Essentially, that’s a nice repurposing of content that will be pure profit, something print publications need a little of these days. Consider this one of the early moves of a major print publications to evolve in a digital environment.

Newsweek will publish the collections as four different books, one devoted to each of the candidates in the Presidential race: Sens. Joe Biden, John McCain, and Barack Obama, and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who could stand to improve her reading comprehension.

The ebooks can be ordered today, but won’t be available until Wednesday. They will sell for $9.99 each.

"We have reported deeply and written searchingly about these candidates, and the Kindle platform has created the opportunity to give readers something with the breadth of a political biography, but with digital immediacy," said Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham. "This is a vote for the kind of content we produce well, and which means so much to readers."
 

Robert Cox of the Media Bloggers Association (MBA) said The Ruckus "places Newsweek on the cutting edge of this campaign season’s online political dialogue."

Nine bloggers from an assortment of sites will contribute to the blog, as noted in the announcement about The Ruckus:

John Amato, crooksandliars.com;
Faye Anderson, andersonatlarge.typepad.com;
Dean Barker, bluehampshire.com;
Adam Fogle, palmettoscoop.com;
Joe Gandelman, themoderatevoice.com;
James Joyner, outsidethebeltway.com;
Ed Morrissey, captainsquartersblog.com;
Oliver Willis, oliverwillis.com;
and Chris Woods, bleedingheartland.com

"We think ‘The Ruckus’ will help introduce readers to a new array of voices and will encourage enlightened political discourse as the ’08 race steps into high gear," Deidre Depke, editor of Newsweek.com, said in a statement.

The cross-section of posts on the site presents an opening paragraph from a participating blogger. To read more, the visitor hits a link that goes to the blog’s home. This arrangement looks fair: Newsweek benefits from the added content, and bloggers receive visitors from links on The Ruckus.

Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, and Barack Obama occupy the thoughts of bloggers currently atop The Ruckus’ posts at press time. This aggregator should serve nicely at exposing Newsweek.com visitors to a swath of varied opinions during the run-up to Election ’08.

Google’s algorithmic choice of imagery? A pair of rhesus monkeys.

Ouch.

It also happened with departing Merrill Lynch CEO Stanley O’Neal. Both men, prominent African-American executives, seemingly tagged by Google News in an exceptionally unfortunate way.

“The selection and placement of stories on this page were determined automatically by a computer program,” reads the disclaimer at the bottom of Google News. Google’s reaction to the misbehaving algorithm, as noted by Newsweek, is almost as surprising as the image matching that took place:

Google acknowledges the situation, but declined to openly discuss details of the primate episode. Surprisingly, it was even unwilling to go on record and explicitly disavow any racist motivation. “While we don’t comment on individual stories on Google News,” spokesman Gabriel Stricker told NEWSWEEK, “crawling thousands of sites across the globe is a complicated task, and we’re confident that the quality of the crawled pages is extremely good for the vast majority of news sources on our site.” In an oblique nod to the problem, he cites the need for “more work to be done,” adding, “we’re always working on improvements to Google News to ensure that the experience for all of our users … continues to be great.”

Other stories about different topics likewise generated odd images to match. All of these images come from Reuters, but why those particular images caused such havoc for Google News isn’t known.

Are Google/Apple AdWords Afoot?

Others spoke of Apple’s forthcoming iTV. But also, we should be prepared for a major advertising partnership. The scoop comes from Valleywag’s Nick Douglas:

If that’s true, and it seems awfully likely, then Google will add Apple to an impressive list of advertising partnerships recently disclosed.

Google has a billion-dollar arrangement with the Web’s hottest property, MySpace.com, and recently inked a deal with eBay. Adding iTunes would be one mean trifecta.

According to Newsweek, there may also be a cooperation for Apple’s iTV, still in development. iTV, according to the article, will be a “sushi tray” sized machine for connecting the Web to TV.

Google is speculated to be working on an agreement to deliver Google Video content to the device. If there’s already an ad partnership in the works, expect them to appear on iTV too.

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Two interviews in one day? Well, the repsonse to my queries to interviewees has been fantastic. Plus, Rand has received some excellent attention in the media recently.

First, congratulations on the Newsweek article and for getting Slashdotted, twice in such a short period of time!

I remember reading in the Search Engine Watch forums a while back about how you were considering attending the Search Engine Strategies conference. It seemed shortly after you were explaining Google patents with Dr. Garcia on a SES panel. The growth of your visibility and involvement in the industry is impressive.

Lee: Please describe your background and how did you get involved with search engine optimization?

Rand: As folks may know from that Newsweek article, I work with my Mom (Gillian). I actually joined her company in 1997 and over time, it became a different firm. We got into webdev in the ’90s and then usability and were working with an SEO firm who simply wasn’t doing a good job. They never even mentioned to us the concept of link popularity!

To make a long story short, we started doing it ourselves and have barely looked back. As far as the SEO community, I got an invite to SES NYC from Danny last year, accepted and have been getting more and more involved in the SEO/M community ever since. I really like going to the conferences, blogging, following the forums – it’s become a second job. I owe an absurd debt of gratitude to so many people in this industry. I’m humbled with every link and every mention – it’s been incredibly rewarding working in this industry – not just monetarily.

Lee: You offer an abundance of information and tools on search engine optimization on the SEOmoz.org web site. Some SEO’s offer very little how-to information. How does being so informative about how SEO works with documents like “The Beginner’s Guide to SEO”, play into your marketing strategy?

Rand: Well, our marketing strategy is really about serving our existing clients – folks like Avatar and Shoe-Store. We’re not currently looking to add clients, so it plays very well. We do help companies with consulting and speaking – that sort of thing, so being the expert by offering those resources is certainly helpful in that respect.

Lee: You’ve been very effective at documenting what works and what doesn’t. You’ve also been successful and breaking down documents like Google patent applications into digestible and meaningful bits. How important is it to understand search engine algorithms like HITS and PageRank for successful search engine optimization?

Rand: Hmmm Well, HITS and PageRank are a bit dated. I think what’s truly important is understanding how search engines work and how IR researchers and search engineers think. Those documents can help you get a feel for the thought process and the ideas behind search engine rankings and that’s what’s really necessary. Reading every patent or algorithm can be overkill (even I like to just skim or read Bill Slawski’s analysis). It’s a personal question for each SEO. Jill Whalen is an exceptionally good SEO and I know she won’t touch a patent or white paper from the IR field.

My favorite example of this is actually what Mike Grehan said on a panel we shared in Toronto: “Someday a client is going to ask, well, how do search engines work?” and you’re going to say, “well, I don’t know, they just do.” It was his way of prodding people to learn more about IR and search technology and that’s where I stand on the issue, too.

Lee: Rules for SEO change often. Also, with an abundance of forums, blogs and conferences, there’s also the opportunity for abundant mis-information. What are some of the most common misconceptions you hear and what advice do you have for new SEO practitioners that want to stay current with accurate information?

Rand: Keyword density is my big pet peeve. It’s just a silly idea that search engines would use this to rank pages, when term vector theory has existed since before there were commercial search engines. There’s also still a remarkable amount of misinformation about how content or keyword placement or when and how often “submission” take place, etc. I don’t know that we’ll ever break through all of those issues, but I’d like to make it so whenever someone starts researching SEO, they get a clear, concise, accurate understanding of how SEs rank documents and how SEOs help documents rank.

Lee: In the Newsweek article, the writer alludes to the “dark side” of SEO. It seems every article I see about SEO seems obligated to use the good/bad side angle. You don’t see that on articles about creative direct marketing or public relations. What do you think the SEO community can do, to upgrade its image?

Rand: Get out of the tech space. Seriously, I think that the news outlets of the world have taken to viewing technology (no matter the forum) as having a good and bad side – virus writers and anti-virus programs, spam and spam blockers, pop-ups and toolbars and spyware and a thousand others. The Internet’s common perception is dominated by this type of thinking, and I don’t know that there’s a real way for SEO to escape it.

I’m also not convinced it’s entirely bad for us. Having a dark side makes us more interesting, more newsworthy and more “sexy”. There’s nothing wrong with a little panache and style accompanying hard work and talent.

Lee: What popular SEO tactics do you see becoming outdated in the next 12 months? Do you think personal search factors will increase in importance? i.e. Bookmarks, My Web, Personalized Search, etc.

Rand: Bookmarks – I’d cite Yahoo’s acquisition of del.icio.us as a sign that personal tagging and social bookmarking may be in the sites of search engineers. However, if they look closely, they’ll see that the communities are too “geek”-focused, and that other sources of data will be necessary.

Personal Search – No. I just don’t see it taking off. We rely on search engines to give an authoritative view, not a personalized one and already the media is making personalization out to be an invasion of privacy, which I can empathize with. It may get a small share, but I don’t see it being a big factor in the long run.

Etc. – Absolutely. I think there are going to be changes in the next 12 months that we can’t predict and don’t know about now. After all, could anyone have predicted social bookmarking or map mashups or the web 2.0 hype a year before they started?

Lee: What are some improvements you’d like to see in the major search engines in terms of functionality and services?

Rand: Functionality – I’d like to see a greater focus on manual intervention. It may seem contrary to the industry, but if the want relevance, having thousands of reviewers sort through the SERPs is a great way to do it. Humans can see spam and low quality much better than automated systems and right now, there is a lot of inexpensive labor in the world and a lot of money in search engines’accounts.

Lee: What are some of the resources you rely on for information on search marketing: best practices, news, industry information.

Rand: I have an overwhelmingly big daily reading list, but I’ll give you a few of my favorites outside the mainstream (after all, everyone reads TW and SEW):

www.seo-scoop.com
www.jimboykin.com
www.stuntdubl.com
spaces.msn.com/members/search-science/
www.insearchofstuff.com
www.webguerrilla.com
www.davidnaylor.co.uk
www.oilman.ca
www.performacing.com
www.37signals.com/svn/
www.cre8pc.com/blog/

there’s plenty more makes me realize I need to update SEOmoz’s blogroll

Lee: What are your favorite search engines and do you use them the same way or differently?

Rand: I like a lot of Yahoo!’s results, but I’m actually someone who will use all 3 big ones and AskJeeves occasionally, too. I do have a preference for Yahoo!’s new beta maps, and I like Ask for instant answers. I use Google when I need to find something obscure and MSN for checking out competition – they tend to show a lot of folks who are working real hard at the grey/black hat link building techniques.

Lee: Do you wear the yellow shoes every day, or just at conferences and in magazine photo shoots?

Rand: Only at conferences and by request of the photographer. Brad (the reporter) heard about the shoes from Kim Krause (of cre8asiteforums.com) and asked me to wear them. They’re an SEO trademark -

Thank you Rand!

Lee Odden is President and Founder of
TopRank Online Marketing, specializing in organic SEO, blog
marketing and online public relations. He’s been cited as a search
marketing expert by publications including U.S. News & World Report and
The Economist and has implemented successful search marketing programs
with top BtoB companies of all sizes. Odden shares his marketing
expertise at Online Marketing Blog offering
daily news, interviews and best practices.

The idea to link from mainstream publication web sites for the Post and Newsweek looked like a big boost to blog search index Technorati, and a boon to bloggers seeking more readership.

But as with anything else, if someone can find a way to abuse the system for profit, the initiative has been corrupted with people who create blogs that consist solely of spam advertisements.

Newsweek lamented the practice in an article detailing why this happens:

Blog providers like Google’s Blogger see the problem first hand; spam blog impact on search engines poses a threat to the relevance of search results. “It’s due to the fact that readership of blogs has grown so much,” Jason Goldman, product manager of the Blogger division of Google, said of the growth of spam blogs.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.

“Users are finding alternatives to paid trade sources: mostly ad-supported content and user-created content from blogs.”

Hogwash.

OK, this research will come true if business to business publishers react like a deer in the blogosphere’s headlights.

But The Washington Post and Newsweek show one way to integrate blogs into online content to being a new, valuable dimension to a print magazine’s online presence. You don’t even have to create a blog in these scenarios.

Instead of reading this research, business to business publishers should be defining and analyzing their corners of the blogosphere. All it takes is a few search engines and some quality time online. This foundation will help them create a strategy on how they can integrate consumer-generated media into their publishing models.

The sheer volume of business to business trade shows are the most obvious untapped opportunity. Consumer-generated media, including temporary event blogs, should/will alter trade shows significantly:

* New product shots on Flickr
* Show daily podcasts with interviews
* Blog reports on key speeches and show floor buzz
* Incentivized research encouraging non-attendee participation
* Fun gimmicks like ranking the show’s best tchotchke giveaway

These ideas are just the tip of the iceberg and everyone involved in the show (publisher, organizer, exhibitor, attendee, non-attendee) can benefit.

TechWeb notes “trade companies are likely to continue acquiring online shopping, social networking, and blogging-related companies in an effort to expand their businesses online.” Well trade media is the original niche, or micro, media. Who better to take advantage of the blogosphere? Business to business is near and dear to my heart after 13 years working in this sector. I’m rooting for them.

Reader Comments…

Kevin Dugan is the author of the popular Strategic Public Relations blog. Kevin is Director of Marketing Communications for FRCH Design Worldwide.

Visit Kevin’s blog: Strategic Public Relations.

Congratulations, bloggers. You’ve just become contributing writers for Newsweek magazine. Technorati announced a deal on its web site that will see Newsweek feature its most blogged about content over a seven day period.

It’s a small step toward validation of the Internet as a medium, where the best opinions don’t always come from the printed pages of a massive media conglomerate. Technorati will have its name featured prominently on the Blog Roundup, which contains the top ten Newsweek stories linked to by bloggers. Also, a Technorati search box on the page gives readers an option to search Technorati’s index for more opinions on topics.

Bloggers may see this from a couple of different points of view. On the positive side, traffic from Newsweek to ad-supported blogs could help boost some of the more prolific and thoughtful publishers attain greater revenue and awareness. It wouldn’t be any surprise to see a blogger or two decide to follow Newsweek’s stories in an attempt to capitalize on the Blog Roundup.

Could some bloggers, whether for political or personal reasons, resent a connection to Newsweek? As a mainstream publication, there will be plenty of bloggers whose views don’t coincide with a Newsweek columnist or reporter opinion.

With plenty of room on the Internet for discourse, bloggers who can complement Newsweek’s content, either pro or against, should take the initiative to do so. Technorati’s Dave Sifry has made progress in opening the mainstream to the public. Let’s take advantage of the opportunity.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.

From Newsweek (Michael Isikoff and Holly Bailey):

“Gannon, whose real name is James Guckert, singled out Media Matters-a “well-funded” liberal group headed by longtime “attack dog” David Brock. (“Everything we wrote about him came from the public record,” Brock replied.)

…When President Bush called on him at a press conference last month-during which he asked a question with false info about Sen. Harry Reid-”nobody was more surprised than myself,” said Gannon.

Steve Rubel is a PR strategist with nearly 16 years of public relations, marketing, journalism and communications experience. He currently serves as a Senior Vice President with Edelman, the largest independent global PR firm.

He authors the Micro Persuasion weblog, which tracks how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the public relations practice.

According to Newsweek:

“Last week Karmazin took the helm of Sirius, the No. 2 firm in the rapidly growing satellite-radio industry. On the air for only three years, Sirius doesn’t post big subscriber numbers (about 700,000) or anything close to profits (it has gone through $2 billion to get up and running). But it has been prolific with headline-grabbing deals. In October it signed Karmazin’s top talent at Viacom, shock jock Howard Stern, to a five-year, $500 million contract.

Karmazin will collect a $1.25 million annual salary and $30 million in stock options, which, if recent performance is any guide, could be worth a lot. Sirius stock is up 35 percent this year. “This is a tremendous opportunity for me,” Karmazin says. “I love the radio business and I love small growth companies.” He also vows to overtake competitor XM: “We will be No. 1.” One hopes his plan will be better than his putting.”

The Motley Fool chimes in:

“Yet Sirius is a perfect fit for Karmazin. Succeeding at Sirius would mean that both XM (Nasdaq: XMSR) and Sirius will have nibbled away decisively at free radio’s market share, and that would sting his former company given its exposure to traditional commercial radio.

Having a prolific name at the helm also gives Sirius instant credibility. Karmazin’s contacts should help secure more big-name broadcasting talent interested in making the migration to satellite radio. It’s definitely been good for the shares of Sirius, as the stock was trading at $5.60 last night after Karmazin’s post was officially announced.”

“This is a perfect opportunity for me because I want to lead a growth company that can reshape the landscape of the radio business. I took Inifinity Broadcasting and Westwood One to leadership positions in the industry and am confident that Sirius will become a market leader in short order,” Karmazin commented to reporters.

Shares of Sirius Satellite Radio jumped almost 10 percent Friday as the Nasdaq’s most active stock on news that Mel Karmazin will become its chief executive officer at the end of the year.

Sticking it to his current over the air employer, earlier this week Howard Stern gave away 500 Sirius radios, as well as, around 20,000 Sirius gift certificates to thousands of fans in New York’s Union Square Park. Howard is set to move his top-rated radio show over to the satellite broadcaster beginning in January 2006, but rumors say it might be a lot sooner. Howard has mentioned numerous times on his radio show that he is receiving legal notices from Infinity to cease and desist discussing his move to Sirius.

Howard Stern is so popular that he propelled David Letterman into a rare ratings win over Jay Leno. “The Late Show” beat “The Tonight Show” nationally, snaring a 5.7 rating to Leno’s 5.4, according Nielsen Media Research. This popularity is what Sirius is counting on to sign up at least 1 million new paying subscribers.

Can this wild investment in personality and old radio experience pay off? Newsweek states:

“To make it all work, the prolific Stern will have to perform the same magic he did with his two best-selling books and his 1997 hit film “Private Parts.” In short, he’ll have to get his fans to pay for his shtick. For the deal to pay off, the self-styled “king of all media” needs to persuade at least 1 million fans to buy satellite radios (which start at about $150 in stores and $200 to get installed in a new car) and pay a monthly $12.95 subscription fee. Most analysts not only think that’s achievable but believe the Stern deal is already paying off in the crucial currency of buzz.”

“This made a statement to other radio talent and to everybody in the industry that Sirius is for real,” says Karmazin.”

Rich Ord is the CEO of iEntry, Inc. which publishes over 200 websites and email newsletters.

Rich also publishes his blog WebProBlog which focuses on internet business and marketing trends.