Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week:

Three star links:

  • Want to learn how to do 100 pushups? This site gives you a nice training program that's bound to turn your T-Rex arms into hefty guns in no time.
  • This Wired article says we need to ask ourselves "What can science learn from Google?" Oh geez...
  • Google announces the launch of Ad Planner, which provides site data for publisher sites you might want to place your ads on. And next week Google will announce ShowrStalkr, in which they spy on you while you're showering and inform you of any areas you've neglected to soap up.
  • Hey, check out how trendy SEOmoz is! Suck it, Cutts!
  • Andy  Beal is offering an online reputation management workshop August 7 (the day after my birthday!) at the Sigma Xi Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. This should be an extremely valuable clinic and there are only 17 seats left, so scoop one up if you want to learn more about how to manage your brand and reputation online.
  • MindValleyLabs provides some tips on how to get and leverage attention from the mass media. Racist remarks seem to be working for Don Imus...
  • Eric Enge interviews Vanessa Fox about holistic online marketing, her new Jane and Robot site, and other tidbits.
  • Apparently Thursday at noon PST is the best time to post a blog entry. I think I linked to another study that came to the same conclusion in a previous Roundup Thursday post.
  • The Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers is opening up domain names to endless variations. Expect to see .wtf and .lol TLDs soon.
  • Plurkable tells us how you can become a power plurker. You pretty much have to stay up 24/7 so your karma points don't dip. Bastards.
  • This is insane. Apparently a bunch of idiotic teenage girls at Gloucester High in Massachusetts made a "pregnancy pact" and all got pregnant at the same time because they thought it would be cute to raise babies together. They even went so far as to get knocked up by a 24 year old homeless man (Arrested Development reference in 3, 2, 1..."I just want my kids back!"). Good lord. Whatever happened to slap bracelets being the big trendy thing to have at school? Why is it babies now?!
  • According to RSS Applied, Facebook finally beat MySpace in monthly visits. MySpace was too busy trying to take a pouty photo of itself standing in front of a bathroom mirror to comment.
  • The New Yorker has a video interview of Eric Schmidt, the CEO and chairman of Google.
  • Can Google define what's "obscene"? This NY Times article highlights how the Internet could be changing obscenity standards in court cases. Sarah should weigh in for an upcoming Legal Monday post!
  • Richard Baxter reviews Blip, the "musical Twitter."  Apparently they don't nofollow the links in the status bar, so SEOs, start yer spammin'!
  • This is interesting--50 resources for how to make Flickr work for your library. It's neat to see libraries and other institutions adopting web 2.0ey goodness. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
  • Here's Eric Ward's site translated by Gizoogle. I particularly like the quote by "D-A-Double-Nizzy Sullivan."

Four star links:

  • One of my favorite bloggers, Gord Hotchkiss, authors an intelligent post stating that we shouldn't crown Google as the search engine king just yet because Google's biggest competitor could still be out there--a scrappy young startup like, well, how Google was back in the day.
  • nTrendsMaster is a really good tool for traffic keyword analysis (beware the slow download, though). It claims to "give you as accurate as possible information about the popularity and level of competition for any keyword you like."
  • Danny Sullivan writes a great post about how Yahoo! is mistakenly being painted as a "loser company." Rand's thoughts on the matter: "I'm pretty tired of people saying Yahoo!'s beat, when in fact they're one of the most amazing companies in the world. They're just competing against possibly the most amazing company in the world, so all the comparisons are ridiculously unfair."
  • Psychology Today has the last interview George Carlin gave before he died. I actually saw George Carlin perform in Detroit when I was 16, and he was incredible. We'll miss you, George! Thanks for bringing us some great fucking comedy. :)
Five star links:

5-Star Achievement:

Okay, I don't have a fancy badge to display, nor do I have a link to share, but I'm going to shamelessly plug the fact that I completed a half Ironman on Sunday.


Check out those guns

After enduring confusing registration forms, coping with flat tires, carbo loading, and training for 5 months, I was able to successfully swim 1.2 miles, bike 56 miles, and run 12.4 miles (a traditional half Ironman is 13.1 miles, but the race was in Victoria, BC, Canada, and they did it as a 20 km run). My finish time was pretty mediocre, but I don't mind--now I know what to improve upon for the next race! I have to say thank you to my coworkers for putting up with me running out of the office clad in spandex on far too many occasions, Manstery Guest for training with me and for putting up with my Jessie Spano freakout moments when I was unsure as to whether or not I could do the race, everyone in the SEO community and all of the SEOmoz members for encouraging me and for sending me well wishes, and Christine, our director of operations, for persuading me to sign up for the race, for lending me tons of gear (including her old bike and wetsuit), and for being extremely supportive.

Oh, and since I was in Canada, yes, I did get to indulge in a cheese and bacon baked potato from Wendy's:



Victory has never tasted so calorically delicous.

YOUmoz entries:

Best of YOUmoz:

New events added to the Events Calendar:

No new events added.

Upcoming events:

New additions to the SEOmoz Marketplace:

Featured job postings:

Featured companies:

United States/North America:

UK/Europe:
Asia:

Featured resumes:

Currently looking:

  • Heather Braswell McMahon is an experienced copywriter and is looking for an opportunity in Atlanta, GA, developing copy, search marketing and social networking strategies, and content strategies for clients in an agency or web dev firm setting.
  • Lewise Hiltz is an Internet marketing manager who has experience in both online/e-business and traditional sales and marketing.