Happy Friday everybody!

I know I’ve been kind of quiet recently, but it’s the end of another week and that means it’s time for another Link-Fest.

Are you sitting comfortably?

Then I’ll begin…

The Thing Everyone’s Been Talking About This Week

There have been a lot of posts about Online Reputation Management going around at the moment (seriously, it’s like this week’s Twitter).
Glen Allsop’s ViperChill blog is a good place to start with his post explaining what ORM is.
Jeff Quipp at Search Engine People followed this with his list of over 50 sites you can use to help deflect the impact of negative publicity on the internet.
Back to Glen at ViperChill as he demonstrates some of the dangers of upsetting women who have a clue about how to use the internet.
Then Kimberly Bock got in on the act (after taking a couple of days off) with her post on Yicrosoft Directory Girl called It All Comes Out In The Wash.

It’s Official: Google knows there’s a difference between SEO and Spam (Matt Cutts says so)

Matt posted a video of a keynote speech he gave at the Web 2.0 conference where he gave a few (very light) details about what Google knows about web spam.  It’s safe to assume that the head of the Big G’s spam team knows a great deal more about the subject that he lets on in a ten minute speech, but it’s a good introduction for laymen (or clients) and at least he makes a point of stating that SEO (when it’s done ethically) is not spam.
Which was nice.

Lots of useful advice on increasing your blog’s advertising revenue (from a man who makes his living from blogging)

Darren “ProBlogger” Rowse has been running a series of posts this week with loads of great tips about how to improve the effectiveness of your blog’s advertising.  He covers everything from ad positioning to design and even split-testing to measure your changes’ success.
I still haven’t made my mind up about whether or not to start placing ads here on SEOpsCentre, but if monetizing your blog’s traffic is your thing, there aren’t many people whose experience and advice is more relevant than his.

Lies, Damn Lies and Linkbait

Everybody from BBC Radio and The Sun newspaper in the UK, to Fox News in the US have been running the story of a 13 year old boy who stole his father’s credit card and used it to pay for a couple of hookers to play Xbox games with him and a friend.
But none of it’s true.
The whole story was concocted by everybody’s favourite SEO from Cornwall, Lyndon Antcliff and he admits it was all a hoax on his blog.
Update:  Lyndon has now removed the post mentioned above from his blog and put up a new one explaining his decision to remove the original post.
What’s really interesting though is the debate that’s developing on the story’s Sphinn page about the ethics of this kind of hoax-baiting.

Shoe “SEO is dead” Money writes a post defining the term SEO

Hot on the heels of last week’s SEObaiting post about the death of SEO, this week Shoemoney asked a load of big names in the SEO world to give him their definitions of the meaning of Search Engine Optimization.
I especially liked Matt Cutts QuadZilla’s definition.

Something For The Weekend

This week the post that is going to take up a large part of my Saturday isn’t an epic essay like the posts that I’ve mentioned over the last couple of weeks.
This time it’s Gray-Wolf’s list of WordPress Plugins.  I’d just finished adding the links to my long-awaited post about plugins for WordPress and was mere moments away from pressing Publish when Michael’s post popped up in my feed reader and sent me scurrying back to the drawing board.

Now I’m gonna have to spend my weekend checking out more plugins and deciding which ones to add to the list.
Bastard.

The Funny Bits

There’s been a lot of things that have made me chuckle this week.  Here are a few of my favourites.

Fake Steve Jobs reveals the secret of how Microsoft designs Operating Systems.
(Hint:  Take a close look at the monitors behind Uncle Bill)

TechCrunch noticed that Yahoo’s search results were flagging Google as a Malware site.  It turned out to be a mistake, but it was funny while it lasted.
On the subject of TechCrunch, there seems to be a fight brewing between Michael Arrington and Betsy Schiffman of Wired following the announcement that TechCrunch is getting syndicated by the Wall Street Journal.  Wired’s even started categorizing it’s posts about TechCrunch under the term “Buttmunch.”
Jealous much, Betsy?

Of course, if you can’t be bothered to read all the back and forth bitching, you could just head over to 1938 Media and watch The Mike Arrington Show.  But if you’re at work you might want to turn down the volume a bit, or maybe plug in some headphones (puppet Mike gets pretty shouty).

The Obligatory Mention for Twitter

It just wouldn’t be a Friday Link-Fest if I didn’t include at least one post about Twitter and this week’s entry is rather more bizarre than most.
Gizmodo UK shared this article about a device that will allow your plants to send you messages via Twitter.

W. T. F?!

And that’s it for another week and another Link-Fest.

Enjoy your weekend and keep it clean you muddy-funsters!