I have been spending a lot of time building out other sites, doing interviews, and playing in our member's only forums...this post is a list of some recent interesting links.
Google's Scott Huffman highlighted some of the search quality evaluation process at Google. His post (as well as the older leaked search evaluation documents) should be required reading for all professional SEOs.
I did a quick run down of some SEO tools over at Blogoscoped. Seocracy highlighted a free service called TwitScoop as a cool tool for finding fresh keyword ideas.
Michael Gray on how to figure out what parts of your site are not being crawled regularly. Check out the comments on that post for more tips. If you use Wordpress, you might find this crawl rate tracker plug in handy. Crawl rate is probably a stronger signal of trust than toolbar PageRank is.
Brian Clark launched Lateral Action, a site devoted to using creativity and productivity to drive success. The site looks like it is off to a great start with posts like Innovate or Die: Why Creativity Is Economic Priority Number One.
ChrisG has put together a special pre-launch offer on his new AuthorityBlogger course. At first look it looks like he put a lot of work in creating a great service well worth the layout if you want to become a kick ass blogger and/or get the attention of other bloggers. Nice job Chris.
SugarRae has started posting regularly again. She offers up tips on how affiliate marketing works and the failure of excuses.
IMDB is offering lots of free shows and movies online, which may lead to people becoming more acclimated with watching videos online, but if it does people might start expecting more in terms of production value. I am long on the value of video content, but this article shares some of my hesitation with creating tons of video in a complex rapidly changing field.
Despite the rise of amateur video and the new modes of distribution and discussion, Internet technologies have not been able to change the fundamental character of video. Whether someone watches video on a television screen, or plays it on YouTube, video is a linear, passive experience, designed to be watched from beginning to end without alterations or input from the audience. In this sense, video is still following the model set by film in the late 19th century.
Many things I said in the past later turned out to be incorrect after the market changed. Only with years of experience did I learn how importance the clause it depends is. With text an edit might take 30 seconds, but with video it might take 30 minutes. One way to de-linearize video is to create many small targeted videos rather than one large video.
On the spammier front, it looks like 302 redirects might be back and XMPC offers tips on how to build semi-automated sites.
Marrissa Meyer highlights some of the opportunities and challenges of search in the future. Bob Mass highlighted that her post hints at future opportunities for marketers.
