I recently got feedback from an SEO Book buyer who stated that their site was not accepted by some directories I recommend. If someone does not accept your site realize that due to their editorial stringency a link from that location is probably worth more than a link from the sites that did accept your site.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to attend the first conference event put together by Piers and the team at PSFK focused on trends and ideas.  The agenda was very compelling going into it, and I did leave with many interesting insights and new ideas about marketing and communications.  Though I unfortunately had to duck out early due to client commitments, here are a few key observations I made in my notes:

Continuing my series of Interview with Analysts here is my interview with Joel Collymore. I will be out of the country for about 10 days so the next interview will be published when I am back – that is after 15th.

What is your current position and the name of the company you work for?

A major kerfuffle has broken out in the UK between Virgin Media and satellite broadcaster BSkyB, with customers of both services losing out as the ham in the metaphorical sandwich.

At midnight last night, a deadline expired for both companies to come to an agreement on licensing rights and fees for Virgin to include some of Sky’s content in the range of TV channels included in Virgin’s cable service.

Tom Foremski, he of SiliconValleyWatcher, has teamed with Elizabeth Safran to launch a new project called Silicon Valley Minute.

Microsoft can admit when it’s wrong. Well, not so much wrong as behind the curve, and the admission was made at a conference, instead of in any sort of black-and-white press release. Still, Ray Ozzie, the company’s chief software architect, turned a few heads when he admitted that Google’s success in advertising had caught Microsoft by surprise.

About a month ago a friend said the following before a hockey game (yeah – our team has very geeky locker room talk):

“Is IBM not making enough money these days? I hear they’re providing services for some online world”

The company that recently won the rights to the GMail trademark in the UK has taken its case Stateside. And if Independent International Investment Research (IIIR) is successful claiming its stake to GMail in the US as well, your @gmail.com address could change to @googlemail.com instead.

The verdict is in: Google, or any other search engine, does not have to accept all advertisements submitted, officially giving search engines editorial control over the content of ads appearing in their network. The judge cited the First Amendment as the biggest reason.

Below is the full transcript of the interview with Marissa Mayer on personalization of search results. For commentary, see the Just Behave column on Searchengineland.

Gord: It’s a little more than two weeks ago since Google made the announcement that personalization would become more of a default standard for more users on Google.  Why did you move towards making that call?

I was a supporter of the nofollow link, which told search engines not to count that link in their popularity ranking algorithms.

But, after seeing Loren Baker’s post about how lame nofollow is, I find I’m changing my mind.

Yesterday I said that I noticed that performancing.com was dead and now going to some Louisville blog.

At least one panelist (David Szetela) on the Ad Program Strategies: Compare and Contrast panel here at SES London, argued that while he liked the control of Google’s Site Targeted flavour of content targeting, he wasn’t so fussy about the CPM-based pricing model.

This past weekend I was moderating a panel at CommunityNext, a smart event focused on everything about online communities coordinated by Noah Kagan.

The event was a fun gathering of extremely smart folks from some of the hottest online communities today – and panelists/speakers shared many great thoughts on topics ranging from how to be more awesome, to the genesis behind HotorNot.com.

Roberto writes that Sun has agreed to include an Italian dictionary and thesaurus (from the Italian Native-Lang Project team) in the official OpenOffice.org distro. Congrats to Roberto & team!

I know this is a little off topic, but since Michael has been discussing how to get your own SEO company off the ground and growing, and due to the week Michael and I just suffered through, I had to remind myself frequently on why I traded in my previous “easy” life as a corporate suit, with a cushy job, limited responsibilities, manageable workload, consistent salary and paid health care for this life of entrepreneurship.

Matt points to an interesting article about using an open business model.

A study was released recently indicating that the vast majority of Canadian teens are unaware of the dangers and privacy issues of the internet.

A NetworkWorld article quotes Google’s GM of Enterprise Business as saying:

This is a post I made in an old blog over a year ago, but that blog no longer exists and I had to go hunting for this information again today.

While last week’s suggestion that Yahoo was switching browser preferences without explicit permission, was a black mark for the company, it doesn’t come close to the allegations that Google has revealed confidential information about its users.