...but on Thursdays I dedicate a solid couple hours to just this one task as opposed to the "when I get a chance" aspects of most other days.

Today I found a few interesting stories and so rather than report of something we've discovered or putting my spin on some news I'm going to simply list of a number of interesting news stories, perhaps a bit of a summary on why they're important (in my humble opinion) and a link to the radio show where I discussed them in more detail.

First - let's look at Google.

Didn't get to this on the show (week-after-week we run out of time) but they're pushing hard to get broadband into more regions of the world and get wast wireless access to mover more areas.

Of course they're only looking out for us right? Wrong. As Greg Sterling rightfully points out over at Search Engine Land in his post, "Google Wants The Web To Go Faster", Google's motives here are purely driven by self interest. That said, their self interest coincides nicely with the interests on most tech companies and with consumers so it seems that having the budget and interests on Google on our side just might get things rolling in our favor.

And for those of you who might have missed it the first 83 times they said it - here's a video from Matt Cutts (Google Guru) on quality directories vs paid links:


All right - now on to Bing.

Our regular readers will know that I'm getting sick-and-tired of reporting more positive news on Bing. Well today I get a mixed bag which is better than nothing.

On one hand - Bing's share of paid links has increased by 13% since it's launch. Let's remember - this is where search companies make their money so this statistic is HUGE. You can read more about this on WebProNews.

Now the fun part for me - SE Round Table has brought a discussion to light that Microsoft has increased the traffic they're sending in the form of bots looking for suspicious websites. Alright - that sounds good HOWEVER this traffic may well be skewing their referrer stats that all the previous good news is based on. The amount of traffic to some sites is up ten fold since the switch to Bing which is huge for traffic and could well amount to much of the search market share increases being reported.

I haven't looked far into this at this time and so I don't really have a side of the discussion however it's definitely a story to follow. You can read the article and follow a discussion on the subject over at SE Round Table here.

Obviously there's a lot of other news out there. Today I high recommend visiting Search Brains. They're always good but today I was especially impressed with the quality and diversity of news.

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