by Craig Sutton Many people use the Twitter service to meet other interesting people, both with similar likes or just to hear what others have to say. This method of online socialization has become quite commonplace in the online world. I myself started using twitter after being introduced to it at Small Business Marketing Unleashed by Jennifer Laycock. I found it to be quite entertaining and an interesting way to keep up with some of the people I met.

Today we are pleased to feature "Portishead In Portishead," a special 31-minute concert presentation from the seminal trip-hop group Portishead . These seven songs, from their new CD Third (which is actually their fourth album ??" go figure), were performed in multi-instrumentalist Geoff Barrows' former drama school classroom. Enter here . Along with this extended concert video, Portishead also put together a list of their favorite clips on YouTube.

The search engine industry normally calms down during the summer months (most of these companies are on the Northern Hemisphere where there is summer now). This week, however, we witnessed the birth of a new large scale search engine, the first one in a long time. Cuil (pronounced /ku:l/ or "cool") seems to rely less on link popularity and more on the content of the web pages they find when ranking results. Immediately this strikes us a step back, search quality wise,

When it comes to SEO, there are three kinds of people. There are those that know little and do little; then there are those that know everything, they drill down into analytics and search results and can tell you where a page ranks on any given day. Somewhere in the middle is your ordinary everyday website owner who is trying to deliver the best SEO program on a learn as you go basis. For these individuals, PageRank can still be a valuable tool.

Yahoo has re-elected all of its nominees to its board of directors , closing a big chapter for the company in the wake of Microsoft's failed $44.6 billion acquisition attempt . The news came at the company's annual board meeting August 1, but not without some huffing and puffing from some shareholders. The board includes Carl Icahn, who wormed his way to a seat on the board and still covets a deal with Microsoft, and current Chairman Roy J. Bostock, Ronald W. Burkle,

Google competes with Commission Junction with its own affiliate network. Apart from Google AdWords, affiliate agreements are probably the main sources of income for many "non-professional" web site owner. The recipe is easy: Find products that are relevant to the topic of your site. Sign up for an affiliate agreement and get percentages of the sales generated from links on your site. In other words: You (normally) get paid per sale, not per click.

One of the most important aspects of running a PPC campaign is the time factor. Don't just expect windfall results within one month. Take your time and build your campaign slowly by engaging in periodic ad testing, a daily budget, and bidding tweaks. This is very important. Your ad testing should simply be an A/B test comparing your current ad text to a new ad and you can do this weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, or even quarterly. I recommend monthly.

Search engines crawl the web reading pages, indexing them then following links to the next page where it goes through the same process. Along the way it tries to assess the appropriate connections between the search phrases entered by users and the content - it does this using what we call keywords and keyphrases. Can you train the search engines to read and index your pages in certain ways?

With video views in the tens-of-millions, nearly 400 episodes, over 100,000 subscribers and a cover story in WIRED magazine, lonelygirl15 is undoubtedly one of the first breakthrough web series to hit YouTube. Like all good things, however, it must come to an end, and today marks the start of a long goodbye: a 12-episode finale, each one posted on the hour. It's been amazing to witness the loyal community of fans that has cropped up around lonelygirl15. Well two years ago,

It appears that social media, particularly in the form of blogs, can now be used by public companies to meet their public disclosure requirements. Neville Hobson has reported the story on WebProNews . Yesterday, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved new guidance for publicly-listed companies in using traditional websites and social media channels like blogs to meet the SEC's public disclosure requirements under Regulation FD.