Google guards their search algorithms carefully, but from time to time they are willing to give some hints as to how they weigh the sites listed in their index.  Performancing.com has an exclusive interview with Matt Cutts, Sr. Engineer and Head of Webmaster Relations at Google.
Q. Can you give the Performancing readers a few tips [...]

Your customers are not just consumers. They are your marketing department, your product development specialists, and the secret to your success—an untapped resource waiting to be invited to the table.
The concept of involving your customers in your business isn’t a new one; blogging just takes it to a new level, largely because you often aren’t [...]

Om Malik is mulling over Cisco’s most recent press release involving Comcast. 
The press release doesn’t really say anything, but in a larger scheme of thing, this is a pretty serious development. Comcast will be spending dollars on new technologies and start-ups. So folks, get your tickets to Philly, and start loving the Eagles. Thus [...]

A BBC story offers some surprising statistics.  According to their article, 3/4 of survey respondants claimed to have checked a blog for information before shopping. 
"Consumers are tired of marketing gloss and so the interest in blogs is not surprising," said Paul Halfpenny, product manager at survey sponsor Hostway.
"We all want impartial advice and information, [...]

Pheedo just published a study that appears to hold true to previous research.  RSS Ads are simply more effective than traditional site ads. 
CONSUMERS USING RSS READERS ARE more likely to click on ads presented as stand-alone posts than on ads within posts–7.99 percent to 0.85 percent–according to research conducted this fall by RSS company [...]

A new opinion search engine, OpinMind, offers an interesting way to guage the blogosphere’s reaction to specific terms.  While they currently only track 1.7 million blogs in their index, Steve Rubel thinks this may give Intelliseek some competition, in the long run.
TechCrunch has more:
And you can do a faceoff by typing two queries with a [...]

Mainstream media giant, Viacom, and Pubsub have partnered to bring you targeted alerts on all local CBS affiliates websites. 
Via Steve Rubel:
The local news sites now have a feature called TrackIt, powered by PubSub. TrackIt is described as “a matching service that tracks topics that matter to you, then notifies you when new content is [...]