Jim Westergren Leaves SEO

Jim Westergren is leaving the SEO scene, that's right the owner of many successful SEO websites and was running his own site "Jim Westergren
SEO Fusion represented the non-Swedish part of my company. I am very happy to announce that I have just finalized a deal with the british SEM company Epiphany Solutions Ltd which will help me reach the new life I strive for as well as turning over a big part of the company to someone elses hands to take good care of.

This deal includes the very popular directory list AddURL.nu with it’s service, the Smart Link Building service, my three directories (AddURL-Free.com, AXEQ.com and DirectoryDelta.com) as well as 34 other web sites used for marketing purposes to clients.

Jim Westergren completed sold out all his sites and services to Epiphany Solutions who will be able to take care all the SEO work from here on out. It's sort of sad to see Jim Westergren leave the SEO scene, but I know he will do and wonderful things as a writer as well.

More Inappropriate Nude Images Found on Google News Home Page

What is going on with Google and these pictures. Read the complete article of "More Inappropriate Nude Images Found on Google News Home Page" at SE Roundtable!!

What is happening over at Google these days!?!? I would not have believed it unless I saw it with my own two eys...

No Sex, No Friends, Just Give Us The Web

The Americans and American culture is completely turning before our eyes. With more and more Americans today surfing the web and practicially to the point of obession. It's so far that many Americans feel that they can not go a weekend with out the web or to even try to take the cell phone away for the weekend.

In a recent survey it was stated that one in three Americans would rather giving up friends and sex for the Web. That's right SEX, people are giving up SEX to spend time on the web.



"People told us how anxious, isolated and bored they felt when they are forced off line," said Ann Mack, director of trend spotting at JWT, which conducted the survey to see how technology was changing people's behavior.

Some would go on to say, "They felt disconnected from the world, from their friends and family."

Where or what does this really say about our culture and society today?

Americans Saving Too Little These Days And Forever

Americans don't save

In 2005, Americans saved -0.5% of their money in their banking accounts; in 2006, Americans saved -1.0 % of their money in banks. In previous years, the only time they saved less than that was 1933, with -1.5%. As you may know, America was in the Great Depression that year.

Thanks to Funny Statistics for this funny statistic and quality information and the sad fact is it's true!

Here Is An Revolutionary Idea

So while surfing the web today, it was very interesting to continue to see this word "revolutionary" being tossed around through a few different avenues. Let's just take for starters the meaning of revolutionary - 1 a: of, relating to, or constituting a revolution <revolutionary war> b: tending to or promoting revolution revolutionary party> c: constituting or bringing about a major or fundamental change <revolutionary styling> revolutionary new product>2capitalized : of or relating to the American Revolution or to the period in which it occurred.

Though, the whole interesting part about this word revolutionary is that I found it quickly used in two popular blogs just in the past few days. The most interesting fact of the matter is that in one particular blog it continues to stress the value and how important words are and can be in headlines and more. In this blog "Is Hype Good?", James Brausch continues to stress words that are the most valuable. You would not believe what the highest valued word come about to be....that's right it was "revolutionary" scoring the second highest at 47, while the only higher scoring valued word was Paradigm-shifting at 72. We can not forget to that the word "incredible" was tied with "revolutionary" at 47.

So what does all this mean? Well, let's look at my second example. While visiting JohnChow.com, one of it his latest blog posts is Are These Wordpress Themes Really Revolutionary? and there is that word "revolutionary" again. To much of a suprise this word revolutionary seems to have a theme going around on the web.

It seems that many people are using this word "revoluationary" to levelage and gain more attention to there blogs, products, and posts. So maybe next time you think about making a new product, service, or something. Make sure it's a revolutionary idea, product, etc!

Amazing SEO News That Covers It ALL

SEO News, keep yourself up to date on all the SEO news globally, breaking news, and so much more.

* AP Breaking News
News from one of the world wide leaders in breaking news. AP has been called the source of all daily news. Most big tech news outlets use delayed AP news.
Interface: 4 of 5 (The stories are neatly arranged with titles very easy to read)

* Reuters ¦ Breaking News from Around the Globe
Internet news from Reuters. The other big daily news machine. Timely and always up to date with breaking news.
Interface: 4 of 5 (The stories are neatly arranged with titles very easy to read and it's a fast loading page.)

* NewsNow: NewsLink Search Engines
The search engine category at NewsNow is very good and timely. They don't miss much and have some stories you won't find anywhere else.
Interface: 1 of 5. The interface is quite slow and bloated with javascript. Stories are on meta redirects. Pain to use.

* Rocketinfo - News Search Engine
Probably the best kept secret on the net for finding news. Use the advanced interface to search for search engine news stories. The only draw back here is that the same story will be listed dozens upon dozens of times. There is no clustering of the same story, so all the sites that carry AP or Reuters distributed news get a listing (ugh).
Interface: 4 of 5. Micro font problem. It's still easy to use, but over eager css makes it hard to read.

* The Virtual Acquisition Shelf & News Desk
Gary Prices research, data, and search engine news tracker. Features extremely timely articles. Often first with big stories. Updated daily
Interface: 3 of 5. Stories have little or confusing separation with blood red for a link color that over powers the page (sorry Gary). The rest of the page is very clean and noise free.

* WSRN.com: Company News
This link is to Wall Street Research Net company news (Link is to Yahoo news). They have a great stock tracker where you can follow news about public companies. They often have stories covered no where else. It is most business oriented news. They cover about the last month worth of news for each company.
Interface: 4 of 5. The story titles are quite easy to read. There are quite a few graphics and ads in to the top and left, but with the story titles so easy to spot, it can be over looked.

* NewsLinx Web News
Tech news from internet.com. They take weekends off but have 30-40 hand picked articles a day from traditional tech news outlets. They also have one of the few good archive news systems of any of the scrapers.
Interface: 4 of 5. The story titles are very easy to read with good separation between stories. However, it *is* internet.com and they always have too many ads. It's page spam city with 4 graphic ads and 40 link ads and a couple of boxes. That said, it is still better than it used to be. It makes for a very slow loading page most week days.

* News Is Free: Internet
A great deal of foreign blog news. I find it is rare to find a good story here. From time-to-time they have something. Use the search feature to cut through the high volume of noise.
Interface: 1 of 5. Yet another site with good content layered under a noisy hard to read and use interface.

* Fagan Finder
A nice blog style search engine news tracker. Everything is nicely categorized.
Interface: 3 of 5. Fast loading, but hard to read colors with light blue links on light blue background.

* Google Weblog
Aaron Swartz's Google blog. Good timely info updated with new stories a couple times a week.
Interface: 5 of 5. Well separated stories with good titles in a default browser font and no link tricks (nice work).

* Portals and Search Engines
Mostly a repackage of AP and Reuters news. Very slow to update. You'll have to dig through some stuff such as the cbs marketwatch stuff (is that paid advertising?), but it's good for a weekly overview.
Interface: 4 of 5. easy to use and well laid out. Touch too many ads, but you can always find the headlines and go.

* SearchEngineBlog
Fairly easy to follow story links that are updated daily. Definitely one to watch.
Interface: 4.25 of 5. Fonts are just a smidge small for my taste, but still readable with great use of white space to separate stories (a tidbit overlooked by too many other sites)

* ResearchBuzz
Timely data, news, search, and research stories with brief reviews and comments about articles. It's a nice distillation that helps put some context on the news. (subscribe to 'extra' for the best stuff).
Interface: 4.5 of 5. Very easy to use and follow. Minor complaints: touch of small fonts, links not underlined, and no left border between brown stripe and content - I can live with it.

* Pandia Good articles and timely. Occasionally find some Euro stories no one else is covering.
Interface: 4 of 5. Very easy to read and well laid out with no nonsense.

* SearchEngineWorld Breaking News Easy to read standard links with timely article links. Updated daily. (can I say that without sounding suspect ;-)
Interface: 4 of 5. A bit dated in look and feel, but easy to use and fast.

* WebmasterWorld Timely news and discussion around major search engine and industry news events. Included for completeness sake.
Interface: 4.5 of 5. Very easy to use and read with user definable skins.

Bobcats And Domains

The Charlotte Bobcats finally brake into simple branding and into a simple web address.

The expansion team Charlotte Bobcats for the first three seasons were using a longer domain name and there official site could be found at www.bobcatsbasketball.com. The reason for this being that the owner of www.bobcats.com belonged to a Montana real bobcat breeder.

Barbara Roe owns Bitterroot Bobcat and Lynx in Stevensville, Mont., and had the rights to the Web site name for 10 years. She says team officials began asking her in 2004 about buying the rights, but the early offer of a couple thousand dollars wasn't enough. Roe says they have agreed to pay about $50,000. I believe for an NBA team $50,000 was still pretty low if you ask me, but if Barbara Roe is happy, and all the bobcat fans rather NBA teams or the real bobcats...let it be.

Roe now uses the domain name www.bobcatsmt.com.

Charlotte Bobcats president Fred Whitfield says the team is glad to have the rights.

The NBA team's new marketing campaign also includes the slogan "Elevate," new uniforms, and a new secondary logo.