Kim Krause Berg (whose usability reports I've recently implemented on some client sites to great effect) was interviewed by Jim Hedger of Stepforth. She had some criticism on a blog of his (rightfully so) and he responded brilliantly by parlaying that into a positive. I love it when conflict is resolved amicably. Some of the highlights:

"Those of us who work on the Web, whether it be in design, programming, SEO, copywriting, search engines, whatever - we have this amazing opportunity to do really humane things for and with one another. By building web sites that everyone can use, we're generating an act of kindness and consideration."

"User testing with real people during the wire frame and/or staging process adds enormous value. It's not done in situations where cost is an issue, or time. It takes longer to build and test as you go. But, the advantages to a process that includes usability along the way, is less defects at the end and increased customer satisfaction on roll out."

Also, there's a big nasty mess of a debate between O'Reilly and Google and some other folks in SEO. Aaron's got a good summary and makes an excellent point:

Is it wrong to work your way to the top of the search results? Probably not if it is ok for Google to make billions of dollars a year serving ads next to CONTENT LIKE YOURSTM without giving you a cent.

Finally, via Gary Price at SEW, there's a paper (warning: PDF) by Gilad Mishne (Gary's link is broken right now) on measuring the 'moods' of bloggers and the online world via automated blog entry parsing. Pretty cool stuff, but just wait until major media companies and governments can predict and respond to the moods and interests of entire segements based on content scraping via the web. It's coming...