All your favorite music you didn't even know about

Another cool find - Pandora - for all your favorite tunes.

I love listening to music online. I hit a few of my favorite radio stations and also use genre specific stuff like Iceberg Radio, but Pandora takes this idea to a new level. You choose a band or genre, and it will play that for you. But it will also find music similar to that you may not have heard before.

So far, its been pretty good. I have one channel called White Stripes, and all the new stuff its pulled in has been pretty on target. Some of it I've heard before, like The Strokes, but others, like Wydown, I have never heard of before. Of course if Wydown is huge somewhere, I'm not a big authority on music either, and I may just have been living under a rock for the last little while. Either way, this is going to catch on in a big way, IMHO.

Breaking News

this just in:

the coolest new site (ok, maybe not that new, but new to me) - reddit.com
it's a 'democratic' news site. stories are submitted by members and other members vote, either up or down, on whether they were good or not. it took a while to grow on me, but now I can't get enough. you should go check it out.

Another SEO Contest

It has begun. The terms to try and optimize for are

v7ndotcom elursrebmem

You can go for the official contest here, or the guerilla contest here.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I don't know exactly what strategies I'll be using, but I better get cracking.

Search Engine Corporatization

It's interesting to watch the back and forth between different ones in the SEM industry as Google incorporates more and more paid advertising into it's search results. I myself don't like it too much, but it is inevitable. That's Corporate America. If one looks far enough into the future, as with all corporations, maybe there will be leveraged buyouts, mergers and aquisitions until finally there will be only one search engine -

' Ask Yahoogle '

I like the way it just rolls off the tongue.
My 2c.

Paul Graham, a wealth of information in regards to technology and the internet in general, has a good write-up on Web 2.0. He touches on a number of subjects as to where the internet is going, but this was my favorite:

Never make users register, unless you need to in order to store something for them. If you do make users register, never make them wait for a confirmation link in an email; in fact, don't even ask for their email address unless you need it for some reason. Don't ask them any unnecessary questions. Never send them email unless they explicitly ask for it. Never frame pages you link to, or open them in new windows. If you have a free version and a pay version, don't make the free version too restricted. And if you find yourself asking "should we allow users to do x?" just answer "yes" whenever you're unsure. Err on the side of generosity.

I second the motion!

My take on SEO as a newbie

So I've been doing this SEO thing for about a month now, and I'm going to venture a few humble opinions on what seems to be important, in order of importance, in getting a site to show in the organic SERPS (as that's my focus with the site I'm currently working with) using 'white-hat' techniques. Here is SEO boiled down to it's essence:

1) Unique Content is King.
2) Links, and the more the better.
3) Where you are linking to and who is linking to you weights #2.
4) Keep your code clean, accessible, and W3C.
5) Build up topics from detailed to broad, cross-linking your info across the site where appropriate.

Now for any other SEO people out there reading this, you're probably going 'well, duh'. But I figured I'd start small and build on this topic instead of writing one earth-shattering, mind-blowing thesis.

I would also be remiss without acknowledging the amount of excellent information out there from many sources without which I could not have picked this up so quickly:
The oft-mentioned Matt Cutts (linked the non-www on purpose), SEOmoz was my original starting point, then there's the seroundtable and the searchenginewatch blog to keep tabs on what's new. Stuntdubl and Oilman have some good insights as well. There are many others, but how many links do you want to drop in one post anyways?

I think I'll be trying out what I've learned so far in Another SEO Contest. See what happens.

Boom

Wow, just picked this up off of Slashdot. A spammer just got hit with an $11 Billion fine. Thats right - Billion, with a B. Dr. Evil eat your heart out. Somebody's finally getting harsh with spammers.