A lot of questions were tossed Googler Matt Cutts’ way at PubCon in Las Vegas. iEntry Inc.’s Mike McDonald and CEO Rich Ord were there pitching a few of their own. Here’s a transcript of that question and answer session.

In his first appearance at the conference, Beal reflected on his “dumbass decision” to give over the keys to Search Engine Lowdown, and jokingly asked the audience at his talk to change their links from SEL to his new Marketing Pilgrim site.

Thank God OSM (Open Source Media) launched today. Now I won’t have to decide for myself which blogs are written by the Internet’s brightest minds.

The Yahoo Publisher Network has begun to make advertising for placement in RSS feeds available as a new feature for site publishers.

It could be networking, it could be VoIP, but whatever it is, data communication and networking firm Equant is definitely chatting with the search engine company.

The keyword in this phrase gives us a hint – “competitive”. The competitive marketing analysis is an in-depth study of your businesss competition and the markets available to you in order to ensure your advertising and public relations budget dollars are spent where they will be most effective.

The gap between big media and micro media is narrowing.

For the past couple of days, I’ve been playing with Flock, the new web browser. Not so much for its capabilities as a browser – and it is pretty good at that – but more its capability as a blog editing tool.

According to a recent poll from Yahoo! Small Business, consumers will be turning to the Internet for their holiday shopping needs to offset gas prices, for increased convenience, and for hard to find items. Nearly two-thirds of holiday shoppers said niche stores were their best bets for finding unique gifts.

The webmaster-friendly project started by Google over the summer has its own blog and some new features available for its users.

Google Sitemaps makes a tool available that lets site publishers create a map Google’s spiders can use to more effectively index its content. On the official Google Blog, Grace Kwak posted about some new features in the Sitemaps service.

With the launch of Google Analytics, there was some speculation in regard to whether the data collected through the program could impact search results or raise privacy concerns. According to Google insider Matt Cutts, neither is probable. And yes, Virginia, there is a Sandbox, kind of.

Thanks to executive blogs and internet video, the dark ages are back, according to an article in The Independent yesterday.

Remember the “Good Housekeeping Seal?”

Once Google discarded the Urchin label, renamed the service Google Analytics, and ended the fees it charges, several firms felt the ripples of the search engine company cannonballing into their swimming pool.

Chasing Google on the business PC, Microsoft has updated its Windows Desktop Search product with support for installation via System Management Server.

I have a peeve about MySQL. Oh, not about MySQL directly: it’s great. I love it, it’s wonderful, no complaints. It’s the people who use it when they don’t need to that get me shaking my head and talking to myself.

Creators of Asynchronous Javascript and XML applications can obtain a beta release of the Opera Platform software development kit to use in building web applications for mobile phones.

As Google stock approaches $400 per share, the Central Intelligence Agency has decided to get while the getting is good. The CIA’s venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel, announced a plan sale of Google stock on November 4th.

Rumors about a possible CNet acquisition have begun to swirl, with Viacom once again the central figure with the big checkbook poised to buy the company.

Podtrac, a new podcast advertising company, has teamed up with Mediamark Research Inc. (MRI), a provider of magazine audience and multimedia research company, to provide advertisers and podcasters with demographic information about listeners to help them make better advertising choices.

Ever since Google’s “inadvertent” debut of base.google.com, all we’ve had are a few screenshots and a recursive login screen to keep us busy, but that could change in the next few hours.

As many TypePad users know, the hosted blog service has been a literal nightmare to use in recent months.