You thought they were gone. Those pesky, annoying, experience-destroying things. Yes, I’m talking about iFrames.

Popular a decade ago, they’ve made a few appearances in the past several years. The once-popular Digg, for instance, turned to them to implement its DiggBar.

But now they’re back.

As detailed by Brent Csutoras on Search Engine Land, the company responsible for bringing them back is popular social discovery service StumbleUpon:

…on all content pages within StumbleUpon, you have a single button saying ‘Stumble This’, which when clicked takes you to an iframed version of the content.

Not only are they now iframing all content from the site, but if your logged into StumbleUpon, they are not even offering a way to remove the iframed toolbar, leaving you in stuck in the iframed version of the site. If you are not logged in, then there is an option to click X in the right side of the toolbar to remove it.

Csutoras observes that there hasn’t yet been an uproar about StumbleUpon’s change, despite the fact that iFrames have caused so much angst before. In the case of the DiggBar, to placate angry users, Digg founder Kevin Rose was forced to backtrack and admitted, “Framing content with an iFrame is bad for the Internet.”

Is the lack of widespread anger here an indication that StumbleUpon’s relevance has declined? Perhaps, even though unique visitors are apparently way up year-over-year. But regardless, there are more than a few publishers who still get a meaningful amount of traffic and link love from StumbleUpon. And they can’t be too happy about this.

At the end of the day, you have to hand it to the iFrame. While it does have uses, it has arguably been one of the most abused ‘features’ of HTML. But you can count on companies ignoring internet history and using it in the worst ways imaginable.

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The rapid growth of mobile technology and its adoption throughout society has arguably been a boon to both employers and employees. When put in capable hands, a smart phone can be an incredible promoter of productivity.

But that doesn’t mean that smart phones are perfect. There’s a reason, after all, that many corporate workers given Blackberries coined the term ‘Crackberry.’

In short, one of the most attractive features of smart phones (24/7 connectivity and communication) is one of its greatest downsides. Information overload is a real threat, and employees are, in many cases, effectively always on the job.

Thanks to legislation signed into law last month, smart phones could now put employers in Brazil in a tough spot. As reported by Mobiledia, the “legislation in Brazil asserts company e-mails to workers equal direct orders from employers [and] labor attorneys say this makes it possible for workers answering e-mails after hours to ask for overtime pay.”

That, obviously, is probably not music to the ears of company executives and human resources departments, and it’s not an issue limited to Brazil. As Mobiledia notes, companies like Deutsche Telekom are trying to cut back on after-hours communication, and some, like Volkswagen, are going so far as to turn off email for employees entirely after the work day is done.

If more companies change their email policies in a similar fashion, it could have profound implications for email marketers. As ExactTarget’s RJ Taylor observes, B2B marketers could see lower engagement for emails sent during non-work hours, while B2C marketers could see lower engagement for emails sent during working hours. For consumers who opt to have a work smart phone and a person smart phone, email marketers could find themselves grappling with a “context” problem.

In the end, to maintain successful campaigns that convert, email marketers may have to get much more sophisticated about segmenting work versus non-work emails, and spend more time evaluating ideal timing for delivery based on this segmentation. In some cases, Taylor suggests, hitting an individual with a message may require a non-email solution.

Savvy email marketers could of course deal with this, and they already look closely at segmentation and timing, but having less flexibility due to employer-imposed restrictions on employee email use would certainly make email marketing more ‘interesting’ for many companies.

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While the debate surrounding Pinterest’s value as a marketing tool continues, we’re finding the stats behind the social curation site increasingly interesting.

Last week we covered data from Experian that revealed the demographic profile of ‘those who pin’, and over the weekend, Monetate released a new infographic that follows on from this.

While the chart we included in our post from Ignite Social Media stopped at October 2011, we see that from that point until December, traffic increased more than fourfold.  In fact, this grew to 7.51m unique visitors in December alone according to Compete.

The amount of traffic Pinterest sent elsewhere has risen accordingly, becoming a top five referrer for several ‘specialist retailers’, according to internal data from Monetate.

Of course, it all depends on who those retailers are, which is something we’ll follow up on in the coming weeks, but this does suggest that Pinterest’s ability to send people elsewhere is growing. Particularly when you see that Experian places the site as the fifth highest traffic referrer among social networks for the week ending 26/11/11.

When you put this in the context of search, it still overshadows social networks as a driver of traffic by a long way, as shown in the stats below.

But Pinterest is young, and though at the moment is underdeveloped in terms of how brands can even use it (brands are listed as ‘people’ – and the search function isn’t the best), we’re still keeping an eye on it. 

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As this week’s news is dominated with the news of another founder splitting ways with his company, we’re reporting moves in the US by RIM, Virgin America, Nokia, Comcast and Zynga amongst others.

Did you hear of any big moves that will affect our industry that we didn’t catch? Let us know.

Research in Motion co-chief executives, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, have stepped down to make way for COO Thorsten Heins to become president and chief executive.

Nokia‘s chief designer Marko Ahtisaari has been promoted from Senior VP to Executive Vice President, Design. This move comes after the success of the Lumia 800 and 900, both designed by Ahtisaari.

.ORG, The Public Interest Registry, appointed Nancy Gofus as chief operating officer as they develop and execute marketing strategies that further expand the .ORG domain globally.

Zynga.org, the philanthropic arm of the social gaming company Zynga, is joined by Ken Weber who will take over as executive director.

Comcast names Amy Lynch as VP of Comcast California’s southwest bay area which includes Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Peninsula. She is reportedly the first woman to take this role in the company’s history.

Collective Brands has nabbed former Converse VP Rick Blackshaw for the role of Keds Brand President.

Men’s Fitness names Michael De Medeiros as their new Editor-in-Chief. De Medeiros was previously editor of Maximum Fitness and M Magazine.

The Weather Channel made an abrupt change of leadership as advertising veteran, David Kenny, became their new chairman and CEO to replace Mike Kelly.

Outdoor Channel Holdings, owners and operators of Outdoor TV, appointed Tom Hornish as their new president and CEO. He succeeds Roger Werner, who will move to take the position of co-chair.

Virgin America has hired Karen S. Walker as the Company’s new Vice President and Controller. She comes to them from CNET Networks, a US$ 400 million publicly-traded new media company.

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For many in the tech community, Techmeme is one of the top places to turn when you want to discover the latest news. Launched in 2005, Techmeme was at first automated, but since 2008, it has employed human editors to curate the best tech news on the web.

The idea: human involvement is necessary to filter the wheat from the chaff. Which seems like a good idea given just how much chaff there is on the web.

But is it working for Techmeme?

Recently, former TechCrunch writer Sarah Lacy launched a new blog, PandoDaily. She raised money from a cadre of some of Silicon Valley’s most influential investors, and brought with her as contributors some of her former TechCrunch colleagues, including TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington.

Lacy’s goal: “to be the site-of-record for that startup root-system and everything that springs up from it, cycle-after-cycle.” And not to sell her blog, unless there’s a $ 1bn offer on the table.

One of the PandoDaily’s ‘features’: the PandoTicker, which is nothing more than an aggregator of news from other sites, with titles, excerpts and URL slugs designed, obviously, for SEO. Good or bad? I won’t judge, as these PandoTicker items may arguably be of interest to PandoDaily’s readers.

But are they of interest to Techmeme’s readers?

Here’s what happens when aggregators aggregate aggregators:

The PandoDaily link above takes you to:

Loop de loop, anyone?

Needless to say, aggregating the PandoTicker SEO-bait, which has little more than a link to the source you could have clicked on directly through Techmeme, is completely unnecessary. When I first noticed that this was happening, I didn’t think much of it. Once Techmeme’s human editors noticed that they were aggregating an aggregator, they’d fix the issue. But day after day, Techmeme keeps linking to PandoDaily pages which offer no value to Techmeme’s readers.

I won’t speculate as to why, but given the importance, popularity and prolificacy of services that aggregate and curate content, this should serve as a good reminder to other aggregators and curators that providing a quality service depends on a lot more than being less ugly than the Drudge Report.

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