A few years ago, we spoke of the “AdSense Economy.” It was so simple. Create a website, slap on an AdSense widget, and voila: “Insta-biz.” Wow! Who knew business could be so simple? AdSense was proof of Google’s (GOOG) genius, having grown into a multi-billion dollar business in only a few years after its launch in 2003.

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I was in the middle of typing up my “25 Random Things About Me” list on Facebook when a funny thing happened. I hit clear and decided to abandon the whole time-wasting endeavor. I’d made it through what I intended to be my sole entry before coming to my senses:

1. I like certain books and films and things that taste good. Also, kittens. Thanks for including me in this important social experiment. Now, please stop tagging me.

Over the past two weeks, I’d found my steady purr of status updates on Facebook interrupted by the ever-growing, viral cacophony of the “25 Random Things About Me” chain letter. In case you haven’t been “tagged” yet (fear not, you will be) the concept is simple. Generate a list of 25 “things, facts, habits or goals” about yourself in the notes section of your profile and hit submit. Then, annoy 25 of your Facebook friends by encouraging them to do the same. “If I tagged you,” the instructions explain, “it’s because I want to know more about you.”

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Social networkers are looking to score some airtime, with 36 percent of them wanting to access their networks via TV screens, according to an ABI Research survey released Thursday.

The survey of more than 1,000 households found that younger consumers are most interested in chatting and messaging with friends while watching TV. Middle-aged adults want a more passive experience, such as the ability to check on status updates via their TV sets. And those over 50 are most interested in knowing what their friends are watching.

“Just as video entertainment is moving fluidly across various screens, so is social media,” Jason Blackwell, a senior ABI Research analyst, said in a statement. “We’ve seen that consumers find increased value through shared entertainment experiences and want to explore and deepen these experiences through communities of interest, and that’s what’s social TV will ultimately do.”

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You can thank this blog post for even more carbon emissions in the atmosphere. That’s because Web hosting is largely powered by fossil fuel power plants and computers run on electricity. To help bring a little carbon transparency to Web sites, including those in our good ol’ blogosphere, two student entrepreneurs–Alex Wissner-Gross at Harvard and Tim Sullivan at Yale–have developed the CO2 Stats Project, a widget that tracks visitors to Web sites, calculates the sites’ carbon emissions and offsets the lot. Wissner-Gross and Sullivan tell us that their widget, launched at the end of October, has grown to more than 1 million unique visitors viewing it each month across about 700 sites.

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