Catch­ing up with Mark Glaser at PBS’s Medi­aShift blog:

9 Tips to Improve Search Engine Opti­miza­tion (SEO). Top tips:

1. Get inbound links and link out as well.

 Terry Heaton, senior vice pres­i­dent of AR&D, notes that inter­nally link­ing is also impor­tant, and is some­thing the top news­pa­per sites do well.

“The main rea­son Wikipedia links always appear near the top in Google is because their Google Juice is rich with links from and to them­selves,” Heaton said. “The ‘weight’ of a link is mea­sured, in part, by the source. Wikipedia gets a ton of traf­fic, so a link from them is ‘worth’ far more than a link from, say, any TV sta­tion in the coun­try. Hence, Google ‘sees’ the links and val­ues them accord­ingly, which raises Wikipedia’s search results…Internal link­ing, there­fore, always reaps SEO rewards. …

2. Head­lines and title tags should have key words up front. …

3. Web addresses for your blog posts or arti­cles should include key words.

4. Page descrip­tions should be unique or eliminated. …

5. High­light your best con­tent on every page. …

6. Cre­ate theme or cat­e­gory pages, and run more spe­cial series.

7. Limit tags and cat­e­gories to the most impor­tant ones.

8. Cre­ate a Google News sitemap and opti­mize images.

9. Get into offline con­ver­sa­tions as well as online ones.

More from Mark:

State of Inves­tiga­tive Report­ing at News­pa­pers, Broad­cast­ing. Live-blogging a panel in Berke­ley, Calif., on the future of inves­tiga­tive reporting.

Are Vet­eran Media Execs the Ones Who’ll See the Future?

I’ll be attend­ing New­sTools on Thurs­day, Fri­day and Sat­ur­day in Sil­i­con Val­ley. Ustream should be car­ry­ing live streams of the event here. Here’s a list of the atten­dees.

Ran into Brian Zisk at Web 2.0 Expo last week. Brian’s putting on the sec­ond San Fran­cisco MusicTech Sum­mit on May 8 from 9 am to 6 pm. The con­fer­ence fea­tures the lead­ing Bay Area devel­op­ers, entre­pre­neurs, musi­cians,
and orga­ni­za­tions in the music/technology space.   

Speak­ers from Google, Pan­dora, imeem, SonyBMG, See­q­Pod, SomaFM,
Sun, YouTube, Warner Bros Records, GETV, Rock­You!, BMI, ASCAP, WuChess,
Apple, INgrooves, Nor­west Ven­ture Part­ners, Gang of Four, CD Baby,
Keker & Van Nest, Vator.tv, Mozilla, and oth­ers will be on tap. Ticket prices go up this Fri­day. I’ll see if I can make it over there this time.

Deb from Com­mu­ni­cano passes along this info:

Ifby­phone
has just announced a Face­book app called Phone-Me-Now that gives Face­book friends free click-to-call capa­bil­i­ties — with­out dis­clos­ing
their caller ID and no mat­ter what type of phone they’re using (mobile
or land­line — even a rotary dial phone). The wid­get uses some of the
same pow­er­ful tech­nolo­gies Ifby­phone also uses to give its small and
medium-sized busi­ness clients enterprise-level Web presence.

I missed this essay by Nicholas Carr ear­lier this month: The Great Unbundling: News­pa­pers & the Net, an excerpt from his new book  The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edi­son to Google.

MoveOn’s Obama in 30 Sec­onds con­test is down to 15 final­ists after 1,000 entires and over 5 mil­lion votes. You should be able to see and vote on the final­ists  here (for the People’s Choice Awards). I liked the one above titled “Obama 2012.”

Wish I could be at the Eco­nom­ics of Social Media con­fer­ence today in LA. Impres­sive list of speak­ers. Here’s cov­er­age on Tech­no­rati.

At the Ide­aLab blog, Dan Gill­mor writes about the value of find­ing the right domain name and he points to a cou­ple of free ser­vices I hadn’t heard of:

Make­Words
is a “name gen­er­a­tor” — essen­tially, you plug in key­words and it gives
you sug­ges­tions. The flex­i­bil­ity is impres­sive. You can tell it how the
domain name should start or end, and you can get refine­ments from a
long list of key­word themes, as well as affixes by theme. For exam­ple,
I searched on “Cal­i­for­nia” and refined it with a “travel” theme, and
got a list or allegedly avail­able names that included
farescalifornia.com, flightcalifornia.com, getawayscalifornia.com and
tripscalifornia.com.

Name­Boy
is another gen­er­a­tor. In my expe­ri­ence it’s sim­pler to use, but much
less nuanced. You type in a pri­mary and (optional) sec­ondary word, and
it spits out results.

How are new map­ping tools and geo­t­ag­ging
tech­nolo­gies being used to unite com­mu­ni­ties and
tell impor­tant sto­ries from around the globe? Find out
how you can make your mark on the new media land­scape at the 2008 Beyond Broad­cast con­fer­ence
on June 17, 2008 in Wash­ing­ton, DC.

Beyond Broad­cast has become an annual
des­ti­na­tion for mak­ers, schol­ars and pol­icy experts
explor­ing pub­lic media for a dig­i­tal, par­tic­i­pa­tory era. 
The theme of this year’s con­fer­ence is Map­ping
Pub­lic Media. How do map­ping and visu­al­iza­tion tools
reveal shifts in the pub­lic media land­scape? Pan­els,
pre­sen­ta­tions and demos map the emerg­ing
land­scape. (Alas, I won’t be able to attend.)

Early bird rates for reg­is­tra­tion end on Wednesday.

San Jose Mer­cury News: Next gen­er­a­tion is reshap­ing pol­i­tics through social net­work­ing — a Q&A with the authors of the new book Mil­len­nial Makeover: My Space, YouTube & the Future of Amer­i­can Pol­i­tics (Rut­gers Uni­ver­sity Press).