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.