“A popular question on our Webmaster Help Forum is in regard to best practices for organic link building. There seems to be some confusion, especially among less experienced webmasters, on how to approach the topic. Different perspectives have been shared, and we would also like to explain our viewpoint on earning quality links”.

“With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before — no matter when or where it was published.”

“Music is almost universally important to human culture, but instruments are not strictly ‘useful’ and it seems strange to think of them as mere tools. That said, from the first bone flutes and stone tools, the evolution of musical instruments has closely paralleled to that of more utilitarian technology. As inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil puts it – [musical expression] has always used the most advanced technologies available.”

“Apple said it sold more than 300,000 iPads on Saturday, the device’s first day on the market. Apple iPad users downloaded more than one million apps from the company’s App Store and more than 250,000 electronic books from the iBookstore. Some reviewers said the iPad could challenge the primacy of the laptop. But others said the device, though gorgeous, simply doesn’t fill an obvious need. Does the iPad offer designers and users a new medium, or is it merely an iPod Touch on steroids? How much does the form factor of a device drive the creation of new kinds of content and how that content is read, heard and watched?”

From Room for debate at NYTimes

“Organizations don’t need “social media” strategies. They need social strategies: strategies that turn antisocial behavior on its head to maximize meaning. The right end of social tools is to help organizations stop being antisocial. In fact, it’s the key to advantage in the 2010s and beyond.”

“Gartner, Inc. has identified 10 mobile technologies that will evolve significantly through 2011 in ways that will impact short-term mobile strategies and policies.”

“We are pleased to announce that WordPress has won the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. WordPress has won this Award for the first time in the past four years, earning itself a place in the Hall of Fame category for the Award next year.”

Open Source CMS awards

“Linux enabled Google to build dirt-cheap servers; Java and Perl and Ruby have become the lingua franca for building Web 2.0 applications; and the free Web-server software Apache powers nearly half of all Web sites in the world. Open source software gave birth to the Internet age, making everyone—even those who donated their labor—better off.”

Can open source hardware do the same thing?

This article from Wired Magazine explores these issues and more.

“Here’s a simple scenario. A startup produces an innovative idea and works with a patent lawyer to file a patent. This takes a considerable amount of time (a few months at least) and a substantial amount of money ($25K+). But the startup does it anyway and after the patent is filed, people feel comforted that their idea is safe.
Right? Of course not! Not even close. Any patent filed today will take 4-6 years to approve. In the current era where a week is a long time and a year is an eternity, the time to process a patent is unbearably long. Because of this gap, filing a patent appears useless. While you can threaten based on a pending patent, people are unlikely to take it seriously.”