Brian Chappell of Ignite Social Media tells us how Google Alerts has added new functionality for RSS subscriptions.

I love Halloween. Mostly because its the one day everyone decides not to take themselves so seriously. To celebrate this holiest of holidays IMBroadcast.com has put together a spooky little contest. 1( Create a video of yourself in costume giving a great internet marketing tip. 2( Upload that video to the " Halloween SEO Tips " channel on IMBroadcast.

Search & Socia l announced the launch of the X-Browser SEO Tool last night. Co-Founder of Search & Social Jordan Kasteler and myself are very excited about this tool. X-Browser SEO Tool is a bookmarklet that can be utilized in either Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari or Opera, on both Windows and Mac operating systems, to find information vital to search engine optimization.

People learn in different ways. Our industry offers a plethora of learning and sharing communities based around linguistic learning styles including blogs, forums, Sphinn , and more. Our industry also offers many auditory learning resources in the form of Webmasterradio.fm and podcasts. Furthermore, our industry has also been among the earliest adopters of video, creating vlogs and paid video tutorials. In order to share these videos,

CNET's Stephen Shankland brought us an interesting article today on the projections of search advertising spend. Many have speculated that the weakend economic state could be a boon to the Internet sector, as businesses look for more cost effective marketing, and consumers look for better prices on goods. However some analyists disagree. Cowen analysts Jim Friedland and Kevin Kopelman stated: "We are lowering our estimates on Google, Yahoo, Amazon, VistaPrint, eHealth,

I have been pretty obsessed with the topic of Information Environments as of late. From their structure, to the way that we let them interact with the search engine bots, a full understanding of our Information Environments is the basis of a strong SEO approach. No matter what changes in search algorithms a strong Information Environment Design will help your usability as well as assist in classifying your data. In a recent post ,

A new report from Universal McCann , one of the world's largest media service firms, looks at how Internet based commentary is an increasingly powerful force. Blogs, Twitter, FriendFeed, Fecebook, and other forms of social media are not only shaping thoughts, they are also shapping where dollars are spent through reviews and product descriptions.

Google and NBC Universal announced a partnership yesterday that would help form a strategic multi-year advertising, research and technology partnership. The announcement was made on Monday by Mike Pilot, President, NBC Universal Sales and Marketing and Tim Armstrong, Google's President of Advertising and Commerce, North America. The two said their respective companies will work together to create more effective advertising metrics,

I am a FriendFeed fan boy. That is saying a lot, because I am usually pretty critical of everything. The platform is easy to use, and makes the first real concentrated effort towards making a single platform for all social media. One of the main uses I see for FriendFeed is as a reputation monitoring and management tool.

The official Microsoft adCenter blog announced the beta testing of a desktop utility for their paid search platform. For paid search managers, this software will function much like Google's Adwords desktop application. Basically you will be able to manage your adCenter campaigns from the convenience of your desktop without the use of a browser. The positives of software like this are numerous.

This must have been a tough one for the search giant to figure out. People read numbers better than they do colors. Google has started to add Approximate word counts on their Adwords keyword tool , along side of their vague colored bar graphs, which used to be the only data they gave. The reason behind these moves by the big G, or small g or whatever they are being called this week, is likely their realization that the future of paid search is in the small business.

Vivisimo, an enterprise search company based in Pennsylvania, announced Thursday that it has expanded its search affiliate program, which offers a free search engine for all government Web sites . This search platform indexes more than 50 million government documents. The platform covers news, images, frequently asked questions, maps, and weather forecasts. Searchers can also find government contact information, applications, and notices regarding jobs and benefits.

Today Google launched Google Trends for Websites . This is the search giants first foray into competitive research, and comparisons are being drawn to Alexa and Quantacast. Barry Schwartz points out a good use for the new tool at SearchEngineLand.com : Now, if you think like a link builder - you can use this tool to find sites that are within your "neighborhood" or industry. So if I want to find link partners for the Search Engine Roundtable , I enter in seroundtable.com,

A post at TechCrunch today boasts that Wikia is "beginning to suck a lot less." The wiki based search product is supposedly stepping up its game through the implementation of editing features that lets searchers reorder, add, remove, rate, annotate, and comment on results. These new features make the system harder to gain, and spammers easier to oust. Jimmy Wales admitted to the lack of quality his site has shown and stated that it: Pretty much sucked.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau )IAB( recently set their " Interactive Campaign Setup Best Practices ," out on the world. For those of you not familiar with the IAB, their site's about page defines them as: Founded in 1996, the Interactive Advertising Bureau represents over 375 leading interactive companies that actively engage in and support the sale of interactive advertising.

The local search property, Citysearch.com , is coming under fire for its lack of a click fraud system. According to a lawsuit filed yesterday in Los Angeles Superior Court, Citysearch.com is defrauding its advertising customers by not only turning a blind eye to click fraud, but the lawsuit states they are actually encouraging it. "Most click fraud cases involve companies that simply turn a blind eye to it," said the victims' attorney, Brian S. Kabateck,

Pro sports organizations could use a few hours with a reputation management expert ala Andy Beal. In the last few months, we have seen the sports world being devastated by its own lack of transparency. It is something we as marketers are learning to cope with now, but these multi-billion dollar leagues are still not catching on. The online sports world continues to grow. Blogs, forums, online gambling, and fantasy sports news and games abound. Sites such as Deadspin.

A new Twitter application has been launched called StrawPoll , which offers Twitter users the ability to poll and monitor their followers. The application can be found at www.StrawPollNow.com and is now available to all Twitter users. StrawPoll works with the Twitter API to offer your followers not only the poll question you would like answered, but also a shortened URL to a StrawPollNow.com page where users can answer the poll more in-depth.

The New York Times reported today that in an interview, Yahoo's CEO and co-founder, Jerry Yang, claimed that Microsoft pulled it's bid for his company after Yahoo counter offered the software giants previous bid. This is in direct contrast to claims by Steve Ballmer and Microsoft's advisers, that stated that the bid was pulled due to Yahoo's unwillingness to counter, and Mr.