Too many items from early this week and last last week are critical reading. Make sure you take notice of these, as a few have a strong effect on the industry:
- Wired exposes NSA wiretapping on the Internet Backbone at AT&T and they wrote an excellent piece on why they released the report.
- Patrick Gavin and his team put together a spiffy little link price calculator. There's even a nice little easter egg for SEOmoz.
- MSN allows you to add a meta tag indicating your preference for using your DMOZ description and title. Yahoo! and Google - I urge you to give the power back to webmasters on this. There are far too many editors there who have an interest in modifying titles and descrips to punish the listed.
- Google has a little bug with the site search command for hyphenated domains and non-www versions of some sites. Just be aware before you panic at the loss of indexing.
- The Co-op can take over the top of your search results if you've signed in and subscribed to a particular content offeree (or if a very popular provider has relevant content). Just another way that SEO is switching gears. BTW - I'm fairly sure this is the post Danny wrote sitting next to me in Seattle during the SEW Live show - not bad for an "on-the-fly" piece.
- You may be just fine with 3 hours of sleep, or you might need 11 - apparently, the 8-hour rule is a myth.
- Curious about the design process for a website - this guy (who's only 16) seems to have it down and the images are fairly remarkable.
- Last Friday, ILoveJackDaniels had a terrific post with examples of conversations that gave me a spooky sense of Deja Vu. If you take on clients in the SEO field, this is a must-read post.
- Not sure how I didn't about this before, but Koders.com, currently a very small index-size search engine, lets you search actual source code, rather than just text, on the pages it indexes. I can think of some positive uses and a lot of nasty ones, but it's good to know that someone's out there.
- As always, Aaron had some great insight on the future of search relevancy - I can't help but be 100% behind these ideas. I also love his consulting services page (need to get that guy on the recommended list).
- Want $1000? Try to outrank Jeremy for his moniker (I'm helping you by not using the term in anchor text... you know, "Shoemoney").
- Whoops, almost forgot about Tiberiu Bazavan - Good luck, Jim.
Any other news that you felt was "can't miss" from the past 7 days?
"8-hour rule is a myth"
Too bad this link is down. I was interested in reading about this...
Rand, I like these "round up" posts. I enjoy seeing the topics that catch your imagination. Do these posts as often as you want. They are very high return for my reading time (you do all of the work finding the good stuff and I just read :-)
Here's my question... Aaron's post closes with.... "In 5 years will sites need a social aspect to them to be visible and profitable?" What do you make of this? Should I be adding forum or commentable blog to all of my good sites - even if they are demanding on my content development resources?
MSN allows you to add a meta tag indicating your preference for using your DMOZ description and title. Yahoo! and Google - I urge you to give the power back to webmasters on this. There are far too many editors there who have an interest in modifying titles and descrips to punish the listed.
I hate to say but I don't agree with you on this one.
If ODP data is invalid/out-of-date, the best way IMO is fix the source, not to hack the utilizer as it would be more efficient in many ways (including SEO purposes).
Rand, that's a good roundup, thanks. Koders is indeed useful. The Economist article is very interesting too, it's true that not everyone needs 8 hours of sleep at night, sometimes I sleep 3 or 4 and feel just right the next morning. BTW The link to TLA is wrong.