Steve Rubel has this obsession with information harvesting that I recognize and share. His series of posts on using Gmail as a database and Personal Nerve Center hit home with me. Intention, attention, focus, knowledge work; these are some of areas where I find Steve fascinating and am happy to see not only a fellow geek but a “think one step ahead” person.

There is no room for generalists anymore We all need to specializeHe was among the first people I followed on Twitter…

You wrote Managing Writers: A Real World Guide to Managing Technical Documentation.

How are technical writers different from, say, copywriters?

I started writing this response with the following distinction in mind: Copywriters primarily write promotional material, while technical writers primarily write informational or instructional material.

While I think there is some validity in those definitions that distinction is blurring…

Bing tries to be a better search destination. They compete with Google on search.

That’s wrong.

Google’s business model isn’t search. Google’s business model is selling and displaying ads.

By taking a page out of Google’s own playbook, Microsoft can destroy their archenemy.

Google’s Predatory Playbook

Google makes money by selling and displaying advertising via a fully automated setup…

When I wrote that if you can type 38 words per minute you can do a 500+ word blog post in 15 minutes, I got two types of response:

Brian types at an astounding speed of 90 words per minutes so, yes, as long as he knows what he wants to say, he can write a 1350 words article in 15 minutes flat.

Meaghan on the other hand finds the idea somewhat unbelievable, sad even…

If writing is something you do when or if the muse hits you – you’re costing your company money.

If you can’t tell how much time, precisely, you’ll need to write a 1000 word article – you’re costing your company money.

Writing is a measurable, controllable process. By measuring the amount of time it can take, you control how much time it will take.

How Much Time Does It Take To Write?

It depends, right? “There are deep articles and then there are…”

Nonsense…

When I asked Julie Joyce if she wanted to recommend someone to interview, she didn’t hesitate to point me to Aly.

I had been following Aly a good while already on Twitter. Smart, honest, and opinionated she’s there for real interaction.

If you need to place her Twitter stream somewhere, think of her as the clean(er) version of Sugarrae: telling it like it is, straight up.

WordPress is said to be one of the easiest blogging tools…

Arnie is one of those people I think deserve more credit. Then again, he most likely gets just that but from his large clientele. Street cred versus rockstar fame, so to say. He’s on the link building side of things, the place I call “in the trenches” – it’s fascinating to get his input on that.

Click the witter icon to tweet a quote

Search engines went from a spam mess to being quite relevant…

Tad's a smart person. Strikes me as such and shows it in the things he posts, says online. He lives in Europe, I come from Europe; instant bond. Us knows us.

ps: contains weetable quotes

In 2005 you described the state of SEO in Germany as backwards, out of time, virtually non-existent. How are things today?

I guess I was a little provocative.

Germany had a lively SEO scene of many people doing SEO on their own sites even in 2005…

I don't remember why exactly but Gapingvoid, as I think of him, was among the batch of first people I started to follow on Twitter. He seemed to be in some kind of smart crowd; the kind of crowd I like to follow to learn from. When I learned Who He Is I liked the fact that he replied to regular people (like you and me) on Twitter. Probably he's one of those himself; regular people…

Following Anna on Twitter I became intrigued by what it was she was doing. In this interview she shares how she helps evolve a TV-straight-to-web production line into a standalone news platform that works with the TV side of things. Underlining the value of social media and social networks she says that sharing information is a form of activism – but is also realistically hesitant to sent people offsite…

Not part of the SEO "scene" of constant testing and blogging and chatting it's forgivable if you think Henk who.

But to us, the somewhat older SEO generation, Henk van Ess is the Dutch journalist who in the summer of 2005 exploded the story onto the scene that Google was using human quality raters — on a massive scale. He made official what only some had suspected: that Google isn't as (automatically) smart as it claims to be…

Firefox can easily be called one of the most versatile, most powerful browsers: tens, nay hundreds of extensions enable it to do just about anything from predicting the weather to playing music.

And thus we do; enable hundreds of extensions, that is. Which turns starting Firefox into a second-boot experience, its startup time equaled only by the actual boot-up of a complete operating system as you switch on your computer in the morning…

Falcon Heene, whom Wolf Blitzer in a most annoying unhip fashion referred to at times as "The Falcon" (#notcool), is going to need reputation management big time.

It's hard to get a picture of just how small a result set his name used to bring up; right now filtering out the words balloon and boy there are only 91 thousand results (and even in that set some are about The Balloon Incident of 2009)…

Michael Gray and I don't really talk. We're moving around in different online circles. He's like the softer, sane, balanced version of Rae Hoffman (interview).

He's also one of those people I like because as you follow him around the web, you'll notice that he (cozy word alert) "gives back" to the community. Scanning a couple of his statements around the web will give you more immediate money ideas than submerging yourself in your SEO feeds…

Today is Blog Action Day; a day when thousands of bloggers post on a specific social change topic in order to raise awareness of that topic and, eventually and maybe, cause a dent in the issue.

It's a day that sets me – and most likely you — apart from the rest of "them" as I see the concept pass by on Twitter (that's how I became aware of it) and read the stats on the Blog Action Day home page: 9,081 blogs registered…

Matt's one of those smart people you just want to follow on Twitter. Genuine stream, real conversation. Funny dude at times; smart. You know, the real deal.

Over a year ago I said, on Twitter, that to me The Joshua Tree is one of those classic albums. Matt couldn't agree more, said so… and we sort of stuck around.

He's one of those folks I really, really, wanted to talk with (interview)…

Dr. Mihaela Vorvoreanu taught public relations at the University of Dayton, was a Fellow of the Society for New Communications Research, an Assistant Professor teaching public relations in the Department of Communication Studies at Clemson University and now is Assistant Professor technology at at Purdue University where earlier she achieved her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees.

With everything I read from her hand online and a thesis titled "Building and Maintaining Relationships Online: A Framework for Analyzing the Public Relations Website Experience" I couldn't help but wish for an interview — a wish she gracefully, and I like to think joyfully, granted…

Count the facts, keep score and rate yourself.

If you know…

0: "Google, you say?"
1-5: you've heard about Google
5-10: you're informed
10-15: you're a practicing SEO by day, running a money-making web empire by night
15-19: you can, and do, say "Googledance" with a straight face
20: … get a life …

The Facts

1. Adwords accounts for 99% Google's annual revenue…

As is the case with more and more people these days, I know Hugo through Twitter. It's a testimony to the service and says something about the core of its community, I think.

Over time Hugo repeatedly jumped out of the stream into my mind's spotlight with links, statements or commentary that just … well, tickles me. Intrigues me. "Here's someone who knows a lot more about this 'stuff'", I thought…

Tamar Weinberg is a phenomenon.

Anyone in SEO has heard about her, at the very least. Often sideways as she's not directly involved with SEO.

Tamar's forte is social media, the genuine participation in which she takes to the next level: one hour after giving birth to her son David she was on Twitter to tell us about it:

Her knowledge of what was then hip to call "Web 2…

Brian Carter is one of those people who grows on you until one evening you sit typing the intro to an interview and you realize you can't even pinpoint the moment you got to know him; he's just always been there.

Brian's sense of humor is quirky, funny. If you pick the wrong set of tweets by one of his many @ handles you'd be excused walking away from them with a dismissive shrug of the shoulder and a heartfelt "weirdo!"

In fact, Brian's been the only contributor to the Search Engine People blog who tried to negotiate — and reason! — posting light hearted, "silly" blog posts…

This week's Ruud Questions is a little bit different due to our SEP Experts Week on Blogging.

I'm talking with Paul Wylie to get another angle on business-driven blogging.

Initially blogging was very personal. Now blogging can also take the form of reporting. For a business, for a company, which considers blogging, what angle should they pursue?

Business blogging is a slippery slope each company must fully understand the complexities involved before decided if their company wants to commit to blogging…

In Doing Things The Right Way — or The Google Way (was: How To Lose Trust) I wrote how aside whatever technical workings of the rel=nofollow attribute there is a lack of common courtesy politeness in the way Google has (not) communicated this change as clearly to the webmaster community as they should have.

@steveplunkett contacted me on Twitter to explain just how he disagreed with me [yes, see, you should be on Twitter too and follow @ruudhein as well -- you not only get to be hip & happening but also get to join the conversation and tell me just how wrong I am]…

A lot, an awful lot, has been said about The No Follow Issue but one thing I miss so far is Trust.

With what feels like sleight of hand, Google has done away with a huge chunk of Trust in the relation it is trying to build between itself and webmasters.

The relation that they are trying to build is one where they are perceived as at least meaning no harm. How they go out of their way to give regular folks, webmasters, small business owners, yes everybody, the information and tools and knowledge to achieve their very best in Google without crossing The Line…

The way I got to know Cindy Krum is different from most of my other interview targets. That is, I didn't really know about her before I did my interview with her.

No, the way we "met" is that I privately asked some people who would make a great interview target regarding mobile SEO. One name came back several times and that name was, unsurprising to you reading this interview now, Cindy Krum…

Jeff Quipp at SES Toronto

Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog

Jeff Quipp: the past, present and future of SEO

…

I think I met MCJ via Fantomaster online. Or maybe I saw her involved in a discussion with Dave theGypsy — I'm not sure anymore. Either way, quickly after becoming aware of her I started to follow her because what she has to share with us is of a different quality than the usual SEO c…. stuff we hear. Started to read her blog posts (tremendously informative).

She's smart…

The Man in Black fled across the desert and the Gunslinger followed

When thinking how to introduce Fantomaster, those words came to mind. His is a nickname that evokes the legendary imagery of Clint Eastwood, of one who took the red pill.

I was pleasantly surprised to come across him on Twitter; more so when I realized how smart he is (he even retweets me on occasion, so like, there!)…

Content consumption moves away from the original point of publication.

Many people rely on aggregators and filters to leisure in the information streams.

As up and coming as blogging was "back then", Twitter and others are now.

Ruud Hein asks: are you there? If not, does anyone care?

I’ve always read a lot of news [by the way, do you notice how we start stories, posts and articles with I these days and remember how that annoyed the hell out of our teachers back then?]

When I was 16 or so, the thing to read if you were sort of socio-aware, "smarter than thou art"-style, was De Volkskrant and De Waarheid…

Bryan Eisenberg is what I consider a very smart marketer.

I "know" him best from his intriguing 2006 "Waiting For Your Cat to Bark", written with Jeffrey Eisenberg and Lisa Davis, which, to me, is the "Don't Make Me Think" of marketing. The only other consumer book aimed at thinking how people buy and how to get them to buy that I've found this good over the years was Paco Underhill's "Why We Buy"…