Michael Crook, along with the rest of us, learned some valuable lessons. The biggest lesson we all learned (Crook much, much more acutely), is that you don’t screw with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The EFF eff’d him up good.

People who use the social bookmarking site Del.icio.us to tag their favorite pages can clear up the mystery behind the tags they use when their meanings are not readily apparent.

Great post by Melissa Burdon at grokdotcom on the real goal of search marketing—conversions. If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you know how much I agree.

In order to compete with online travel agencies, hotels have begun to shift their money into online marketing according to a study by Hospitality eBusiness Strategies. The global study found that 68 percent of hospitality executives plan to focus their budgets on Internet marketing in 2007.

When it came to what hotel executives thought would bring them the greatest return on investment 72 percent said Web site optimization. This was followed by 68 percent who said search optimization and organic search, while 62 person favored Web site redesign.

Before being split into two companies that essentially represented broadcast and cable, CBS resided under Viacom’s corporate umbrella.

When blogs first hit the scene, there were many who passed the practice off as ‘just another Internet trend’ and doomed the medium to failure before it ever got off the ground. Years later, blogging is still around – and it’s rapidly joining the ranks of mainstream media as a source of breaking news.

It’s ratcheting up, that madness, that spring fever, that excitement that sends college basketball fans into an ink-and-paper bracket hysteria, trying to predict the unpredictable and who’s got the moxie to win it– wait – it’s not so ink and paper anymore.

Pausing for melodramatic over-the-top effect.

$3.2 billion in a cash tender offer for WebEx shares will bring the online conferencing company into Cisco’s fold.

GoFish Corporation, an online video company has struck a licensing partnership with Undergroundfilm and Big Film Shorts to offer independent short films on the GoFish Network.

"Our goal is for GoFish to be the lightning rod for creative talent on the Internet," said Michael Downing, founder and CEO of GoFish. "Whether licensed content, user-created, or our unique made-for-Internet programming, we will continue to populate the GoFish Network with the Web’s highest-quality video content."

In a departure from the negative publicity surrounding the company this week, Google announced the launch of its instant messaging gadget today. The Google Talk gadget can be embedded in a user’s personalized Google homepage or on any other webpage or blog simply by adding a line of code.

By anonymizing logs of information captured from people who search on Google after 18 to 24 months, the company hopes to improve the perception people have of their privacy being protected.

Have you ever set aside time to interview an expert for a project, only to realize that the person you are speaking with knows absolutely nothing?

I was recently on a call with one of my clients for a white paper project.

An outside “expert” was brought onto the call.

I began asking my questions.

I just published a new article, called "The 5 Secrets PPC Agencies Don’t Want You to Know". This article is part of  Search Engine Land’s new Strictly Business column, which covers topics related to B2B search marketing.

Here’s some cool news.

It looks like Microsoft is now starting to implement its adCenter Labs Video HyperLink Technology with real world clients. The first signs of this come this week as MSN Entertainment shows of Kohl’s department store using the Video HyperLink Technology, which is an interactive video tool which provides more information about objects in a video when you click or even hover on them.

Recently I wrote that whoever coded for Reputation 1.0 would own Web 3.0; this is the second part in a series that addresses the issues of "internet reputation"

Seems like web standards and accessibility are continuing to attract attention. Here are a few recent articles I’ve stumbled upon relating to web standards.

While I usually focus on organic web marketing or web analytics issues in this blog, today I want to talk about bid management. I could be wrong, but I have this sense that it is greatly underutilized in the market.

A little over a year ago we sold off a set of sites that we had been operating for a few years. The sites had a very strong organic traffic flow, but we also did a substantial amount of PPC on these sites – about $50K per month. Them there’s real dollars!