I’ve spent quite a bit of time lately trying to get rid of all the quizzes that have been hitting my Facebook pages from people. I’ve blogged about one way to get rid of them, which has been working well for me, but today I got another suggestion on how to ban them from even displaying on my page in the first place.

You can follow the instructions below that were given to me by Papa Roux on Facebook. He operates a cajun restaurant here in Indianapolis, but he’s serving up more than great food with this tip.

If it’s not enough reason jus because they’re annoying, here’s an article from PC World about the other reason these quizzes are doing more than just giving you a bit of an insight to your friends on Facebook. There is a cost with The Hidden Secrets of Online Quizzes.

What he shares isn’t too complex but it’s also not as immediately obvious as you would expect either.

If you look at your Facebook homepage you’ll see sets of small buttons that are the different types of updates you’ll see in your updates main page.

On the left-hand side you’ll see something similar to what appears on my sidebar. I’ve got a lot of groups specified, but you get the idea.

Just click and drag the items to the top of the list you are most interested in seeing in your stream. I prefer Status Updates, and photos and Links.

My least preferred item at the moment are all those quizzes, which appear as part of the news feed updates. I’ve moved this to the bottom of my list. So far it’s helped bury those quizzes out of view even more.

If you’ve got more tips on how to get rid of what you don’t want on you Facebook stream, be sure and let us know in the comments.

We are still more than ten days from the new year, but a majority of the world has already started retrospecting the last twelve months and forecasting the next twelve.

Jayvee inspects the culture of FAIL on the Internet and finds that video advertising is going to decline. Actually, the rate of growth of online advertising has reached a saturation point even though online advertising itself is continuing to rise.

In these tough times, when the economy has been slowing down, Clair suggests that choosing Linux and open source software has become more necessary. For those who are already in that path, there is a free Ubuntu training course. Ubuntu is Linux for human beings, isn’t it?

A survey found that only 1% of people are using Google Docs, and many of those use Microsoft Office already. However, Colleen feels that the Microsoft’s stranglehold on office suites may be slipping away with Microsoft promising and postponing their next release and the availability of too many options for the users.

Juan says that 2008 is the year of iPhone, which is not very debatable in the user sense though this is also the year for RIAs, Twitter (@bsravanin) and cloud computing. But then, he is an Apple guy. :-) He also shares the offer that MacUpdate is having as a holiday promo. A good offer, far better than dreaming about the Apple 24″ LED display which is about $900!

Speaking of promos, Jason has a post about the Sears Wish Promotion, similar to the HP Magic Giveaway which has recently ended. There is already several Top 10 lists too, like the top 10 viral videos of 2008. I personally don’t like the fact that these lists do not consider the rest of the year that is still to be lived through. The more important news is, in case you haven’t already heard, that a serious security flaw has been exposed in the Internet Explorer and it is advised to not use it for financial and other sensitive transations of any kind.

While you wait for the security update, be sure to take note of the 8 security bulletins that Microsoft is ending the year with. Various OS users may want to check out the 2008 Service Pack 2 beta releases.