On the Usability Front:
The Biggest Web Design Mistakes of 2004
Steve Krug Interview (found on Web Words)

On the Syndication Front:
I finally added syndication buttons to the site :) thanks to Andy Hagans for making them.
Why Bloglines Sold: It's Not a Business

On the Spam Front:
Pfizer Inc. and Microsoft Corp. teamed up to target e-mail spammers who peddle phony Viagra

On the Open Source Front:
Ask Jeeves may want to open source their desktop search, may create a browser
Google may host Wikipedia. This artilce states they may want to control the information to block other search engines. I seriously doubt it, I think they are smart enough to do it for good karma points alone.
Is MSN Dying?

Blog Anchor Text:
While the author of asbestos.stinkmachine.com is not interested in the subject, he is acquiring some good linkage data as the blog community states how fascinated they are with him making money from AdSense.

In Google's investor day a slide showed Weblogs Inc makes over $600 a day from AdSense. It seems there are a ton of AdSense sites, but if you lack topical interest is it a sustainable business model? Other than the guy getting the free links from the oohs and ahhs most people are going to need to spend some $ to build linkage data.

There probably is still some easy money on the table, but as time passes surely that market will get much much more saturated and competitive.

On a side note, if bloggers are so smart and well connected, how are they so behind the loop on AdSense?

Fake Weblogs:
So evil they may as well be terists...

What is funny is that

• blogs will link to other blogs just because they are profitable and being made for AdSense.

• and criticise other blogs for being fake

Beyond intent what really matters?

My weblog is fake. If the fake blog wiki would ever go back online I would add my blog.

Naive & Manipulated:
perhaps worse than being fake?

Recently Google updated their index and relevancy algorithm with Update Allegra.

The update was believed to be related to latent semantic indexing.

Beings that my own rankings just dipped, it would be easy for me to take things overly personal and perhaps be a bit biased about the situation. Then again some of my other sites are now ranking way better than they were, and I also pointed out this problem before it ever had any significant effect on me.

In doing this update the search results are in many areas less than stellar. Understandable that shuffles will occur as they must to consistantly improve relevancy, but on more than one occasion Google has seemed to have lost focus on their official mission statement.

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

They tell you to design content for the user. Link to quality resources. Act if search engines are not even there. Generally this is good advice for many webmasters.

What they do not tell you is that they do not follow their own guidance.

Sure trying to rank for a term like "SEO" or other generic terms may be a bit unrealistic for many and only a few sites can rank well for such a term. I am not particularly saying that I believe I deserve to rank #1 in Google for "SEO" because it is a generic term and they owe me nothing.

On another front there are brand names that people work long and hard to build. Sure the search results are just informational pages about a topic, and maybe Google doesn't give a shit about my brand, and that is fine too.

Where the real problem exists though is that since I have worked so hard to build that brand it gets a ton of traffic and people expect to see my site there.

When people search for stuff like "seobook" and 10 out of 10 of the front page results reference me but I am not listed that provides a poor user experience for Google's users.

To try to prevent their results from being manipulated they have often thrown the baby out with the bathwater. But maybe in the hopes of achieving their longterm goals Google realizes they have to take short term hits.

What if Google is wrong in their desires though? What if their desire to fight off commercial manipulation is so great that they fail to accept commerce as part of the web, and too often show informational results when people want to shop? Would that eventually cause people to stop using Google? Would accepting markets for more of what they are without trying to bias them away from marketing and toward aged sites or information dense pages potentially create a more efficient market?

A buddy of mine pointed me to a white paper by Zoltan Gyongyi, Hector Garcia-Molina, & Jan Pederson about a concept called TrustRank(PDF).

Human editors help search engines combat search engine spam, but reviewing all content is impractical. TrustRank places a core vote of trust on a seed set of reviewed sites to help search engines identify pages that would be considered useful from pages that would be considered spam. This trust is attenuated to other sites through links from the seed sites.
TrustRank can be use to

• automatically boost pages that have a high probablility of being good, as well as demote the rankings of pages that have a high probability of being bad.

• help search engines identify what pages should be good canidates for quality review

Some common ideas that TrustRank is based upon:

• Good pages rarely link to bad ones. Bad pages often link to good ones in an attempt to improve hub scores.

• The care with which people add links to a page is often inversely proportional to the number of links on the page.
• Trust score is attenuated as it passes from site to site.

To select seed sites they looked for sites which link to many other sites. DMOZ clones and other similar sites created many non useful seed sites.

Sites which were not listed in any of the major directories were removed from the seed set, of the remaining sites only sites which were backed by government, educational, or corporate bodies were accepted as seed sites.

When deciding what sites to review it is mostly important to identify high PR spam sites since they will be more likely to show in the results and because it would be too expensive to closely monitor the tail.

TrustRank can be bolted onto PageRank to significantly improve search relevancy.

So a friend of mine is building a tool which will likely be publically available for usage and it may run a thousand or few thousand queries a day. This tool may query some of the major search engines and may need to use some open HTTP proxies.

Does anyone know how he can gain access to reliable open HTTP proxies and if / what costs would be available?

Feel free to emails me seobook aT gmail DoT com if you do not want to post anything in the comments.

If and when he completes the tool I will mention its launch on this site :)