Usablenet, a company that powers the mobile Web sites of various airlines, hotel chains and Amtrak, said that traffic to its travel-related sites was up 200 percent over the past two days.

Also of note, Usablenet said the most traffic came from iPhones and Android devices, marking the first time that more business travelers were using Android-powered phones than were on BlackBerry devices.

“As travelers away from home are searching for the most up-to-date information regarding their itineraries, many of them are depending on mobile websites,” Usablenet President Nick Taylor said in a statement. The company’s clients include American Airlines, British Airways, Delta, JetBlue, US Airways and Amtrak, as well as the Hilton, Omni, Starwood and Wyndham hotel chains.

Meanwhile, those who have managed to stay high and dry have been enjoying some schadenfreude with time-lapse blizzard videos, such as this one.

December 2010 Blizzard Timelapse from Michael Black on Vimeo.

In the video, Obama and Biden bemoan, “We arrived in ’09 on a rainbow of hope, but 2010 blew it all up in smoke” and “Oh 2010, we can’t wait for you to jet like that guy from JetBlue.”

The video is also a departure from JibJab’s trademark dancing cut-out faces style, dating back to its first hit, “This Land.”

Participation in the program is free and voluntary for companies, which would need to set up company profile pages and add products to be reviewed before users could leave a recommendation. The program has some 30 participating companies at launch, including JetBlue, Liberty Mutual Insurance, Microsoft Corp. and Harvard Business School Executive Education.

Participating companies will be able to review the recommendations, respond to them, and possibly delete frivolous ones, LinkedIn said.

The closely held company has in recent months been adding new functionality to its website to become a hub for the information that professionals need to do their jobs. “A big part of what we’re working to do is becoming the essential source of information for our membership,” said LinkedIn Chief Executive Officer Jeff Weiner.

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The animation studio is a unit of Next Media Ltd., the company founded by billionaire Jimmy Lai, an outspoken critic of Beijing — and the founder of the Giordano retail clothing chain — who has used his media holdings to counter what he calls a pro-China trend in the region’s press. Next Media is now Hong Kong’s largest listed Chinese-language print media company and the publisher of the Apple Daily newspaper and Next Magazine in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Mark Simon, commercial director at NextMedia, says the animated videos have been enormously popular, averaging four million views per day in Hong Kong alone, and sparking imitations among its competitors, though not in the way one might think.

Hong Kong’s “unique” media environment means the company’s strategy “isn’t echoed by others, as no one helps a competitor, especially one unpopular with government,” he said. “But in Hong Kong, every single TV station is now undertaking some form of animation. No secret, a response to us.”

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BoomTown has not been much of a fan of Facebook fan pages, finding most of them sterile affairs with empty marketing messages and little in the way of real life.

But things are actually hopping if you click over to the one, located here, created for JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater, who went loco after an encounter with a belligerent passenger, opened the emergency inflatable slide and got out of Dodge.

The JetBlue (JBLU) employee got out of jail just last night and still faces charges for his dramatic actions, which could be stringent.

But his Internet life is looking good.

The Slater Facebook fan page, which has garnered 81,856 “Likes” since it was made yesterday, is the perfect example of what social networking is–chock-full of lively comments, homemade photos and topics, such as one titled “Holy Chute!”

I personally liked many of the photos, such as the one above, which has the caption: “The story of one man who’s dealt enough nuts to nuts.”

Two others are below.

YouTube is also seeing Slater-inspired actions, mostly in the form of original “take this job and shove it” ballad videos, four of which you’ll find below.

And finally–and, of course–Slater gets a Taiwanese CGI treatment from New Media Animation that is pretty priceless.

Enjoy:

The story of JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater–who, after being abused by a passenger, did a full “Norma Rae” and huffed off the airplane via an inflatable slide–spread like wildfire across the Internet yesterday, almost immediately after the incident occurred.

It’s too much to hope that someone on the JetBlue (JBLU) flight had a Flip camera and is uploading the incident on YouTube right now, but video is unnecessary after the tale of flight rage got out and details piled upon details.

This is just the kind of silly, but true-to-life, story that everyone loves to share, and share it they did, with #teamslater quickly gaining ground on Twitter, and online comments and news stories exploding.

And why not? Everyone has encountered the entitled jerk who gets up before the plane has stopped, grabs his bag from the overhead compartment and then shoves his way to the front. Slater was simply doing his job by asking this passenger to sit down, and then decided he had had it when the bag struck him and he was cursed at.

We’ve also had our share of surly service from airline personnel, but this incident shed light on exactly why they might be a little more tetchy than we expect at times.

Maybe the cursing back on the intercom system and the dramatic beer-drinking exit was a bit over the top, but so what?

Slater is now, for better or worse, a Web hero.

Just like Norma Rae, seen in the video clip from the movie’s big scene below:

(The image is from Slater’s MySpace page here.)

Airline passengers will soon have a new option for getting wired at 30,000 feet.

This morning, Delta Air Lines said it will offer wireless Internet access across its entire domestic fleet by mid-2009. Though much larger in scale, the service is identical to the one used American Airlines (AMR), which Walt reviewed earlier this year.

Provided by Aircell’s Gogo, Delta’s (DAL) in-flight broadband will offer 3.1Mbps-connectivity for $9.95 on flights three hours or less, and $12.95 on flights of more than three hours. Not an unreasonable price. According to a 2007 survey by Forrester Research, 26 percent of leisure travelers would pay $10 for Internet access on a two- to four-hour flight and 45 percent would pay that on a flight longer than four hours. For business travelers, the percentage is quite a bit higher.

“Time on an airplane was either time lost or time found,” said Tim Mapes, Delta’s vice president of marketing. “This is going to totally change the dynamics of what a business trip is. Our customers are demanding of us the same type of wireless service they have on the ground.”

And they may even be able to use it, if they can get their laptops past The Department of Homeland Security …

Airline passengers will soon have a new option for getting wired at 30,000 feet.

This morning, Delta Air Lines said it will offer wireless Internet access across its entire domestic fleet by mid-2009. Though much larger in scale, the service is identical to the one used American Airlines (AMR), which Walt reviewed earlier this year.

Provided by Aircell’s Gogo, Delta’s (DAL) in-flight broadband will offer 3.1Mbps-connectivity for $9.95 on flights three hours or less, and $12.95 on flights of more than three hours. Not an unreasonable price. According to a 2007 survey by Forrester Research, 26 percent of leisure travelers would pay $10 for Internet access on a two- to four-hour flight and 45 percent would pay that on a flight longer than four hours. For business travelers, the percentage is quite a bit higher.

“Time on an airplane was either time lost or time found,” said Tim Mapes, Delta’s vice president of marketing. “This is going to totally change the dynamics of what a business trip is. Our customers are demanding of us the same type of wireless service they have on the ground.”

And they may even be able to use it, if they can get their laptops past The Department of Homeland Security …