The Star Wars Saga carries arguably the largest fan base of any one particular work of fiction. Fanboys and uber-geeks have made the Internet their platform to engage in endless debates surrounding topics such as the exact specifications of the X-Wing Starfighter to whether or not the destruction of the first Death Star was an inside job.

The most valuable thing that you have when you’re marketing online is your time. Every second that passes means money that you have either made, or let go by. When it comes to marketing on the internet, no matter how good your product is, and how spectacularly you present it, if it isn’t seen by anyone, it will all be for naught. Therefore, everybody who intends to achieve success online must therefore become somewhat of an online marketing expert.

Having co-workers that do public relations, they seem to have timing down. They know when to put out press releases for the most coverage, when the best time to call people is and what time is optimal to send out an email campaign to get the most responses. So that got me wondering, when is the best time to blog?

I had the chance to interview Matt Cutts this week about personalization and it’s impact on the SEO industry. Excerpts from the interview and some additional commentary are in my Just Behave column on Search Engine Land today. As promised, here is the full transcript of the interview:

Is search engine optimization a waste of time? According to one man in the UK it is.

Anthony Fallon, CEO of Warrington Web Works, a UK Web Publishing company says that search engine optimization is both a waste of time and money to businesses and he can support his argument with proof.

Work overload, and the accompanying stress of not having enough hours in the day, is a major problem for many business owners and managers. Not only is the issue of feeling snowed under by too much work an issue for entrepreneurs and exectives, it’s getting worse. Some business people are left to dream of adding magical hours to their clocks as a last resort.

On the whole, Google’s search properties are doing well – a recent analysis showed a 24% year-over-year improvement. There’s a lot of variation among those properties, however. Google Video was the clear winner, with a gain of 545%, but Froogle, Google Alerts, and Google Local all suffered losses.

JupiterResearch, a firm that provides information on the impact of the Internet and consumer technologies on business, has found that executives operating very small businesses or micro-business executives are unique when it comes to their online behavior when compared to other online users and business executives.

A little CPU could go a long way toward making inroads on several medical research fronts, including cancer, muscular dystrophy, and AIDS, and IBM promotes its World Community Grid to help with that.

Although content is important when you are trying to leverage social media sites like Netscape or Digg, the story title used for the submission maybe as important if not more important. Here are a few types of titles that I have found to be effective.

1. Increase Your [Blank] within [short time period]

Steve Rubel wrote:

"The page view is on life support. It fails to capture all of the myriad of ways consumers engage in online activities without ever leaving a web page. To get a feel for this, spend some time playing with Yourminis. So what will replace it and when will that happen? Let’s handicap the field." On his blog What Will Replace the Almighty Page View and he thinks it will be events or time spent.

On Monday, Time and TV Guide will separately announce partnerships with Brightcove, a prominent online video distributor, aimed a developing proprietary platform to offer video content to subscribers of both magazines.

One of the Time’s primary goals is to significantly boost the video content on Time.com and eventually for its other publications, which include Fortune, Money, Sports Illustrated and Entertainment Weekly.

Google rose to dominance via the back alleys of word of mouth, catching giants like Yahoo and Microsoft completely off guard with geek credibility that eventually spilled over into the mainstream. But now that Google is playing with the big boys, it may be time to act like one and actually promote its own services.

The latest lesson in Marketing 101 came courtesy of MySpace, when the social networking juggernaut chose eBay for its e-commerce partner instead of Google Base.

When it comes to where US Internet users are spending the most time MySpace is the leader. The social networking site accounted for 12 percent of all time spent online in December 2006, according to Compete Inc.

One trend my firm follows is what we call consumer dissonance.

YouTube is Google’s new big stick, but the used-to-be-a-search company better learn to walk softly or lose the droves of devoted viewers. A new poll from Harris Interactive shows that while nearly a third of YouTube users are sacrificing TV time for online video, almost three-quarters of them won’t take kindly to pre-roll advertisements.

The pageview’s not dead, just weaker. There will be certain types of sites where those numbers matter – especially textual sites. But increasingly, as video and interactivity thrive, it is time spent per user rather than pages viewed that gets the attention of marketers. This is more of a TV model than a billboard one.

The Internet, magazines, newspapers, mobile phones, radio, and recently, maybe even billboards. But is Google going to top all those media this year by working with CBS to set up an online auction for TV advertising spots? Reports conflict, and Google, as usual, will not “comment on rumor or speculation.”

Early Monday, Time Warner announced plans to purchase TradeDoubler, a European provider of online marketing and sales services. The deal, which has yet to be finalized, is reported to cost the company around $900 million.

It’s so easy to forget the universe extends past our own elbows. I was trying to recall when I first became interested in website accessibility, and I can’t remember.

Online advertising is meeting a crossroad in 2007, shifting from a focus on generic keyword targeting and universal search results to a more targeted, behavioral-based model. Page views and traditional SEO will lose focus, and Google is leading the way on all roads at once.