Stuff you should know, stuff I should remember.

With all the business about Yahoo! outing journalists that are critical of China to the Chinese authorities, can we extend this farther back in history? Capitalist democracies have always enjoyed totalitarian regimes for their control and access to cheap materials, markets and labor – morality and profit-motives aren’t alwasy complimentary. If Anne Frank had kept […]

Dave Davies on Evolt has a rundown comparing the search engine optimization strategies of Google vs Yahoo! vs MSN. Snippets: MSN doesn’t do a ‘aging effect’ on links – Yahoo! places greater weight so links wont’ ‘hold their full value for a number of months’. It might take up to 8 months for the full […]

I always like these lists that different WordPress users put out about what they’re must have plugins are. Here’s one on NewsForge.

Dave (head guy at Technorati) is back with his State of the Sphere entries. Snippets: Blogosphere has grown in size 60 times compared to 3 years ago. Half of new bloggers are posting 3 months later. 10% of blogs update weekly 9% of new blogs are spam – 60% of pings are spammy (and blocked […]

A big question newbies have about blogs is how do you know that what you’re reading is true? If anyone can write a blog – how can they be trusted? The usual spiel is that blogs are a self-correcting ecosystem and the good stuff floats to the top. Usually the well-linked stuff floats to the […]

Wall Street Journal Reports that Amazon.com is planning their own music download subscription service. (via Read/Write)

Business Logs also has a snarktastic little list of how you too can appear to be big and famous in the blogospere: Already have worked in the media in your industry Blog all the time with passion Break some cool news and the get A-list blogs to link it Network network network Have a gala […]

Something I’ve always wondered is how the result of Alexa are impacted as fewer and fewer people their little toolbar. Can they be trusted? Business Logs finds some discrepancies between Alexa ranks and the traffic reported by the bloggers themselves.

WebSideStory (remember Hitbox?) reports: During the last three months of 2005, the search engine conversion rate at business-to-consumer e-commerce web sites was 2.30 percent, more than twice the conversion rate of other acquisition sources (0.96 percent), which include banner ads, affiliate marketing links, shopping search engines and other referring links via AdSearch

OJR has a great exploration of the disconnects in Dan Gillmor’s Bayosphere project. Bayophere was an attempt to enage citizen journalists to chronicle their region using blogs and other community technology. Main problem: it wasn’t by, for and about the Bay Area. Post were off-topic, and like much blogging, techie influenced. During its seven months […]