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Why the Mainstream Media’s Still Important
Google is willing to give sites like Forbes a top ranking for keywords like SEO just because they published a recent article mentioning the topic. In a world where Google is closing more holes, them opening up the organic results to news sites is a treat to public relations firms.

TiVo Launches Search For Broadband Users

DVR innovator TiVo has announced a new Universal Swivel Search feature for its broadband users, which allows them to search broadband, cable, and broadcast programming.

The Google Kool Aid
Tamar linked to an interesting WebmasterWorld thread, Todays Webmaster & Their Relationship with Google, this week. The original poster makes some good points about how we’ve fallen under Google’s spell, spend too much of our energy focused on Google, think that Google’s guidelines are what define ethical seo, and give Google access to more data than we should.

Congress Adds Bloggers To Press Protections
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The US Government is recognizing the citizen blogosphere’s function in the operation of the press by introducing new legislation to offer bloggers the same protections as traditional journalists.

EconSM – Social Media Meets Mobile Media

Session Description: "Social media is changing the most social of devices, the mobile phone, at a time when more and more mobile devices aren’t just phones anymore. Just as PCs replaced minicomputers and laptops displaced desktops, we are seeing the beginning of handheld devices doing much of what full-fledged computers used to do. Handheld devices are the key to the next generation of social media; we’ll explore the ramifications of this switch.

Performancing Metrics Back

A rising star in the blog web analytics space over the last year or so was Performancing Metrics. Performancing ended up having some problems and ended up selling off the metrics and community aspect of their business to SplashPressMedia.

Googler Games Google; Cutts Goes Silent
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A week after Google’s Matt Cutts set the SEO world ablaze by asking webmasters to report cases of link-buying, his area of the Googleplex is decidedly silent – and so is the media relations department regarding a double-dipping Google executive’s association with a questionable made-for-AdSense company.

Will Blogosphere Force Amazon to Withdraw Lawsuit?
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has been caught saying one thing and doing another. According to ZDNet, while Bezos was chatting at the Web 2.0 conference and promoting his company’s S3 hosting service to the crowd, he was quietly suing the pants off of Alexaholic.

The SEO Playbook (Welcome to the Rabbit Hole)

SEO is about more than meta tags, title tags, and targeted anchor text. Call it "competitive webmastering", "SEO", or any one of a slew of other titles – it is the thought process of lateral thinking and understanding of website creation and marketing combined that matters most.

Cutting MyBlogLog Spam

Social traffic is fantastic because:

      • It’s highly targeted
      • It’s immediate
      • It’s low cost and often free

The downside is because of it’s interactive nature (which contributes to it’s virality), spam marketers will always try to flood you, and drown out your message with their spam.

This includes, but is not limited to:

Perspectives on Link Buying

I like to buy links. In fact, I love to buy links. As powerful and relevant as possible. The more they are such, the more they will help search engine rankings. Search engine rankings help sales. I love to buy sales even more than I like to buy links. I love to scale this process too. I am a capitalist. Capitalist theory may have it’s downfalls, but overall it has served our country pretty well. I think a case could be made for just about any link on the web being purchased in one way or another. You can read my thoughts on not being a link communist here.

Mountain or Molehill: Reporting Paid Links to Google

Google has announced increased counter-measures will be put in place to neutralise the practice of buying links which game the ranking algorithms.

For many years webmasters and SEOs have indulged in buying links to boost the rankings of their sites in Google’s SERPs. This practice became especially prevalent as Google increased the link relevance in their ranking algorithm.

Microsoft Stops Filling Search Boxes

MSN UK was running an experiment where they pre-filled the search box with “of the day” popular terms, such as “Apprentice BBC” or “Cricket World Cup”, hoping it would prompt users to take advantage of the search box a little more. Well, after a few days, the experiment has been retired and dubbed a bad idea.

Global Link Authority & Subscription Data
Search engines, especially Google, place a lot of trust on Global domain authority when computing their relevancy scores. If a page is on a trusted site it automatically gets a boost in relevancy scores. Premium content providers know that Google needs them so they take advantage of their market position.

Google Flushes New Internet Service
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Google showed its humorous side yesterday as the company launched Google TiSP a supposed free wireless broadband service that operated through users plumbing systems.

Bullying & Cyberbullying

Bullying is a serious issue. It makes people feel bad, makes them do things that they might not necesarily want to do, and forces people’s hands. Cyberbullying is worse – it takes all those things, puts them online in blogs or journals or social networks, and ramps it up a level via emails, Twitters and text messaging, and instant messages.

Indian Wi-Fi Mesh Spun Using Google

The citizens of Mumbai, India may soon be blessed with a wireless mesh network that should blanket the city.  And although Lifestyle Networks and its managing director, Abhishek Javeri, are behind this development, Mumbai’s citizens will also owe a thank-you to Google.

The Self Serving Agenda of Search Engines
Andrew Goodman recently posted about SEO industry reputation woes, but the real reason for the problem is the self serving agenda of search engines. Don’t underestimate the marketing of the search engines, which outside of their own link buying and selling, generally like to hint at this equation SEO = spam.

Choosing a CMS to Build Your Website
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Nothing irks a non-tech savvy person so much as an “opportunity” to manage his website him- or herself: creating each page individually from a template, copying the file to the FTP server, placing links from other pages manually and what not.

That’s what keeps content management systems alive: they make the whole process of building and managing website easy for a non-developer type of person. In this post, you can learn how to choose the right content management for yourself and your website.

Ups and Downs of Socializing Content

There are many ups and downs to adding a user generated content section to a site. It has been interesting watching the effects of SEOMoz’s user generated content and points systems.

Kucinich Takes Impeachment Plea To YouTube
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Well, it seemed bound to happen eventually. Politicians have officially transitioned from YouTube campaign speeches to YouTube soapboxes – sorry, Microsoft owns Soapbox, it’ll have to called something else.

Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) is the latest US Congressman/presidential candidate to take his message to YouTube. Only this is isn’t a plea to "chat" or to vote for him in 2008, it’s a call for Americans to get behind impeachment of George W. Bush.

Social Media and Support Communities

Social Media is a hot phrase currently. It’s an extension of the idea implicit in that Times Magazine selection of YOU (that’s all of us) as Person Of The Year in 2006.