Since today is sort of a slow news day, being Good Friday and everything, I thought that I would mention 10 or more items that are useful tips for bloggers and marketers alike.

Legit News Photos for Free. Om Malik has the scoop on PicApp, where you can get legit news photos for free. It’s an interesting service, but I actually prefer to use something like the Voxant, a service that actually pays you for views of the latest news. I like free stuff, who doesn’t, right? Well, it’s even better if they pay you. Here’s sample content from today from Voxant, about the Republicans who have been instructed to blog, blog, blog:

In an interesting post, Louis Gray says that “The new company profiles on LinkedIn are a gold mine for reporters who want to get data beyond what the PR guys may want to dish out.”.

Henry Blodget asks if Facebook is hot today and going to be dead tomorrow, like AOL. I guess Henry forgot about the post that I wrote a while back, saying that AOL is really going to be TMZ, which is hot now.

There is not much time left to sign up for evernote for free. downloadsquad has all the scoop about it.

TechCrunch talked about how mytopia, the new casual gaming network works with all sorts of other stuff. Monday it will release the same games across the major Web and desktop widgets: iGoogle Gadgets, Apple Dashboard Widgets, Yahoo Widgets and Windows Vista Toolbar Widgets, says TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld.

According to Cnet, Google wants to fill in the TV white spaces. Google is “planning a conference call with journalists on Monday to discuss a company filing with the FCC regarding the use of unused portions of the TV spectrum band, known as white spaces.”

OK, well, that’s not quite the number of updates that I thought I would make today, but five is quite enough. So, to fill up some additional space on this post (bold, right?) let’s again see what Voxant has to offer today:

Having just gone to Paris, I learned a few things about French people and French culture.

Here’s the 10 requirements to passing off as a French Person :

1. Don’t Smile
2. Be Skinny
3. Drink More Wine Than Water
4. Don’t Wear a Beret - contrary to popular belief, very few French people wear berets. During my time in Paris I saw ONE guy with a Beret
5. Give Yourself a French Sounding Name - Especially important if you’re looking for a job in France
6. Have long meals, and be sure to chit chat and gesticulate during the entire course of the meal - you’re allowed to smile in this situation
7. Wear designer clothes - French people (and Italians as well) really know how to dress sharp.
8. Wear nice shoes - no sneakers - the easiest way to pick out an American Tourist in Paris is to look at their feet, they’re usually wearing sneakers!
9. Kiss your friends on the cheek when you meet them
10. And, of course, the most important, speak French PROPERLY

Here at the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York City (Search Engine Strategies New York 2008), Gigablast has officially launched their fresh and comprehensive site search for websites. If you have a website you can now provide a free site search as well as web search for your site’s visitors.

To add this site search feature to your site, you will need to first go here to the Gigablast Help area. You will need to add a form to your site (Gigablast provides the code pictured below):

You will actually need to modify the code to include your domain name as well as your site’s logo in 200×50 size. To be honest with you, as a webmaster and site owner, I’m not sure if I have a 200×50 size logo to add and it will take extra time to have one made or to make one. so, I’m kind of confused as to why Gigablast would require this. But, in any case, I’ve added the code (minus the site logo) below so you can see how the site search service works to search my site:

What’s interesting is that you could actually use this site search to build your own mini-search engine. For example, if you have a network of blog sites you could add all the sites to this site search code and allow visitors to search your network of sites.

Here is a sample screen shot of the Gigablast search results:

What’s cool about this new service is from Gigablast is that if you add site search to your site the site will receive Gigablast’s Gigaboost system, which means that your site will receive priority during the Gigablast indexing process. This Gigablast priority allows you to offer fresh site search results that are frequently updated. This is especially important for sites that update their content frequently, such as news sites, blogs, and other information-packed sites.

“The most frequent complaint regarding alternative site search services is the freshness of the site search results,” said Marcus Ruark, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Gigablast. “Gigablast Site Search with Gigaboost provides a tremendous search advantage to websites with dynamic, usergenerated content, frequent page updates, or regular sales promotions.”

Since web pages with Gigablast Site Search receive priority in the Gigablast indexing process, all web searches on www.gigablast.com, or on any of Gigablast’s affiliate or partner websites will have fresh access to those Gigablast Site Search web pages.

Gigablast Site Search with Gigaboost is free and available right now at www.Gigablast.com.

Founded in 2000, Gigablast is a leading provider of natural, algorithmic search services, including consumer web search, XML web search feeds, hosted search, and customized search software. Gigablast’s innovative, industry-leading algorithms enable massive-scale spidering, query-processing, and spam reduction with minimal hardware and expense.

Business.com is launching new Money and Technology channels in an attempt to improve user experience and bring more qualified leads to B2B advertisers who advertise on Business.com.

As part of these new features, Business.com is attempting to deliver “improved usability and audience targeting capabilities around two core needs of every business – money and technology.”

The new Business.com Money Channel and Technology Channel is debuting at the the Search Engine Strategies New York 2008 conference and trade show. If you’re going to be at the SES conference this week (like I am), you might want to check out the Business.com demos. They will demo the new Channels on March 18th and March 19th at booth #153 in Rhinelander Hall.

According to Business.com, the Money Channel and Technology Channel integrates features that attempt to deliver unique value to both users and B2B advertisers, including:

– New business how-to guide content integrated into directory pages – contextually relevant business how-to guides from Work.com (www.work.com), the leading business expert community, help business buyers clarify their needs and define action steps toward a solution.

– More specific search results by business requirements – new Finders enable users to identify vendors offering products or services meeting specific business requirements. For example, users can easily find inventory management software vendors offering web-based systems for small businesses with bar code support and accounting system integration.

– Updated and expanded business taxonomy – hundreds of new product and service categories in the new channels, expanding user choice and improving the ability of advertisers to target listings by product or service niche, attributes and geography.

– New channel and hub landing pages – new pages incorporating navigation, related how-to guides, blog-style news and banner ad sponsorship opportunities.

Avaya is the exclusive sponsor of the new Business.com Technology Channel. The sponsor of the Business.com Money Center is expected to be announced soon.

Business.com, a wholly owned subsidiary of R.H. Donnelley Corporation (NYSE: RHD), is the leading business search engine, directory and pay-per-click advertising network. The Business.com site helps business decision makers quickly find whatever they need to manage and grow their businesses, and the Business.com Network – including premier partners BusinessWeek, Hoovers , Financial Times, Internet.com, and more – enables B2B advertisers to reach qualified buyers wherever they are online. The company also operates Work.com, a B2B community publishing platform featuring more than 4,000 business how-to guides contributed by business experts. Business.com was named to the 2006 Inc. 500 and 2007 BtoB Media Power 50, Los Angeles Business Journal list of Best Places to Work and Deloitte Technology Fast 500.

Came across this great clip on YouTube! Enjoy

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Only in America can a prostitute involved in a major sex scandal with an important public figure become rich and famous because of it.  Ashley Youmans (or Alexandra Dupre -whatever she goes by today) stands to make millions off of her now very public romp with client #9.  Adult magazines, movies, record labels will all come calling because of her infamous name.  These businesses don’t necessarily care about ethics, they care about what sells.  Sex sells - especially when it involves a scandal.  The deeply disturbing thing to me is the fact that there are millions of hard working, noble Americans out there who do the right thing and are never rewarded with riches for it.  This girl couldn’t even graduate high school, yet she is now going to be wealthy beyond her wildest dreams because she sold her body to the right person.  Wealth does not provide happiness, but it is something that should be earned honestly (I know that provided a chuckle for some of you out there).  It is a shame that people can obtain it through such immoral means.  Of course, there is nothing saying she will accept the money, but the fact she has a chance to is what bothers me about the U.S. of A.
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I was tipped off today by a WebmasterWorld thread that Google is testing their Site Links feature that includes a search box right under the Site Links. See the screen capture below:

From what I can tell, and from the short amount of testing that I’ve done, the search box appears when you search for Microsoft at Google.com. It looks to me that it’s nothing but a Google custom search engine, or simply a site: command search of the microsoft.com domain, which includes all of their subdomains.

Being the search engine marketer that I am, I thought that I would try a few creative searches to see what I could come up with. First, I tried this search:

“search engine spam”

I thought that I would see what I can find out about search engine spam at Microsoft. Most of the results are from Microsoft’s Research area. Well, it’s certainly makes for interesting reading:

What’s interesting to me, though, is the fact that Google thinks that Microsoft’s Front Page 2002 has more to do with search engine spam than anything else. Go figure.

However, it’s kind of frightening to me that there are at least 1250 pages on the Microsoft site that do not have a title tag. C’mon, guys, clean up your site!

Back to Google Site Links search. Site Links have been around for a while, and as a search engine marketer, I have always thought that if you’ve “done everything right” so to speak, Google will “reward you” by giving you site links. After all, I haven’t seen (yet) any sites that are “spammy” sites or sites with site links that shouldn’t have them. If you come across a site like this, I would love to see it.

By adding the additional search field to the Site Links area, it appears to me that Google has identified the fact that when Google visitors search for the search phrase “Microsoft”, they’re looking for particular information about Microsoft. So, it only makes sense that a search field be added there. After all, it’s helpful.