When the clock struck midnight on January 1st, I began running. It was a 5k run in Philadelphia, along the Schuylkill River, to be more specific. During this run, I passed a homeless man. Rather than running past him, I stopped. I gave him $100. Later that day, I stopped to think in greater detail about that incident. What was it that compelled me to engage him? I think the answer to that question, in this case, should be fairly obvious. The night was cold and rainy.

As we all know, unless you are fortunate enough to have content on a client site go viral due to its sheer brilliance, link building is a time intense activity.  Positioning yourself in a niche, building great content, approaching a webmaster for a linkâ?" these things don't happen in the blink of an eye.  But I've established an excellent way to work on link building campaigns that takes less time than it would  to do all the work alone.

As we move into 2010, most of us are thinking about goals we'd like to achieve in the new year. Whether you're a marketing team of one focused on getting the word out to your local community about your newly-opened small business or you're juggling multiple client accounts for a major search engine marketing firm, there's no question that knowing your way around adCenter has its benefits. You may feel like you've got the basics down,

Seesmic announced today that it has acquired Ping.fm . This is a service that has half a million active users posting daily from various devices by sending email, text messages, and chat. "Ping.fm is compatible with every single Internet device in the world, which why it has become so successful among thousands of users," says Seesmic. "Try using chat to update Twitter, and youll find it direct and seamless as you can post updates from gtalk, aim or skype through Ping.fm.

Happy New Year, SEWatchers! Hope you had brilliant holidays and a chance to relax. Now time to ease ourselves back into the driving seat and plan the year ahead. Here is one approach to get you started. Click to read the rest of this post.

A while back, Google launched an extensions gallery for its Chrome web browser. Ad-blocking add-ons are among the most popular for Mozilla's Firefox, so it stands to reason that they will be for Chrome as well. With Google's primary source of revenue being its ads, a lot of talk has surfaced about Google letting people block its own ads with its own product. Is Google was smart to allow ad-blocking extensions for Chrome? Discuss here .

Hello and Happy New Year. I'm Keith Koenig from the merchant services team at PayPal. As you've heard, we've upgraded the Payflow Pro gateway service to provide PayPal merchants with newer and safer features. In our previous post, we let you know that merchants had to perform a simple update in .

Last month, Google acknowledged Apple's importance by releasing a beta version of Chrome for Mac. New statistics show that Google sort of put Apple to shame, too, however, as Chrome passed Safari in terms of market share. The stats come courtesy of Net Applications , and according to the organization, Internet Explorer remained very much on top of the Web browser pile in December with a market share of 62.69 percent. Unsurprisingly, Firefox placed second, with a share of 24.

Smartphone owners are more comfortable making purchases from their handsets, but poor mobile site functionality is still a frustration for many, according to a new survey by Compete. While m-commerce is set for strong growth in 2010, consumers are still more likely to abandon mobile purchasing on sites that are not optimized for the on-the-go experience, similar to shopping cart abandonment in the early days of ecommerce.

Vermont residents may want to start giving a little extra thought to whether or not they like the way Google does things. It seems that Matt Dunne, the Manager of Community Affairs at Google, is trying to become the state's governor. An important note: Dunne hasn't sworn to turn Vermont into one giant Googleplex. There's been no fanatical talk of data collection. And the words "Google" and "search" don't even appear on Dunne's homepage (part of which you can see below).