Feedster will launch the Japanese version of its RSS and blog search engine soon, according to Feedster President Chris Redlitz. Feedster recently received funding to do so from Japanese investment firm Mitsui and Co., and the move will also help another future transition into the Chinese market by the end of the year at the earliest.

One of my readers writes in that Nike has launched a basketball weblog!

Everyone has heard that content is king when it comes to search engine optimization and just good old plain web site marketing smarts.

Internet researcher eMarketer forecasts that the total US audience for podcasts could reach 25 million by 2008, and perhaps 50 million by 2010.

Keith O’Brien at PR Week has an interview with digg’s Jay Adelson.

The US Patent Office delivered something even sweeter than chocolate to web development company owner Neil Balthaser on Valentine’s Day: a rich-media patent that could be worth millions of dollars.

Seven former Yahoo engineers left the portal company to work for mobile games company MForma, and Yahoo has accused them of walking out the door with trade secrets.

Sony Ericsson and Google have made a deal that will place Google’s search and its Blogger software on upcoming mobile phone models.

Technorati has launched a new Top 100 list.

The Virtual Earth team at MSN has managed to go from concept to launch in a matter of weeks with their on-the-street perspective of Seattle and San Francisco.

Some guy named Steve Jobs was on stage this morning announcing stuff for some computer company in Cupertino.

I’m way behind on stuff I’d planned to write (and read) and am also now partially sleep deprived thanks to weird schedule gyrations, SES New York, and The Fire Alarm From Hell at the Sheraton (a story for later). So take this with a grain of salt or two.

I met briefly with Chris Tolles from Topix.net this afternoon. We had talked a bit back in December at the Chicago SES. At that point, Topix was on the verge of a couple of fairly substantial changes so I figured I’d swing by their booth and see how things were working out.

A public beta test of Microsoft’s social listing service, Expo Live, debuted online today to stake out the company’s claim on the classifieds market.

Those all-important search engine rankings you desire for your website could be in peril if you utilize duplicate content that runs afoul of search engine guidelines.

I was in the ‘Search Pundits’ session this morning here at Search Engine Strategies in New York. Basically, you had Robert Scoble, Matt Cutts, Jeremy Zawodny, Zia Daniell Wigder and David Vise sitting up front with Danny Sullivan moderating questions from the audience.

CBS Radio filed suit today against Howard Stern for $500 million for breach of contract and fraud.

Today, via the Internet, Windows Live Local is offering up a limited Technical Preview of street-side’ a new feature that Microsoft is building for its Windows Live Local consumer local search and mapping site.

Last night the Ask.com party named Code Red was full of interesting people and a few stormtroopers here and there.

Eric Schwartzman separately interviewed my new teammate Phil Gomes and I and mashed it up into a big podcast.

A variety of scams, fraudsters, and software tools could contribute to as much as a billion dollars of fake click activity each year.

Though uses for Java continue to expand, the threats do as well. Kaspersky Labs reported a Trojan called RedBrowser making the rounds, targeting Java capable cell phones. While this Trojan is annoying, it easily stopped.

AdAge has released its annual data factpack (PDF).

I read with some amusement (and agreement) Tom Foremski’s rant titled Die! Press release! Die! Die! Die!.