links for 2009-03-07

"What a nice surprise to see on the front page of the Los Angeles Times today a story that features how important SEO is to web sites."

"Eric Goldman reports that Utah, for the third time, is trying to regulate keyword advertising by proposing new laws. The first two times they failed, but they are hoping the third time will be a charm. This revised law proposal, HB 450, is trying to prevent registered marks as triggers for keyword advertising but specifically excludes the search engines from being liable, themselves. So this new law only is for advertisers."

"I cannot stress enough that I know people will continue to game the search engines, continue to push right up to the line of what's acceptable by the search engine rules and some will go even beyond that, rationalizing why they do so in various ways. And sometimes, it can even be difficult to disagree with those rationalizations, especially when they point at search results that are cruddy and spam filled for particular terms. I'm talking about something different. I'm talking about tactics that waste time not for search engines for for real people. Off-topic trackbacks and comment links are a huge time suck for content owners. Gibberish pages that rank and suck me or others into an irrelevant off-topic page are annoying. That's the type of crap I'm talking about."

"With huge cuts in journalism jobs, nobody’s asking the question: when are journalism schools going to close?". Mark has some really interesting thoughts on how the current institutions are failing to be as adaptive as they could be.

"Choosing a content management system can be tricky. Without a clearly defined set of requirements, you will be seduced by fancy functionality that you will never use. What then should you look for in a CMS?"

"I've said this once and I’ll say it again: there's no male or female in technology. You either are a geek or you aren't. Male geeks may be different from female geeks - but they have something in common: geekdom".

"A Chronology of events in aeronautics, aviation, space science, and space exploration". It is a clunking huge PDF mind you...