My Favorite Posts of Week 35

Here are my top five favorite posts of last week.  Occasionally, candidates and hiring managers ask me what blogs I'm reading, so I'm going to add this as a regular feature.

Let me know whatcha think.

1. The Internet is Still Dead and Boring - When everyone is looking for gold in the same river, the best opportunities are somewhere else.
2. Domain Names for Bootstrappers - A domain name overview for newbies.  Sure, 99.5% of the low hanging fruit has been picked, but opportunities remain for those who stretch.  To whit: Yesterday I bought SEMRoundtable.com on Godaddy for $8.00.  I know.  I was surprised, too.  I imagine that of the 625 recruiting domains I own, 87% of them will be worthless, 10% will subsidize the rest of the portfolio, and the remaining 3% will become the basis of a meaningful business.
3. Conferences and Community - Thinking of speaking at an event?  Read this first.
4. Why Microsoft Should Buy Facebook - Pity about my recent Facebook flap.  That's going to be an interesting recruiting environment, and I hate to be sidelined.  And permanently, no less.  Boy, that seems excessive.  Hopefully, while everyone is looking for gold in the same river, the best opportunities will lie somewhere else.  Onward.
5. The Promise & Reality Of Mixing The Social Graph With Search Engines - Danny Sullivan squares off with Robert Scoble on the future of search.  A very useful post.

My take on the SEO "man-vs-machine which-is-better?" debate:  Search algorithms are like the tax code, and SEOs are like CPAs.  Google is like the federal government.  SEOs simply want to know what Google's rules are, and then push the limits of what's "legal" in order to get the best results for their clients.  Just like a CPA.  Tax evasion is illegal.  Tax avoidance is legal, ethical, and expected.

Black hat, white hat, and gray hat tactics will remain in the SEO's playbook, regardless of how the Google taxcode evolves.  If you predicate Google's organic results on social graph, then that's what SEOs will deal with.  If not, no problem.  It's an SEO's job to figure it out.

People are always going to follow the money.
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Comments

[Mike]

Hi, do any of you bloggers know anything about the viral widget called BlogRush. Apparantly it was just launched 8 hours ago.

I found it here in the top of the right column at this Ning site.
www.Linkedin-Entrepreneurs.com

It's supposed to give you reciprical traffic based on reading the content of your page like Adsense does (but it doesn't pay anything, just gives free traffic).

It says you actually get like 10x or more traffic back, due to some exponential growth aspect of it. (multi tier affiliate based on who signs under you?)

Does this kind of thing really work? I wouldn't say no to free traffic.

[Ted Grigg]

Nice analogy you gave there about how SEO professionals maximize organic search by pushing search parameters just like GOOD CPAs get maximum tax savings legally. I never thought of it quite like that before.

Ted