Just saw this Google ad above - is that JavaFX contest by Sun a kind of paid blog posts scheme? (And if those were to contain non-nofollowed backlinks to JavaFX.com, would that be against Google's webmaster guidelines?) The following bit is from Sun's contest guidelines: Complete the submission form and provide a URL to your blog describing your experience using JavaFX 1.2 SDK. The blog may be about your experience using JavaFX 1.2 SDK, its reliability, performance,

One way to brand yourself and ensure that you give yourself an edge over your competition by telling your potential customers what your USP (Unique Selling Proposition) is right off the bat is to use the correct keywords. USP is Unique Selling Proposition. What distinguishes you from the competition? You can right to the heart of that with your keywords before you ever start your search engine optimization efforts.

German Heise writes (my translation): Combining automatic speech recognition and machine learning, Michael Backes - professor for cryptography and information security of Saarland university - and his research team were able to reconstruct nearly three quarters of texts printed with a needle printer by the printing sounds it made. To do so, the researchers originally printed a dictionary,

Seth Godin pulled no punches with this pithy Saturday-morning post - You're Boring . Seth argues that unlike the old days when boring brands could simply buy attention, now the only option for anyone is to "become interesting, noteworthy and yes, remarkable." Along those lines, we thought it was a good idea to send you back to How to be Interesting by Jon Morrow. Because it's never too late to stop being boring.

Karma Bounties Programming question & answers site StackOverflow.com has a system based around karma and badges , and karma acts as a kind of in-site currency. One nice extra feature are bounties . When you don't get a good answer to your question after some time, you can start a karma bounty. You will assign 50 to 500 points from your own hardly earned karma,

One of the criteria that could affect your trust rank is page load speed. That is, how fast your pages load in your users' browsers so they can view them. There are several things that can affect page load speed: Excessive use of photos or videos Landing pages, or index pages, created from Flash Code bloat,

I have spent the better part of this afternoon and evening trying to do anything other than think about the passing of my good friend Rajeev Motwani. But I have failed. The thought that Rajeev has left us is hard to fathom. Rajeev was part of the fabric of Silicon Valley. He was part of the fabric of Stanford. And he was part of the fabric of August Capital. For a number of years now, Rajeev has attended our partners meetings every Monday afternoon. As a tenured professor,

So much of what I discover on a given day in the search marketing industry is via Twitter. When I find interesting and occasionally hot stories I note them on our @stepforth account and/or my @rossdunn account. Since our blog often suffers from my Twitter distractions I felt I had better provide a summary on the busy days. Thus, welcome to our very first Tweet Update for May 5th, 2009: Did Bing Just Leapfrog Yahoo Search?

The video shows a Compal Qualcomm powered Smartbook, it says, from the Computex 2009 tech show. In other news, according to the Financial Times , "Acer ... said it would begin shipping the world's first mainstream notebook computer using Google's Android operating system in the third quarter of this year ... The marriage of Acer's low-end Aspire One netbook with the Android operating system, originally designed for mobile phones,

by Claudine Zap The " Kung Fu " master dies in Bangkok. A former Olympic snowboarder meets an untimely fate. And a timely fish tale. It was a week of good-byes on the Web. Join us for a look back at those stories and more with the Buzz Week in Review. An actor with (karate) chops David Carradine , son of actor John Carradine , died this week in a hotel room in Bangkok.