Want to drive more traffic to your site? Figure out a way to bust a lying snake of a famous best-selling author right in front of Oprah Winfrey. Okay, I know that’s probably harder than it sounds, but it worked for TheSmokingGun.com, whose traffic has been heavier than James Frey’s fat head on Jupiter.

After Nick Denton enticed Nick Douglas away from Blogebrity, it was learned that Douglas would be the scribe behind the then-unnamed Silicon Valley outpost of Denton’s Gawker empire.

UPI is reporting that General Motors has canned Tony Kowaleski as its top PR executive and convinced former GM communicator Steve Harris to come back and improve GM’s battered image.

Yahoo has announced that, in partner ship with IFilm, it will have this year’s always interesting Super Bowl commercials available on Yahoo Video shortly after the end of the big game.

When Wall Street’s darling stock plummets upon missed earnings estimates, folks tend to concentrate so much on the recent numbers, they miss the subtleties of side comments on the future.

Andy Rutledge does a superb job redesigning the Google.com homepage, managing to keep what works in the clean white-space interface, while bringing true structure to the page and giving it a more modern sheen.

During its earnings announcement, Google noted how higher than expected taxes caused the company to miss Wall Street expectations.

The company behind the Hydralinks technology has moved its user-generated content search engine into public view.

Andy Rutledge believes he’s come up with a better looking interface for the Google homepage.

Matt Cutts was recently interviewed on WebmasterRadio.fm’s SEO Rockstars show with Oilman and Webguerrilla.

Microsoft has said it will carry out 18 technology projects in Portugal as a way of boosting the country’s lagging economy.

I had to make a decision today, and I believe I made the right one. Since I installed the Google Toolbar version 4, IE7 has been wonky.

The Google Reader team have issued an update. The main new feature is a drop-down that gives you quick access to all of your labels, but the keyboard access to the same feature is a cooler: a dark gray overlay that appears when you hit g, then l.

In theory, there are good reasons behind this, but financially its just plain stupid.

cNet (news.com) has come up with another clever contest using imagery from Google Earth.. funny, I could have sworn that clipping and reposting images from Google Earth on a commercial website was against the terms of use??

After making version 3 of the AdWords API available, with new support for content bidding, Google had to revert to the previous version a day later.

Gawker recently launched ValleyWag, a gossip blog for the Silicon Valley area.

The Google AdWords Professionals program is now available for non-U.S. companies.

I’m a stickler for organization and orderliness. That’s why my online (and more generally my tech) life is propelling me to a digital breakdown.

The Los Angeles Fire Department’s blog, produced by the LAFD PR team (as reported by Steve Rubel), has prompted an LA blogger to call on the Los Angeles Police Department and the Sheriff’s Department to follow suit.

Okay, ladies and gents, time to put on your thinking caps. Andy Beal asks, “What if Google made cola?” and asks for opinions on it. Submit it to the Search Engine Roundtable forum or comment below.

It sure is getting easy to blaspheme these days. An AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) user lost his religion about the company’s new slogan, an apparent scrambling of the letters AIM into I AM.” The user calls the slogan “blasphemy” and a “vulgar sin of offence.”

The user-generated content republic has implemented three small changes to Digg’s functionality for its devoted user base.

Danny Sullivan points to a survey that shows Google advertisers say they found their ads more effective than Yahoo and (much more than) MSN.