Are you a founder? Great writeup of what it takes to be a founder and see if you fit the bill.

TubeChop Great way to microchunk youTube videos

Ad supported Internet report from the IAB

Blind Search Blind search between Yahoo, Google, and Bing without knowing the results publisher – very cool

Google Page Speed Google introduces Page Speed and a great tool for webmasters

Deliver something of value every week – Very straightforward

10 Ways to launch a blog

Ignore Sunk Costs – from Seth Godin

Post from: Eric Friedman
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Links Roundup 07/02/09

“masterpiece” by 415style

I was talking with Amanda Peyton who I met after the Internet Week version of the NY Tech Meetup about SEO and gave my thoughts on why and how it is important. This was following another great event showcasing 50+ companies in the first NYTM Showcase demo room.

She asked “does SEO even exist?” to which I replied with what I believe is a very good analogy I will use going forward to explain my thoughts on SEO.

Seo is like Art

The gatekeepers who decide whether or not your page is “optimized” are the search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. This is done via a blackbox that people have tried to game, crack, follow, and abide by for many years.

The analogy holds true for art as well as the gatekeepers who decide whether or not your work is “art” are the major museums such as the MoMA, the Met, and the Guggenheim (at least here in NYC).

Each group is similar as they have different specialties and themes, and their own flavor of what works and what does not. They are curated and handled differently, but ultimately have the final say.

People spend vast amounts of time arguing whether or not something belongs in a museum or not, and one of my favorite examples is the painting Blue Monochrome by Yves Klein which is one color on the entire canvas.

I will avoid the argument for the moment of whether or not this is art, but clearly it has some foundation as it is hanging in the MoMA.

The same holds true for websites. You can build a site, optimize it, and throw it online and call it “optimized” but only the engines will determine if this is really the case. Your reward for optimizing towards the guidelines set forth by these gatekeepers is ranking. This is now heavily influenced by outside links coming in, but still determined by the engines.

So I challenge anyone who really questions the validity of SEO and so called SEO-experts, and use my analogy of artwork. If it were that easy, everyone would pickup a blank canvas, some paint and brushes, and create a masterpiece – whatever that may look like.

Post from: Eric Friedman
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SEO is like Art

Most legitimate online ad networks offer marketers a quality guarantee when it comes to publisher content and ad placement. However, one apparent problem with Ad Exchanges is that there aren’t as many checks in place to ensure brand-safe venues. In an open market, anything is game and with thousands of options, most agencies and marketers do not have the time to sift through all of the options. Similarly, Marketing.fm raised this question last year when we discovered embarassing brand placements within various User Generated Content publishers. Below is a perfect example of how a blind buy across Yahoo’s Right Media can lead to highly controversial ad placement on

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A Slight Problem With Ad Exchanges… (warning NSFW)

Be sure to checkout the biggest news makers for 2007 via Google search.

Interested in the top searches on Yahoo!? check them out.

How about MSN? Check them out.

Post from: Eric Friedman
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What people searched most in 2007