This week’s The Economist magazine includes a feature called Technology Quarterly in which an article titled “Dancing with Google’s spiders” describes various aspects (good/bad) of search engine optimization including a few quotes from Matt Cutts of Google. (quotes at Threadwatch)

If you are still trying to write system specifications in English then you are in trouble.

The maker of 3D creation package SketchUp, @Last Software of Boulder, CO, have been acquired for an undisclosed sum by Google.

To hear some people, you’d think business should abandon traditional communication channels and dive into social computing to deliver its messages and address its issues.

Delicious has quietly rolled out a redesign to their URL pages that offers some pretty rich information such as the URL’s bookmarking history, user notes, common tags and more.

Nick Wilson announced the debut in public beta of the Performancing Metrics service aimed at professional bloggers and their blogs.

One of the top resources we listed in our online reputation monitoring guide was Memorandum (which includes the excellent tech.memorandum).

Great news for Oodle, they’re getting a competitor in the form of new classified search engine, Vast.com.

Readers of Memeorandum’s political and technical blog news aggregators now have a third option for their viewing pleasure – the gleeful gossip grabber WeSmirch.com.

CNN is reporting breaking news…

Newsgator has acquired smartFeed, a startup that allows you to subscribe to and download podcasts directly on your phone or PDA.

Turns out Yahoo has its own cheat sheet, listing 32 input boxes giving you direct ways to use Yahoo Search features you may not know about.

For some time now I have noticed a large number of entries in my Apache error log.

Writing Covered Calls is a conservative strategy where you buy a stock that you would like to invest in and then write a call option against that stock.

Google. The effusive praise this deceptively low-key search engine elicits is maddening. I used to mock Google. Now I seemingly won’t go to the john without it.

We’re living in interesting times. With today’s release of Amazon.com’s S3 on-line storage service, we’re one step closer to the cheap on-line storage that so many don’t believe will be useful.

Google continues is roll-up of cool technologies with news that it has acquired @Last Software, makers of SketchUp.

Nick has just announced the availability of Performancing Mertrics, which he describes as “a professional grade blog statistics service aimed at professional bloggers.”

Alumni and fans alike will be able to purchase next-day access to condensed men’s college basketball broadcasts from iTunes for playback on the computer or a video iPod.

Seeing that MSN Spaces RSS feeds were having issues in Bloglines, looking like they were changing constantly due to dynamic elements, MSN Spaces introduced a new field to their feeds:

An alpha test of using RSS to deliver results from Google Video quietly began with a post to its newsgroup last week.

Dave Winer says he’s gonna give up his blog this year. That’s caused a lot of conversations here at SXSW. I’m still processing what that will mean for Dave. For me. For everyone.

“Da Da Da. Da Da Da.” Not to be confused with The Police song “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da” from 1983′s ZENYATTA MONDATTA album.

Shel and I had quite a robust discussion about the Wal-Mart and Edelman blogger relations campaign yesterday in show #119 of FIR: The Hobson & Holtz Report.