This is the Link Report for September 16th through September 17th:

Please feel free to post your thoughts in the comment section below

To see all of our links please visit our Delicious page at Delicious.com/goldsteinmedia

• » Competitor Analysis – 10 Key SEO Factors to look out for – SEO Software for Professionals from Interleado – Find out what your competitors are doing with their website to attract traffic.

  Getting more traffic than your competitors is what most companies are striving for online. Achieving this usually requires that you rank better than your online competitors – this requires that your website has more authority and that your content is better optimised.

• SEOmoz | Our Stance on Paid Links & Link Ads –
• Twitter Closing New Venture Round At $1 Billion Valuation – Fast growing startup Twitter will soon be joining a select group of startups with private venture round valuations of $1 billion, we’ve heard from multiple sources. CEO Evan Williams disclosed the round to employees at a recent all hands meeting.
• Oneok Sues Twitter For Trademark Infringement [Update: Dropped] – Natural gas distributor Oneok Inc. has sued Twitter for trademark infringement. The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Tulsa, said that Twitter had allowed an anonymous user to use the user name ONEOK, a company’s trademark.
• 5 Easy Steps to Stay Safe (and Private!) on Facebook – Unbeknownst to most mainstream Facebook users, the social network actually offers a slew of privacy controls and security features which can help you batten down the hatches, so to speak. If used properly, you'll never have to worry about whether you should friend the boss and your mom. You can friend anyone you want while comfortable in the knowledge that not everyone gets to see everything you post.
• Bug testers: Google is clean, Bing is buggy | Relevant Results – CNET News – An independent search engine bug bash gave high marks to Google's bug testers and found that while Bing is buggy, it's also doing a lot of things right.
• Brilliant 360-Degree Panorama of the Milky Way | Wired Science | Wired.com – Makes you feel small.
• 7 Moves Facebook Has Made to Outflank Twitter in the Last 6 Months | Ignite Social Media – Facebook is innovating, what does this mean for Twitter?
• HOW-TO: Write Effectively for Twitter & the Social Web – Social media itself has changed writing online – making it more informal and personal. In fact, when you’re writing online these days, you’re writing not only for your audience but also for search engines and social media sites. Add Twitter to the equation and the need to communicate with only 140 characters raises writing for the social web to a new art form.
• Facebook Photo Tag Search: The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread – facebook_photosYesterday we wrote about Facebook prototypes, a new Facebook (Facebook) feature which lets you try out beta versions of new features. Click on “Applications” at the bottom left of your screen, then “Browse More Applications”, and then on “Prototypes”.

This is the Link Report for August 12th through August 13th:

Please feel free to post your thoughts in the comment section below

To see all of our links please visit our Delicious page at Delicious.com/goldsteinmedia

• Facebook Grew Twice As Fast As Twitter In July – Facebook not only bought Friendfeed this month they grew twice as fast as twitter in July. Making them the clear dominant market leader.
• YouTube Launches Its Redesign – Now that redesign is going live for all users. If you take a look at YouTube (YouTube).com, you will see the new interface for yourself. YouTube has also blogged about the redesign, explaining some of the new features and a few that were removed. Here’s the text and a screenshot:
• The Internet Marketing Driver: Your Google Local Business Center Dashboard, Analyzing and Refining Your Google Maps Listing Based on Analytics – Another great post by SEO Guru Glenn Gabe about local search and local business center in Google
• Official Google Reader Blog: A flurry of features for feed readers – Google Does it again
• Google Caffeine FAQ: Your Questions Answered – PC World – Q&A about the Google update
• Technology Review: Blogs: TR Editors’ blog: Caffeine Injection Gives Google Search a Boost – For instance, Caffeine is undoubtedly faster than the current Google Search, often coming back with results in about half the time. It also appears to crawl many more pages–sometimes twice as many for a particular keyword. And according to some pundits, Caffeine's results suggest that it also uses a more complex combination of keywords to rank pages.
• Facebook Goes Lite and Tests Twitter-Like Version of Itself – Let the gloves come off. Facebook bought FriendFeed the other day and not they are going straight for their competition, namely Twitter. Will it work?
• Twitter Not Suing Developer, But Spam Apps Should Watch Out – Developer of app MyTwitterButler an auto following Twitter app claimed that he was being sued by Twitter. Twitter denies this.
• Federal judge in Tyler says Microsoft can’t sell Word | TechBlog | Chron.com – Houston Chronicle – What a shock, MIcrosoft infringed on a patent. Judge orders halt to sales of Microsoft Word.
• Pixorial: Bringing Sexy Back to Online Video Editing? – Put together by former executives from Netscape and Oracle, Pixorial has been in private beta since January of this year. Its mission is to “help people do more with video memories than ever before,” and to that end offers an interesting mix of digital and analog video services.

This is the Link Report for August 6th through August 7th:

• Georgia Takes a Beating in the Cyberwar With Russia – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com – Besides the bloody shooting war going on between Georgia and Russia, there’s another, quieter battle going on in cyberspace.The Georgian government is accusing Russia of disabling Georgian Web sites, including the site for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
• Twitter Restores Service After Online attack – NYTimes.com – Twitter, the popular microblogging site, was out of service much of the day Thursday as it worked to defend itself against a Web attack, but service appeared to have been restored by late evening.Many of Twitter’s 45 million legitimate visitors were unable to use the service for hours. Analysts characterized the disruption as a denial-of-service attack, in which hackers overwhelm a Web site by sending it a deluge of junk requests, and one suggested the attack might have originated in Russia or Georgia.
• Pronounce Names – Dictionary of Name Pronunciation, How to pronounce names, How to say a name, Name pronunciation, Name pronunciations, How to pronounce a name -
• Revision3 > Hak5 > Episode 524: USB Multipass – Linux, Trinity, USB – Why carry around a dozen bootable USB drives when you could merge ‘em all into one? On his episode we build a USB Multipass complete with customized boot menu ready to launch any of favorite tools–including Backtrack, Ophcrack, Kon-boot, dban, freedos, and more. Plus Shannon reviews the Trinity Rescue Kit, the boot disc dubbed CPR for your computer.
• 3 unveils MiFi mobile Wi-Fi service – mirror.co.uk – The 3 network has just pulled the wrappers off MiFi, a mobile Wi-Fi device that allows you to connect any Wi-Fi equipped device to the web no matter where you are.
• Is Cyber Warfare to Blame for Twitter Meltdown? – Everybody’s still regrouping after today’s Denial of Service attacks against Twitter, FacebookFacebookFacebook, LiveJournal, and other social media websites. Now, however, some further details about what happened and who might be behind it are coming to light.
• 20 Simple Productivity Tools for Bloggers – Great post full of links to Mashable’s pick for 20 great productivity tools for Bloggers
• Digg Ads Are Here: Will Users Bury Them Into Oblivion? – Two months ago, Digg (Digg) announced a lynchpin in its revenue strategy: Digg Ads. The program, an attempt to fix the company’s inability to turn a profit, allows users to vote on specific ads within the homepage feed. The more diggs, the less the ad costs to the advertisers. But if Digg users hate the ad, then their downvotes increase the ad price.
• Team Apart Makes the Virtual Meeting Social [Invites] – There is a lot of software out there for conducting virtual conferences and performing demos: GoToMeeting, Microsoft Office Live Meeting, WebEx, and AdobeAcrobat Connect immediately come to mind. Most of these programs though require software to be installed and are meant for conference meetings rather than team collaboration. They’re not virtual workspaces.
• Koobface Virus Gets Smarter; Targets Twitter and Facebook Users [Alert] – Koobface, a virus that targets computers via social networking sites, is apparently back and with added sophistication.A typical Koobface attack – like the one that surfaced on Twitter last month – comes via a link that purports to be an interesting video (i.e. – someone tweets “my home video” with a link to what looks like a YouTubeYouTubeYouTube page). Those videos then tell you that you need to upgrade your Flash player – which, many legitimate videos often do too. Upon “upgrading,” however, the user is infected with the virus.

WebPro News’ Mike McDonald talked with Rebecca Lieb of Econsultancy on the future of Search and how it will evolve in the future. She thinks that there will be a lot more optimization with “digital assets,” video, images etc., as well as an increased synergy with social media.

More WebProNews Videos

Google’s Matt Cutts explains on the latest Webmaster Help Video that Yahoo, Best of the Web, other Web directories with an editorial process are not considered paid links. This is because they have guidelines that need to be met and will reject low quality submissions if they don’t meet the right criteria.

This is very helpful and makes sense because both BOTW and Yahoo Directory are actually useful to users as well as Google and the search engines. One thing that always gets me is how Cutts says that you don’t have to worry about going overboard on SEO to rank high, just provide great content. This in some ways is true. Great content should out-weigh Optimized sites, but in actuality it doesn’t always happen that way. I know Cutts really can’t say otherwise, but it just gets a little annoying that he keeps saying make great content and everything else will fall in place, when he knows full well that often that isn’t the case.

Here’s the video. I’d love to hear what you think of this and what you think about Yahoo Directory and Best of the Web.

Check this viral video out. It’s unbelievable.