by Tony Chen

Movies to look forward to in '09, letting others surf the web for you, design thinking from IDEO, stats you should know - here are this week's savviest links.

Pick of the week
I check 5 sites everyday: gmail, drudge, cnn, facebook, and (of course) savvy daddy.  Here's my nomination for a 6th:  Newsified.  why surf the web when others can surf it for you?

Some stats
1 in 50 people worldwide are on Facebook, I think it's gonna keep growing.  And I wonder if it's gonna take over email at some point as a way for people to communicate.

Number of stay-at-home dads has doubled since 1999.  The only surprise here is that a major newspaper actually reported it.

1 in 12.5 million spam emails result in a purchase.  That one naive person who actually responds is what keeps these guys in (a multi-million dollar) business.  Arrggh.

Some lists
The 50 Biggest Movies of 2009, 2 of which are based on toys.  Here's another 20 toys that deserve movie-status. I'm still waiting for a Lego movie.

50 dad blogs to check out -- you'll probably be familiar with most of these, but there are still quite a few gems.

50 best places to raise your kids -- While I find these lists interesting, I find them oddly offensive as well.  Good kids grow up all around the world when they are raised well.  Or maybe it's just sour grapes.

19 best read-aloud books ever and 13 award-winning toys

Why Kids Lie - an age-by-age guide

Some perspective
IDEO's CEO on Design Thinking - One of my favorite companies in the world talking about one of my favorite topics - Could design thinking be applied to our lives as dads?

10 pictures of the earth we all gotta see - inspiring.

The overparenting crisis & the new trend toward "benign neglect" - this is the most popular article on Babble.  Hooray for kids everywhere.  Nonetheless, I wonder if overparenting is a lot like pride - you can only see it in others, but not yourself.

Why I'm happy the stock market crashed

Re-assessing the dangers of BPA in Plastics - just stay away from BPA, okay?

Learning how to be a programmer... kiddie-style

What is the most visited page on savvy daddy, aside from the homepage? It's this Jon & Kate thread of course.  Love or hate 'em, folks are watching the show.

And finally, a linkfest would not be complete without a useless time-waster:  Fathers-in-Chief, Babble ranks the parenting of all our previous presidents.