Posted by rebecca Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: Three star links: Soxialize came out with Tweet Pro , a service that allows you to quickly and easily find Twitter users who share your same interest by searching through posted messages and profiles using keywords you enter. Richard Baxter teaches us how to create a new page template in Wordpress for social media targeting . Lately he's been providing some solid tips and posts on his blog,

Posted by rebecca One of my friends and colleagues, Chris Winfield, is presenting on how to ignite viral campaigns at SES San Jose later this month. If you're attending SES San Jose, I highly recommend hearing Chris's presentation. Not only is he a great speaker, he knows his stuff when it comes to social media marketing, link bait, and viral marketing. Also, he has excellent taste in television, if I do say so myself. Anyway, recently I interviewed Chris about his company,

Posted by rebecca Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: Three star links: Gmail got 302 hijacked . Oh, the humanity! Lisa Ditlefsen nerds it up by introducing SEO Wars . Rand is "Rand Link Walker." Need I say more? Live Search Webmaster Center has been updated to offer crawl issue reports, backlinks data, and download functionality. Hooray for new features!

Posted by rebecca I'm pleased to announce that after quite a lull in guide publications, we've got 5 great guides on their way. Today we're launching one of them, The Professional's Guide to Blogging . Available in web and document format, the blogging guide provides an in-depth look at what blogging is and how a new blogger can create, write, and promote his or her own blog. Authored by blogging expert Tamar Weinberg,

Posted by rebecca Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: Three star links: Giles Bowkett examines what it's like to be " Internet famous ." I'm not exactly sure, but I think it involves cheezburgers. SEO Black Hat is offering seats to this year's SEOktoberfest . Want to party in Munich and pick the brains of some of the best super affiliates and black hats around? If so, contact Black Hat and let him know you want in. It's a pricey ticket )5,000 Euros,

Posted by rebecca For the four of you who aren't aware, The Dark Knight is a pretty big deal for a multitude of reasons: It was the first movie to film large chunks of the film with IMAX cameras. It debuted on the largest number of screens in cinematic history )4,366(. It also debuted on the largest number of IMAX screens )94( and broke IMAX debut records )$6.2 million(. It beat the record of most money made from Friday midnight shows )$18.5 million(.

Posted by rebecca Three star links: Great news for Internet marketers and e-commerce: more shoppers are purchasing goods via the Internet because of the high gas costs . The New Atlantis exposes the " myth of multitasking ." Well, there goes my built-in excuse to Rand whenever he asks me why I'm browsing Etsy instead of doing site reviews. Crap. Interesting opinions here: Paul Graham discusses pooled-risk company management , and 37signals disagrees with him,

Posted by rebecca VanessaH , an SEOmoz member who does SEO work for PlumberSurplus.com , recently contacted me about an interesting link bait campaign her company is attempting. Basically, the SEOs over at Plumber Surplus are trying to build more links to the site and hopefully bump the Page Rank up from a 5 to a 6. They had been trying various methods and campaigns and were brainstorming additional ways to attract more links. By happenstance, the site/property group owner,

Posted by rebecca Three star links: 10e20 brings us " The Ultimate Guide to Decoding Digg Speak ." It's both amusing and surprisingly thorough. Pretty handy if you're an SMM noob and need to know what "those crazy kids" are talking about. Now we know why your socks keep disappearing when you wash them...they make a good snake sweater! Here's an interesting article about how the "Google generation" thinks differently . Generation Google appears to prefer multi-tasking,

Posted by rebecca Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: Three star links: The best SEO training money can buy )hey, we do have to wade through a lot of shit in order to achieve top rankings...(. Apparently Yelp is shutting down accounts it thinks are "trading glowing reviews with other business owners." It's a tricky situation for Yelp since they obviously want to keep the quality and sincerity of reviews up,

Posted by rebecca Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: One star link: Hacker News started a thread asking why hackers hate SEO . Most of the answers are frustrating, though some folks chime in to defend our industry. Three star links: The fellas at Nordic eMarketing went duck herding in SEOmoz t-shirts . Glad to see our shirts were put to good use!

Posted by rebecca Danny Sullivan's lovely wife, Lorna Harris )who once lent me a hat and gloves when Danny took me to see Stonehenge on an especially cold, windy day(, recently created Boudica , a social news site for women. The site is pretty new and is currently in Beta testing mode, but I thought I'd give an initial review of things thus far. I'll start with the following caveat: I'm not an especially girly female.

Posted by rebecca Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: Three star links: Want to learn how to do 100 pushups ? This site gives you a nice training program that's bound to turn your T-Rex arms into hefty guns in no time. This Wired article says we need to ask ourselves " What can science learn from Google? " Oh geez... Google announces the launch of Ad Planner , which provides site data for publisher sites you might want to place your ads on.

Posted by rebecca I was chatting with SEO Hack and Syzlak )the Statler and Waldorf of SEO( when the topic of movie websites came up. When movie studios have a new film coming out, they typically launch a separate, unique website for that film. I played devil's advocate and asked Syzlak why don't studios launch movies on their own domain via a subdirectory )e.g., paramount.com/movietitle(. He responded by saying,

Posted by rebecca Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: Three star links: Our buddy Jeffrey Rohrs is touring the country doing ExactTarget eMarketing seminars . He's coming to our backyard of Seattle next week )June 24(, so if you're interested in attending, you can receive $20 off the $99 registration fee by entering the following code at checkout: R1T1JKR1 Over at Techipedia, Tamar brought us Plutter Kite ,

Posted by rebecca Folks, something just happened, and it was exceptionally tragic. Outrageous. Unheard of. Unbearable. To prevent this same travesty from happening to you, I thought I'd share my experience and give some handy marketing advice while I'm at it )this being SEM Tuesday and all(. Okay, let me back up. I was sitting at my desk, minding my own beeswax and deleting 45 spammy YOUmoz entries )thanks a lot, assholes( when Mel, one of our lovely developers,

Posted by rebecca My apologies for the missing roundup last week-it was SMX Advanced, and we were pretty busy with conference happenings. I've combined news and whatnot from last week into this week's roundup, so please forgive the extra bloatedness of this week's post )there's no such thing as Alka-Seltzer for blogs, is there?(. Also, the editorializing is a little light due to the massiveness of this post, so forgive me for being a little on the "dry" side this week.

Posted by rebecca It's hard having a conference in your own backyard. Everything feels so much more stressful-you have to drive back and forth from the conference to your place and back out for dinner and networking events, you have underlying priorities that are hard to miss )I missed the kickoff networking event at the Sculpture Park due to a bike ride, and I was late to the SEOmoz party because of an open water swim clinic(,

Posted by rebecca My first triathlon was this past Saturday )it was a sprint(, and it didn't go so well. I figured there would be some way to use the experience as a lesson learned about SEO, so I thought about it for a bit and concluded that there is a lesson indeed, and it is about paid links. Obviously, it's a loose tie-in, but whatever, I'm good at stretching analogies . Anyway, if you're willing to humor me and my semi-topical post, read on. If not,

Posted by rebecca Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: Zero star link: Fox News says that the Internet is making us dumber . Um, I'd argue that Fox News is making us dumber. Them telling us that another medium is making us dumber is like Paris Hilton calling Tila Tequila a slut. One star link: Apparently John McCain wants users to spam various websites . Hey Google, are you paying attention? Holy geez,