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

Two star links:

• The Industry Standard provides us with the 25 top B to Z-list blogs. Why am I giving the link 2-star status? Because the stupid site spaces the list out over multiple pages. ARGHHHHH. Take your page views and ad impressions and shove 'em up your arse.

Three star links:

• Andrew Girdwood shares an amusing Gmail ad that may have been a little lost in translation.
• This clever photoset depicts Storm Troopers living their lives in an everyday setting.
• Better think twice about calling in sick--your boss might soon be able to detect if you're just trying to play hooky.
• Shoemoney pings a bunch of SEOs (including myself and Rand) and asks them for their definition of what "SEO" is. The responses are interesting and pretty helpful.
• A real-life Rocket Man tested jet-powered wings in Switzerland. Rocket Maaaaaaan, burning out his fuse up here alone...this dude better not try to raise his kids on Mars. I've heard it ain't the kind of place to do that (in fact, it's cold as hell). Okay, I'll stop now.
• Danny found a site that teaches you how to create a joy buzzer in your shoe that'll pass a current through your body and shock people. Danny's so nice.
• Mark Cuban (you guys shouldn't have given Avery Johnson the boot!) talks about an interesting strategy for Yahoo/Microsoft: what if they paid the top 5 results for the top 25k searches to leave the Google index?
• This guy posits selling your SEO data/logs as a new SEO business model. Rand thinks that you'd need to band together a lot of sites to do it successfully, but that there's probably some VC funding headed that way if a good team runs with it.
• The NY Times talks about why Yelp is super duper. Um, because they hired us to do their SEO? Or because their newsletters are awesome? ;)
• Kim Krause Berg talks about how she hates people using the web as a weapon. We've all been there--the Internet is an enticing medium to vent your frustrations and start a major bitchfest campaign against someone. The real challenge is demonstrating how much restraint you have.
• Advertising on social networking sites is projected to hit $1.4 billion this year, a 55% increase from 2007. And all of those ads assume that Danny is gay and engaged.

Four star links:

• Mike Elgan provides an interesting argument as to why Steve Ballmer should resign as CEO of Microsoft. To sum up his stance, Ballmer's inept.
• Pretty cool idea--recycled paper is turned into furniture. 
• Speaking of cool furniture, how about a Nintendo controller coffee table? That's pretty damn cool.
• This site does a comparison of portion sizes today compared to 20 years ago. *SPOILER ALERT*: They've gotten bigger.
• Search Engine Journal has a post about the next frontier for search marketing standards. Unlike Darren Slatten, Ken Clark thinks that our SEO quiz is a good assessment of a hiring candidate's SEO knowledge.
• This blog goes through the 3 key phases of blogging. Pretty apt observations, if you ask me.

Five star links:

• Sarah found this great article about how to track intellectual assets to stay ahead of competitors. It provides some really useful tips and links out to additional resources.
• Vanessa Fox provides us with great tips on how to rank as the original source for your syndicated content.

YOUmoz entries:

• Barbara Ling: Secrets of a Veteran Webmaster. Bookworm SEO interviews Barbara Ling of Ask Owlbert.
• Words, Words, Words, and Why SEM is Dependent on Them. Kate Morris talks about the benefit of having a writing background when starting a career in search marketing. After all, well-written content is an important part of any SEO/SEM campaign.
• Write Quality Content, Not Keyword-Stuffed Hype. Darkligh+ning also talks about the importance of having high quality, compelling content on your site, and how you should optimize for users more than for search engines.
• Social Marketing and Web 2.0: It's About Passion. Kate Morris authors up another post for us. This time she talks about how user engagement is proportional to how passionate the user is, and that this is especially important for SMM engagement and participation.
• Selling to Seniors: Are You Ready for the Boomers? Webwordslinger.com talks about the browsing and web surfing behavior of senior citizens.

Best of YOUmoz:

• Twitter Insights and How Coke Pissed Off Danny Sullivan by Rishil uses one of Danny's Coke tirades as an important lesson learned: don't underestimate the power of social networking. He also highlights the benefit of using Twitter for research and for venting your frustrations.

New events added to the Events Calendar:

No new events added this week.

Upcoming events:

• Page Zero Marketing Seminar May 15 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada
• PPC Summit May 19-20 in San Francisco, CA
• International Search Summit May 22 in London, UK
• SEO Training Class May 23 online at highrankings.com/seo-classes

New additions to the SEOmoz Marketplace:

Featured job postings:

• Senior Internet marketing associate, paid search marketing coordinator, and paid search data analyst for Vertive in Austin, TX
• Long-term link building SEO. Can work from anywhere.

Featured companies:

United States/North America:

• The MasterLink Group in Texas
• EngineWorks in Portland, OR
• Vertive in Austin, TX
• Redonk Marketing in Dallas Fort Worth, TX
• Eqqy Designs in Vancouver, BC, Canada

UK/Europe:

• Business Feet in the UK
• SEO Ibiza in Spain

Featured resumes:

Happily employed:

• Sandy Allain is a multilingual SEO who works in the Travel and Educational industry.

Looking for employment:

• WJ Muller is a web developer who also specializes in web usability and SEO. He was able to bring a client up from >100 to the 3rd and 6th result for two keyword campaigns.
• John Gao is an eCommerce SEO who has many years of international sales experience.