by Vera H-C Chan With summer on the home stretch, the releases increase in frenzy with more midweek premieres and a full, eclectic slate for the weekend. Here's how the buzziest new releases stack up... 1. " Tropic Thunder " (R). The Ben Stiller riff on war movies opened relatively small ($6.5 mil), but E! points out that some audiences didn't learn of the midweek premiere until (ironically) the boycotts . Hope that the comic trio of Stiller, Jack Black , and Robert Downey,

Thanks to Ben for asking this weeks viral marketing idea question: I read your site every now and then because I want to shape my mind to of a top level social marketer. I especially like you insights marketing ideas for boring industries. Here is the question though. I have been cracking up head to come up with some interesting and viral campaigns for the "stock photo" industry but I can't seem to think of anything!

Posted by great scott! This week Rand gets a bit technical with a whirlwind walkthrough of how the search engine link graph works. Fullu-qualified domains, pay-level domains, internal juice, external juice, domain trust, etc. It's all explained in this fast and furious installment of Whiteboard Friday...enjoy! SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - How the Link Graph Works from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo . Do you like this post?

AOL Mobile Search has been awarded a Silver Medal by mocoNews ! The mobile search blog held a competition of sorts to see which search engine has the best mobile results for the search term " Olympics ." Yahoo! and Google tied for gold and MSN Live came in third place for bronze. Swimmers Dara Torres and Katie Hoff are jubilant about their silver medals and so are we. OK, so ours wasn't won in Beijing's Water Cube , but it feels great just the same.

Posted by rebecca Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week: Three star links: Soxialize came out with Tweet Pro , a service that allows you to quickly and easily find Twitter users who share your same interest by searching through posted messages and profiles using keywords you enter. Richard Baxter teaches us how to create a new page template in Wordpress for social media targeting . Lately he's been providing some solid tips and posts on his blog,

DMOZ , the largest human-edited directory on the Web, celebrated its 10th anniversary this June. The DMOZ directory organizes the ever-expanding Internet for it's growing population of web users. Contributors take the time to sort out the less relevant content that many search engines provide and then organize the valuable listings into categories. Anyone on the planet who has the passion and the willingness to volunteer can choose a topic they care about and join in .

Sometimes it seems that you cannot go a day without reading a story about the economic challenges faced by our country. On one day the headline news is the declining housing market, the next it is a debate about if we are or are not in a recession, and the next it is about the latest financial company that needs to be bailed out. But what does that mean if you are a search marketer?

If you haven't heard, we are having a party on Monday the 18th to benefit two very worthy charities.? We are going to split the proceeds from the event 50/50 between the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society and The Children's Hospital .? I'd like to tell you a bit about why we are supporting the Children's Hospital. I'm hopi ng this post will make you want to support the Children's Hospital, too. I am the proud father of three beautiful little children,

Does this sound familiar? You've picked a topic that your ideal readers are dying to know more about. You can write about the topic with authority . You've even chosen an interesting angle . In short, you've got a killer post that should bring your blog thousands of new readers. You're also smart enough to realize that you need to tell other people about it. So, you send an email to all of the top bloggers in your niche, pointing them to the post.

Google is now offering AdSense for Feeds, after announcing that Feedburner would not be accepting any more applications to the Feedburner Ad Network . No official announcement has been made, but many publishers are able to access the feature in their AdSense accounts. I was able to do so with mine.