I am curious if anyone else has noticed a trend over the past year or so where people (I have nobody specific in mind) in the search marketing business seem to increasingly gravitate towards becoming a “SEO celebrity”. It’s a bit like like moths to a flame, really.

Say what you want about censorship in Russia; the man who will likely become the country’s next president publicly recognized that, at least in theory, the Internet has made the spread of information much freer.

It seems it was only a matter of time before the cleverer element of the SEO world developed a workaround for Google’s penalizing of paid links. The workaround involves a pretty creative "dynamic" linking strategy, and it’s playing a little bit dirty.

The whistleblowing site Wikileaks.org has been taken offline by the order of a California court.

Dynadot, which controls the sites domain name was ordered by the court to," immediately clear and remove all DNS hosting records for the wikileaks.org domain name and prevent the domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org website or any other website or server other than a blank park page, until further order of this Court."

As everyone who’s watched "The Boondock Saints" can appreciate, it’s hard to be funny on demand.  YouTube isn’t so much demanding humor as offering users the opportunity to provide it, however, and although the deadline of a just-announced contest isn’t too far off, the winner will get $25,000 for his (or her) trouble.

Unsurprisingly, it’s in Austin, where the local political climate hews much closer to the West Coast liberal leanings than other areas of the state.

Bots arriving from Google, Ask.com, and MSN to sample pages on the bookmarking site Delicious hit a robots.txt block. As do Yahoo’s Slurp bots too. It’s no big deal.

Early income tax filers seeking refunds likely powered traffic to several tax-related websites last month, judging by sharp jumps in their traffic.

Total shipments in Japan of mobile phones compatible with digital terrestrial television broadcast services reached 20 million units for the first time since the service was launched in 2006.

The figure was reached in December, due to the shipments of more than 1 million mobiles during the month according to the Telecommunications Carriers Association.

Guinness World Records has documented some straightforward stuff, but certain things can be pretty strange, too.  In what seems like a logical enough deal, then, the owner of Ripley’s Believe It or Not has acquired the Guinness World Records brand for $118 million.

The Australian government is considering legislation that would force Internet service providers to take legal action against users who download content illegally.

The proposal is similar to legislation that is being considered in the UK that would implement a three-strikes policy against users who illegally share files using peer-to-peer technology to download music, TV shows and movies for free.

Corporate ownerships and small sites are branching off this deal in every direction.  Still, to reach towards the top level of the matter, MTV Networks has acquired Babunga’s "online family network" for an undisclosed amount.

China says it is banning all audio and video content that features horror related themes according to the General Administration of Press and Publications.

Specifically the banned content includes, "wronged spirits and violent ghost, monsters, demons, and other inhuman portrayals, strange and supernatural storytelling for the sole purpose of seeking terror and horror," the administration said.

More and more people in the UK are becoming comfortable with the Internet, according to a new study.  Usage remains far short of 100 percent, but approximately 60.5 percent of the population ventured online at least one per month in 2007, and a full 62.6 percent should do so this year.

Look for Jack Ma’s Alibaba to become part of the Microsoft-Yahoo discussions due to Yahoo’s sizable stake in the company.

A Google contractor thinks the search ad company stole his idea for Google Sky, a popular addition to the Google Earth product.

At one time, CEO Eric Schmidt blamed rising headcount for having an impact on Google’s numbers and claimed Google would get that under control.

The reorganization at Yahoo that resulted in hundreds of layoffs will cost the company millions in related costs.

Google has ideas for advertisers who want to capitalize on cost-per-acquisition (CPA) through the AdWords bidding process.

Wal-Mart said today that it will only sell high definition DVDs in the Blu-ray format joining ranks with several other companies and movie studios.

The retailer is following in the footsteps of Best Buy, Netflix, Warner Bros. Studio, 20th Century Fox, Walt Disney Co and Lions Gate Entertainment.

In the midst of an absolute flood of them, we’ve got another trickle of firings to report: 40 people were let go by Yahoo India.  The truly strange part, though, is that Yahoo India is still looking to add over 500 new employees.

The Live Search Webmaster Center team announced earlier this week that Microsoft made some improvements to its Live Search webcrawler to improve indexing efficiency.

The two main improvements, blogs, Fabrice Canel, are with HTTP Compression and with Conditional Get:

HTTP Compression: HTTP compression allows faster transmission time by compressing static files and application responses, reducing network load between servers and Microsoft’s crawler. Microsoft says it supports the most common compression methods: gzip and deflate as defined by RFC 2616.