I know it’s only Wednesday, but this has already been a great week. Sure, we’re all a little tired after putting in long hours in the days leading up to the shortcuts launch. But the feedback is pouring in, and we’re lovin’ it. Shortcuts in the news ain’t so shabby either…

On Monday and Tuesday, we were overjoyed about shortcuts articles and blog posts in Techcrunch, Crunchgear, Wired, US News and World Report, ArsTechnica, CNET News.com, Lifehacker, New York Times, PC World, Computerworld and Techworld. And it should be mentioned that Paul Stamatiou gets the award for being the first to blog it.

Then, middday today Forbes posted its weekly video show “The Download” where writer Dan Frommer cites OpenDNS shortcuts as his favorite thing this week. (Dan is fun to watch on video, and a very cool guy. David and I met him in person recently in New York.)

Throughout all of this, I had my fingers crossed that Anick Jesdanun at the Associated Press might write something, but you can never be sure. (Admittedly, I’ve been monitoring Google news every five minutes since Monday morning.) Not only did Anick write an article, his article is a great example of quality tech journalism. He has a way of explaining things in very understandable terms. It’s already in 32 newspapers across the United States. I bet it’s even in your local paper!

And of course there are a ton of awesome bloggers who’ve mentioned shortcuts - you can see a roundup of all of them here.

A big, sincere thanks to everyone who uses OpenDNS. Let us know how we can make OpenDNS even better. Every idea gets legitimate consideration.

The San Francisco CBS affiliate, KPIX, aired a segment yesterday about OpenDNS and how it makes the Internet faster. We were even the teaser before the commercial! John Roberts and our much-appreciated local customer, Sean Cullen, were interviewed for the piece. Sean is a busy film editor and it’s not easy for him to get away mid-day, which he did for the filming.

The segment was great because it not only explained what a fantastic service OpenDNS is, but also explained what the Domain Name System is - not easy!

Thanks to producer Julia Madden and reporter Jeanette Pavini (who you may remember from the PhishTank segment last year) for helping spread the word.

If you saw the segment, what’d you think?

A standardized speed test for OpenDNS would be difficult since physical locations, ISPs and other setup factors vary. That’s why we value independent speed testing of OpenDNS so much.

Mayank Sharma of Newsforge, the online newspaper for Linux and open source, did some testing of his own - in India - and found that OpenDNS loads pages “much more quickly” than his ISP.

I tested that claim from my home base in India. After switching to OpenDNS, content-laden Web sites like news.com, cnn.com, bbcworld.com, and myspace.com loaded a lot more quickly, ping times were considerably lower, and query response times (measured with dig -x site ) to news.com, lxer.com, osnews.com, distrowatch.org, and bbcworld.com were lower by 10 to 25% compared to times when I was using my ISP’s DNS.

That shoots holes in the idea that OpenDNS is only faster if you’re in the U.S. or U.K.

Lifehacker loves OpenDNS and OpenDNS loves Gina Trapani, the editor over at Lifehacker. Gina named OpenDNS as one of The Best Apps of 2006!

We’re honored to be given this award. I know we will be doing great new things in 2007 to try and earn this award again.

For those of you who don’t know, Lifehacker is a site that talks about ways you can use technology to make your life easier. As they put it: “Computers make us more productive. Yeah, right. Lifehacker recommends the software downloads and web sites that actually save time. Don’t live to geek; geek to live.”

As a longtime reader of Lifehacker, I’d encourage you to check it out and make your life safer, faster and smarter in areas outside of the DNS too. And we swear that we loved Lifehacker tons even before this award.

The ABC affiliate in Omaha, KETV Channel 7, aired a segment about OpenDNS today on the 5 o’clock news. Consumer Watch reporter Mike Sigmond did a great job explaining what it is that we do. Thanks, Mike.

Check out the full segment here.