So the people suing the major search engines for click fraud issues created a website.

With the money that is going to be needed in that sort of a case you would have thought they could have made an attractive professional looking site, but you would be wrong. They even have (not so) flashy "click here" banners.

From their press release:

"What we'd like is for http://www.LostClicks.com to become an electronic meeting place for advertisers and individuals who are concerned about pay-per- click (PPC) fraud," says attorney Joel Fineberg of Dallas, who represents online advertisers in the class action lawsuit. "It's very important that all of us share information because we're dealing with a new technology and a new challenge. The more people who visit the site, the more knowledge we can all gain."

Sending what visitors I can. They are surely in for an expensive battle. Wonder why don't they have a blog, forum, or anything that would encourage community activity? They probably could have put a bit more effort in on that front.

The purist will hate the ads, but if RSS is going to transition from early adopter to mainstream it will need to pay for itself. The two options are that the RSS post is a summary that brings visitor to your site to see ads or you place ads in your feed. Google wants ads in your feed.

Google, wanting more ad inventory, has opened up Google AdSense for feeds (of course, BETA).

You are supposed to have at least 100 subscribers to sign up to the new AdSense for feeds program.

It's kinda funny how Google determines how feeds are supposed to work so that they justify creating more ad space, for better usability for the user of course ;)

Syndicate the full text of your articles. The more content that is available in a site’s feed, the better the user experience, and the more likely people are to subscribe your feed. If you can’t put the full text of your articles in your feed, then in addition to the headline of each article, include as informative a snippet as possible of the article’s text.

Typically most people do not view a feed until after they subscribed to it, so how does showing the full content of your post in your feed make people more likely to subscribe?

Parts 1 & 2

While those articles are not directly associated with SEO, I know many SEOs who:

• rarely sleep

• rarely exercise
• smoke & drink
• have lots of caffiene
• eat unhealthy
• are under heavy stress
• constantly multi task
• etc.

I don't think depression is just a physical or psychological issue, but is deeply intertwined. The articles focus more on the physical reenforcing aspects of severe depression.

Before doing SEO I was in the Navy and then later a mid level manager for another company. At my prior jobs it was not uncommon to drive & work 80 (mid level manager guy) to 120 (Navy) hours a week. I also did much of my initial learning SEO / marketing / web while in that mid level management position (and got so many speeding tickets during that time period too).

When you are first getting started in SEO you may have to work long hours, and sometimes it can be hard to escape work when there is so much to learn and it rests just beyond the edge of your bed. This is especially true when the alternative is to go work for a company that wants to chew you up for all you are worth, and then fire you or go under before you get any benefits out of your retirement.

A few other things that make it easy to stretch yourself too far doing SEO are

• that many times you do not have to leave the house or interact with society in general to get by

• pricing SEO services can be somewhat hard, especially when you are new and do not appreciate the value of your services. about a year ago I had like $20,000 of credit card debt, which has since been joyfully erased.

I don't necissarily agree with everything those articles said (particularly the endorsement of the prescription drugs), but did find the articles interesting.

Hopefully this somewhat off topic post helps more people than it makes mad.

Bo Peabody is the guy who created Tripod, who only accidentally had their everpopular site builder added to that site because his workers created something other than what he wanted. Lucky or Smart is a super quick book (58 pages) which explains some of the tips which helped Bo and Tripod along.

A few tips from his book:

1. "Lucky things happen to entrepenuers who start fundamentally innovative, morally compelling, and philosophically possitive companies."

2. entrepenuers usually are satisfied with well enough, whereas managers try to make things to perfect and thus move too slowly in starting new companies
3. startups generally attract many sociopaths
4. no is the most common word, but is an open door
5. being gracious is key
6. always spin your company / story / self to sell #1
7. press is sensationalistic. never believe in it.
8. news is past tense. doing is more important than reading the news.
9. know that you do not always know the answers and when to say you don't know

Lucky or Smart: Secrets to an Entrepeneurial Life is a book that is quick to read, and reads in a conversational tone, which will make it easy to read in a single sitting.

Not how to get more out of your ad spend, but how to spend more money on your PPC ads. Never did I think I would read an article about how to spend more. Why not though, eh?

The 1st major question they listed in evaluating your spend:
Any Search Engines Missing?
Kinda funny that the article was sponsored by FindWhat and there is a huge FindWhat ad next to it ;)

From the few chats I have had with him Kevin is a super bright guy, and probably one of the top half dozen PPC experts in the world, but do you think ClickZ is being a bit transparent with the advertising business model there?