I just learned that I’m a new columnist for Fast Company magazine where I’ll write a monthly piece, about 700 words. Still don’t know what the title will be, but we’re thinking “Naked Conversations.”

My first column will probably mirror my new speech I’m working on, titled “Living in a Google World.”

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.

It pains me to suggest this, but we must ignore (one of) the teachings of Strunk and White.  We must turn our backs on a number of other writing guides.  And we must break our own habit of writing out numbers as words.

Instead, we should represent numbers with numerals – a recent eye-tracking study suggests that they’re much more likely to capture online readers’ interest.

In 5 years the web will not look like it does now. 5 years ago cheesy thin topical directories were linkworthy and serious webmasters voted for them. If your competitors are outranking you based on

• having a more well known brand
• earlier market entry

don’t think that you are going to catch them and beat them and STAY RELEVANT by only replicating their links and doing what they are doing. 

Many sites tend to steer clear of controversy, but want the traffic controversy can bring. What are the solutions?

I was honored to speak yesterday on corporate blogging in DC, as a joint event put on by Merry Bruns and DC Web Women. The two other speakers, Scott Briscoe of ASAE, and Lorelei Brown of the Natl Association of Realtors, are both longtime bloggers and we had a great time sharing our experience on how the business world looks at blogging.

Clean is better. Eye-tracking studies say so. Web copy should be bulleted, concise, easy. Photos should be informative, not decorative. White space is good. And guys like looking at George Brett’s protective cup.

You weren’t expecting that last part were you?

I wasn’t either. But this post on effective news article design proves it.

Newspapers have had trouble transitioning from print to the Web. They’re used to doing things differently.

You can’t BS a BSer they say, which is why I’m here, to translate Yahoo’s double press release about their new partnership with High Tech Computer (HTC) to distribute Yahoo Go for Mobile 2.0 to a number of Microsoft Windows Mobile powered devices.

Ask.com is based in Oakland, California, and as many people know, the region experienced a minor earthquake late last week. For Ask, this was an opportunity to plug its Earthquake Search. The Ask.com team also took a moment to note one casualty: a Google pen.

Two nights ago I got upset about something and did one of the two curious things I tend to do when I get