You only have a couple of weeks left to submit an entry to this year's Search Engine Watch Awards . The deadline is July 17, 2009. The objective of the SEW Awards is to recognize excellence, as well as inspire innovation and encourage new ideas in search marketing. The SEW Awards will honor 14 outstanding search marketers, search engines and technology providers, as judged by a panel of industry experts and the Search Engine Watch editorial staff.

The AOL Hot Searches blog is already one of the best spots on the web for news, celebrity gossip, event information, sports updates and other user-interest stories. Now, with our latest redesign, it is also the sleekest, most eye-catching and easiest to use site of its kind! On the new page, you will find the same daily Hot Searches lists and themed Hot Searches that you have grown to love along with several new features, like our polls.

I used to think being "right" was a big deal. I had to say the right thing, dress the right way, know the right people, read the right books, live in the right neighborhood, go to the right school. It wasn't because I wanted to, exactly, but because I thought it was a prerequisite for success. If you want other people to respect you, then you have to look and sound a certain way, right? Makes sense, if conformity is all you've ever been taught.

Sharing stories on social voting and bookmarking sites both grows your social media profile power and enables you to reach your audience. Surprisingly enough, being one of the most important element of the story success, proper tagging is very often overlooked.

AOL Canada has relaunched their homepage and in case you couldn't tell, Pepsi has bought some advertising (Click on image to enlarge): The relaunch is based on the update of the AOL.com homepage in the U.S last fall. That relaunch has been good to AOL, with increases of 23% in unique visitors, 34% in total page views and 61% in total minutes consumed year over year, according to comScore's Media Matrix for May 2009.

One large issue when running a business on or offline is training staff. The main issue that arises is whether you feel comfortable training your future competition. This is especially true in a service or consultancy based vertical, such as internet marketing. In the end, a well trained staff is an asset, and you cannot control whether your employees become your future competitors. So how do you go about training a competent internet marketing staff?

(Also published on Adage.com ). As I ponder what's so hard about social technologies for marketers, I'm reminded of the old joke about what the Grateful Dead concert fans said when the drugs wore off ("Holy cow! It's country music!"). Because I've been having my own drugs-wore-off moment about social technology lately and it goes like this: Holy cow! It's just another communications channel! Blogs, Twitter, Facebook - yup, it's just another communications channel.

For the first time in history, some television programming is demanding higher ad rates online than it is for tv. Popular shows such as CSI and Simpsons are among those seeing the higher ad rates at such sites as Hulu.com and TV.com, according to Bloomberg . For a prime time ad, advertisers generally pay $20 - $40 per thousand viewers. But on Hulu.com, the Simpsons recently garnered $60 per thousand.

Philip Lenssen over at Google Blogoscoped noticed a variance in the size of Google logos in the search results from browser to browser. I did a little experimenting and noticed the same thing. On Firefox and Safari, the Google logo is proportionately smaller than on IE and Chrome for me. Check out the images below. Anyone else seeing the same thing?

TMZ was the first to break the news about Michael Jackson's death last Thursday and scooped all of the major news outlets. As a result, traffic to TMZ reached a 3 year high, with visits increasing 5x in volume from the previous day. The market share of visits increased 18% above the previous high on February 20, 2009, which took place after TMZ published photos of a bruised Rihanna following the assault by Chris Brown.