Due to popular demand, blinkx.com founder and CTO Suranga Chandratillake is launching a video search engine optimization wiki along with VSEO guidelines for advertisers and content producers looking to break away from traditional text-based SEO.

According to a story on Wall Street Journal, the deal between Yahoo! and AT&T worth $250mn/year is at stake. Clearly, Yahoo! is not in a shape to accept such a major loss of revenue and might dip below red. In fact, the company has already suffered 5% of its market capitalization due to the reports of “renegotiations.”

The U.S. Postal Service is promoting its "USPS.com Week" to let consumers know of the many options they have for doing business online and that they can "skip the trip" to the Post Office. The Postal Service’s Web site offers almost three- dozen services that are available online.

Recently, I came across this post at Read/WriteWeb about Technorati’s declining traffic. Evidently, Google BlogSearch has overtaken Technorati.

Rumors have been mounting over the past two months surrounding the existence of the fabled Google phone, a device that the mobile community has anticipated with baited breath for some time now. As more details come to light concerning the alleged Google phone, one wonders if Apple views the device as a legitimate competitor to the iPhone.

Question: I recently purchased a website at mydomain.somecompany.com as a store to sell somecompany.com’s products and was wondering if the site had any value, and how I could do SEO on the site if I couldn’t change the content?

Answer: Many companies sell the right to resell their products online, but most of them that require you to use their domain or subdomain for your stores are probably selling junk. Truth be told, I have got similar questions from other people who told me that customer support at some of these firms charged for site customization, and even started off many question sequences with how much room is left on your credit card.

After paying $1 million to purchase the rights to the Topix.com domain, Topix.net CEO Rich Skrenta now has to deal with a couple of daily realities in the search world: changing domains could cause a dropoff in search engine-driven traffic, and Google isn’t exactly Nordstrom or L.L. Bean when it comes to customer service.

The LA Times reports that thousands of bloggers are writing sponsored posts touting such diverse topics as diamonds, digital cameras and drug clinics. The bloggers are spurred by new marketing middlemen such as PayPerPost that connect advertisers with mom-and-pop webmasters.  Thanks to Daily Dog for this item.

Why should there be concern about this practice?

In addition to their acquisiton of Five Across, which makes social-networking and forum software to help companies improve their internet marketing strategy and their communications with customers, Cisco sealed a deal this week to purchase software assets from, and acquire employees of, social-networking site operator Utah Street Networks.

Jakob Nielsen is an authority on usability; "the elegance and clarity with which the interaction with a computer program or a web site is designed" (Wikipedia). His tips are always worth reading and often worth implementing into your own website(s) whenever applicable.

Sometimes it’s helpful to translate a word in Google into other languages you don’t speak, and then search Google Images for it.

Digg’s Kevin Rose was interviewed for the latest issue of Search Marketing Standard (an interesting magazine, by the way), and the topic touched on the subject of moderation again. Quote Kevin:

Digg does not use any moderators other than the 700,000 registered users that participate in Digg. That is the value of the Digg system. We have two people on staff that ensure that the Digg Terms of Use are not violated.

I got an email today from O’Reilly today about the MySQL Conference (coming up at the end in April), it looks like a pretty good conference, but one of the sessions caught my eye. It was called A Storage Engine for Amazon S3.

Danny Sullivan informs about a Wall Street Journal article, Google gains on goal of controlling and targeting TV commercials. WSJ reports, “Google Inc. has established a toehold in pursuing of one its next big ambitions: controlling which television ads viewers see and tailoring them to consumers’ interests.” 

The Mountain View, Calif., company honed the highly profitable Internet model of search advertising — that is, selling ads targeted directly at consumers based on the terms they enter into Web search engines. Last year, the eight-year-old company racked up more than $10 billion of revenue by brokering online ads for itself and its partners.