTube; at times, it seems like the site’s only purpose is to showcase musical losers and kicks to the crotch.  The crisis in Kenya has caused people to use YouTube for some much more serious reasons, though, and the site’s leaders have acknowledged its role.

Richard MacManus, founder and editor of the blog ReadWriteWeb, had a disturbing correspondence with a (seemingly) Russian "brand squatter," a person MacManus describes as one trying to piggyback on his blog brand name for financial game.

Video search engine Truveo has launched a presidential video election page focused on the 2008 race.

The site features election related videos from television networks, user generated video sites and the campaigns themselves. The site includes pages of the candidates in the Democratic and Republican primary races. Candidates featured include Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama on the Democratic side and Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, John McCain, and Mitt Romney on the Republican side.

When I mentioned this aloud, someone responded, "Going out on a limb, aren’t they?"  But Bear Stearns has upgraded its outlook on eBay, and even if a gut reaction might be to scoff (the Dow is down another 300 points just now), the action isn’t as crazy as it sounds.

When Queen Elizabeth’s YouTube channel was unveiled, we thought it was great.  A soon-to-follow channel from the British Foreign Office didn’t seem like a waste.  But there was a definite drop-off in the quality of ideas, and the latest thing – a sort of Internet anti-terror plan – is really raising some eyebrows.

The Nintendo Wii can help develop surgical skills according to Kanav Kahol and Marshall Smith of the Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center in Phoenix, Arizona.

The two have found that surgical residents performed better during simulated surgery after playing on the Wii console. They say its due to the console’s "Wimote" control system, which allows players to direct on-screen action using a wireless remote that is sensitive to acceleration in three dimensions.