I had the chance to interview Matt Cutts this week about personalization and it’s impact on the SEO industry. Excerpts from the interview and some additional commentary are in my Just Behave column on Search Engine Land today. As promised, here is the full transcript of the interview:

AdWatcher is an all-in-one tool that monitors your ad campaigns for fraudulent activity, helps you track your Return on Investment (ROI), and manages your online advertising from one place.

Boris Mordkovich, Co-Founder and Director of Operations at MordComm, the company that develops Adwatcher, kindly agreed to answer a few of my questions:

Usability measures how satisfactory the user will find the experience of using a product or service. It’s as appropriate for newspapers as it is for coffee makers.

Managing keywords is a daunting task, and while there are a
number of places from which you can pull keyword lists, whittling that list
down to specific targets of value is often nonplussing and discouraging.

Luckily, there are some philanthropic souls out there
willing to help out. Recently, Aaron Wall, author of SEObook.com, created and
made available a “Keyword List Cleaner Tool” that helps organize
those vision-blurring lists.

The annual report filed by Google with the SEC reveals hefty revenues, its thoughts on Yahoo and Microsoft, and the potential for its multi-billion dollar business to suddenly go pancake-shaped in certain circumstances.

Sony’s recent dust-up with gaming blog Kotaku over their publication of a Playstation rumor ended up being handled much more quickly than their previous public relations blunders.

An Ohio woman is suing Yahoo for $20 million claiming the company used a photograph of her to promote their email services without her permission.

Two nights ago I got upset about something and did one of the two curious things I tend to do when I get

Countries such as China are slowly beginning to allow outside Internet influences to establish a presence within the nation

Social networking site Facebook is fast becoming the place to be for 17-to-25-year-olds according to a recent quarterly survey by Youth Trends. Close to 70 percent of females ages 17-25 say Facebook is their first site of choice.

 MySpace trailed with 38 percent of females preferring the site and 22 percent favoring YouTube.

In a move that seems to run contrary to recent trends, YouTube has actually come to an agreement with a major content provider. The BBC announced on Friday that it has struck a deal with the popular video-sharing site that will see the UK based broadcasting company share in advertising revenue generated by YouTube traffic.

The company’s Express editions of products like Visual Studio have been available for several months.

Handing powerful tools to novice developers without a training option left them dependent on other resources to learn how to use them.

Annalee Newitz engaged in a test of Digg’s ability to withstand a paid effort to boost a story to Digg’s front page, and has earned her some pointed barbs from the blogosphere.

Lists are good and bad. They

I’ve spoken before about how the Internet turns marketing into a conversation. Lots of people have. But it’s not a new idea. In fact, I was lucky enough to work with one of the people that figured it out first, although I frankly didn’t grasp the significance of what he was saying at the time.

In a press release, Vantage Media has announced that it has concluded a $70 million Series A preferred financing that is led by  Montgomery & Co. Scale Venture Partners. Two others who participated in the round were Tudor Ventures and Integral Capital Partners.

Despite the many bold claims by Digg execs that the popular tagging site can easily spot attempts to game the system, Wired.com proves that it can be done – and quite easily too.

I

TechNet Ajax web casts have a ton of Ajax related training videos that can help out security folks, and developer folks better yet, it’s all free.

If you have never used or taken a TechNet web cast, and if you are interested in Ajax, and what Ajax can do for you, this is a great place to start to get your feet wet. The link is here.

In a great post over at PSFK – Piers publishes the content of a conversation he had with Julie Cordua, the VP of Marketing for the often talked about Product (RED) social marketing campaign.  

Near the end of 2006 Yahoo officially unveiled the new back end for Yahoo Marketing Solutions, widely referred to as the

Last week I read an article that blasted Rand for an article he wrote pointing out the differences between expert and novice SEOs. While I agree with everything written in that article, I think the author could, and should, have taken a better approach.

If you are lucky, your parents have taught you to always be honest with people. Or you want to do that on your own. Nowadays, being honest in business will always mean that you will get better business in the long run.

Why be honest?

In business, being honest means that you will inform anyone you are communicating of an objective, true state of things about you. This will not only set the right level of expectations with the other person (hopefully), but will consequently make it clear for you, whether the person is ready to do business with you.

It