Last night, President Barack Obama and Speaker of the House John Boehner both delivered speeches outlining the state of negotiations surrounding the debt ceiling and the budget. And it appears that those speeches provoked people to flock to the websites …

In an attempt to bring some of his own favorite bits to the interwebs, comedy legend Jerry Seinfeld has launched jerryseinfeld.com. The site, which went live this morning, is set up in an interesting way. Each day three video clips …

Do you need a website to run a successful business these days? In years past, the answer would have seemed to be: almost certainly. Granted, not all businesses operate the same way, and businesses thrived for centuries before websites even existed, but if you don’t have on online presence, you are missing heaps of opportunity. That much is clear.

It’s easy to go awry with Website development – from browser compatibility issues to colors that just don’t work out.

Search engine optimization, an integral part of website – and beyond – is no exception. Often in ignorance, companies cause their own problems or allow issues to endure.

Here are 13 ways you can ruin SEO (but you can avoid these with a little bit of effort):

1. Bring in an SEO specialist after the fact.

I don’t think there’s any question that you need a web presence to survive in today’s business climate. But do you still need a traditional website, or has the web moved on in that regard?

Do you still need a website to be successful online? Share your thoughts.

It’s happened to all of us. You wake up one morning feeling like a million bucks, you stretch and if you’re like me, you notice the eye-rolling as once again your significant other catches you with a toothbrush dangling from your mouth and a laptop or iPhone in front of you while you check rankings and emails. And then it happens – you start your browser with a search phrase already set to display and you notice that your site no longer holds it’s previous position and the move is not in the right direction.

If there is any accuracy to data released by Netcraft, then the Internet has about 182,226,259 sites.  That’s 948,000 more than a month ago.

Netcraft looks at the number of sites hosted on the different top servers. The following graph represents market share for top servers across all domains from August 1995 to October 2008:

Reading about CO2Stats (via TechCrunch), a company who says it monitors your website’s environmental footprint and purchases renewable energy to neutralize it:

A little over a year ago, I asked readers to share their RSS feed with me.

I did this out of concern that my news sources would consist of nothing but “A-listers” and I’d miss out on the insights of those that wrote fantastic posts, but hadn’t yet found the spotlight.

It’s time to do it again!

Just as social sites start to gain or build their target audiences, spammers may rush in and ruin those initiatives.

U.S. traffic on Thanksgiving Day in 2007 increased 20 percent compared to Thanksgiving 2006, Hitwise reported today. 

Islamist militants are getting better at gearing their message online to specific audiences including women and children according to a meeting hosted by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Earlier this morning, NaviSite put up a notice: “The ARP request and name server issues are now largely mitigated and continue to subside as more and more customer sites come live.”  The owners of over 100,000 websites might have preferred to see this happen three or four days ago, though.

The Newspaper Association of America said 59.6 million people visited newspaper Web sites in July 2007, a 9 percent increase over the same period a year ago.

The Evolution of Natural Linking

More than a month has passed since Google struck a deal with the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, the Press Association, and the Canadian Press, but an outcry has continued.  One onlooker believes newspapers’ sites will be hurt.