For those who aren’t regular readers of StickyFigure (if you’re not, you should be. Check it out), Steve Woodruff has been consistently churning out great discoveies with his Five in the Morning series. Five in the Morning is basically a blog post that highlights 5 of the most interesting and well written posts throughout the blogosphere.

Lately Steve has been inviting guests to add some new perspective and fresh content to the mix. When he approached me about being a guest author, I immediately said yes! So without any further ado, here is your daily dose of Five in the Morning:

Digital media continues to blur our online and offline lives. Spruce up your presentations and educate your colleagues with this fantastic list of 49 Amazing Social Media, Web 2.0 and Internet Stats, compiled by Adam Singer on the FutureBuzz blog.

Learn how to use a often overlooked feature of Twitter, “favorites”. Darren Rowse and Ari Herzog put together an excellent post on the Twitip blog that reveals how to use favorites, why you should use favorites, and illustrates how other people are using them.

It’s early, but one of the themes of 2009 seems to be “stop talking. start doing”. Shiv Singh, of Avenue A Razorfish, reminds brands of this and says Brands Must Do! Start doing by listening to consumers. It’s not done enough.

The ultimate do-it-yourselfer Marshall Kirkpatrick has outlined how to Build the Ultimate Social Media Cheat Sheet. Use it to get you up to speed on the social media activity in your market.

And finally, take these tips from The Difficult Art of Cold Pitching by Jon Burg, and apply them to avoid any mistakes when reaching out with a request to a community of people you have a weak relationship with. Chris Brogan even chimes in with his take.

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I posted yesterday on this topic, but the news keeps coming. EMC, the global enterprise storage giant, annouced today they had acquired Pi Corp, a relatively unknown startup, specializing in cloud technology and services. EMC has also formalized a new cloud division, and hired Microsoft veteran Paul Martiz to lead it.

That makes 2 of the biggest players in their respective segments of the infrastructure technology space jump headfirst into cloud computing, all within the past 2 days. Is the cloud trend here to stay, you betcha.

I’ve already written about cloud computing and some of the reasons why I think it is a game changer, forever altering how we look and utilize web hosting (for the better). It looks like Rackspace believes the same, as evidenced by their annoucement yesterday that Mosso, a Rackspace subsidiary, will now offer cloud computing similar to Amazon Web Services. Specific product offering and pricing can be viewed by clicking on the image below:

It’s encouraging to see more players, especially industry leaders, jumping into this space along with Amazon. The result will be increased innovation, competition, and a more mature cloud computing offering. All of which benefit their customers. As the Mosso slogan says, it’s time to “Code, load and go.”

I read a presentation today that covered the challenges businesses face when scaling their web properties as they become more successful. It was originally written and presented by John Engates, Chief Technology Officer at Rackspace IT Hosting. It’s a good explanation of the various stages of growth that online businesses go through and the associated issues that come along the way. There are some mentions of best practices and good recommendations included as well. These are tried and true methods that Rackspace and John have gleaned from their extensive experience with high traffic customers.

You can download the entire presentation in PDF format by clicking here.

The problems outlined in the presentation are well documented and prevalent across the web hosting industry….TODAY. However, with the emergence of on-demand hosting by leveraging cloud computing, such as Amazon EC2, Amazon S3 and Amazon Simple DB, are many of these challenges still relevant? At the very least on their way to becoming irrelevant in the near future.

As a site owner, if you decide to host with Amazon, you don’t face the horizontal scaling issues that come with traditional web hosting. Those problems are taken out of the equation for you by Amazon. Need more hosting horsepower? Add another server in minutes. That type of horizontal hardware scaling can, and often does, take many days in the traditional web hosting model. Cloud computing is not currently without flaws, but these will be worked out over time. For now, the benefits far outweigh the risks when compared to the traditional web hosting model when looking at it from a scalability perspective.