Rand Fishkin recently put up a post titled: Wasting Time or Clearly Incompetent – The SEO Consulting Debate. In it Rand refers to a post by Brian Provost at ScoreBoard Media Group titled: The First Question You Should Ask Your SEO Consultant. Brian has since published an update titled: Attack of the SEOmoz Clones: More Thoughts On SEO Consulting.

Don’t like to get lost? MapQuest has announced upgrades to its "Send to Cell’ service that will allows users to create driving directions and maps at their PC and send them to any Web-enabled cell phone.

Looks like Windows Live Hotmail M10 is not far from being on the way, and with this new release brings some new changes:

There’s another flurry of ‘Newspapers Are Dead‘ posts this weekend. Dave Winer seemed to have triggered this by his post on the troubles at the San Francisco Chronicle. Robert Scoble has taken up the theme as he did some months ago. Even the Google Guys and Dave Barry have voiced the same views in the past.

AdSense advertisers have even more incentive to use Google Checkout for payment processing. Each time a new buyer signs up for a Checkout account and makes a new purchase, the referring party will receive a monetary bonus.

Social targeting is quickly becoming a benchmark with advertisers and publishers… not because it is a key to the golden gates of marketing 101, but because online consumers are adopting search behaviors to understand where they will find like-minded people. This adoption curve is creating thriving and multiplying social circles that are interconnected on the basis of common interest.

The press are an evil bunch:- they phone you when you are busy, ask you lots of difficult questions, try to trip you up or squeeze something juicy out of you, wasting lots of your time, and the buggers rarely give you a citation or a link for your efforts.

Yahoo! allows paid inclusion members to buy quick links in the search results and indexes sites more fully if they use Yahoo! for their site search. While neither of these may seem like a big deal they both are.

I just deleted about 10,000 comment spams from a blog. What could one learn from going through all that spam?

A user of the Yelp social network managed to add an image to a Google Maps info box displayed for Microsoft’s Redmond headquarters that the company probably would not have chosen for itself.

One of my main beliefs about blogging and marketing is that the title always matters.  It matters in selling a book, driving clickthroughs on blog posts or emails, on placing effective keyword marketing, and the list goes on and on.  For just about everything you can do with marketing, choosing the right title is a big deal. 

The firms I talk to about community building seem to fall into two categories – those that want a Web community right now, and those that question the very value of communities.