Today’s news is brought to you by the sweet new mug I just got from the great people of Incisive Media. They bring you the sites of:

• ClickZ.com
• SearchEngineWatch.com
• SearchEngineStrategies.com

It’s the Terra eco-friendly, responsible, reusable thermal porcelain cup with silicon lid. I’m psyched because it says I can put it in the microwave.

That was really nice. Thanks guys!

(If you aren’t aware, I work pretty closely with them. I speak at most of their events and I also write as one of their experts on their sites.)

On to the news…

The article the got me the most excited was, “Google Reader No Longer Just for RSS Feeds“. This is super handy. Until now, RSS readers would only tell you about updated pages that had RSS feeds attached to them. Now you can monitor any page. This can include competitor product pages, industry expert pages (so you can be a resource for them), client site changes, changes in sites that could give you insight into possible new customers… just use your imagination. This is a handy little tool.

Here are all the headlines that I felt were important for you over the last week. Enjoy!

50% of Marketers Shifting Funds From Traditional to Online; Social “Top Priority”

Society of Digital Agencies suggests that 50% of marketers will shift budgets from traditional to online media.

Not only that, but the highest priority for this newly allocated budget is social networks:

Google Reader No Longer Just for RSS Feeds

For example, if you wanted to follow Google.org’s latest products, just type “http://www.google.org/products.html” into Reader’s “Add a subscription” field. Click “create a feed”, and Reader will periodically visit the page and publish any significant changes it finds as items in a custom feed created just for that page.

Official Google Blog: Search is getting more social

With Social Search, when we search for [baby sleep patterns], [swaddling] or [best cribs], not only do we get the usual websites with expert opinions, we also find relevant pages from our friends and contacts. For example, if one of my friends has written a blog where he talks about a great baby shop he found in Mountain View, this might appear in my social results. I could probably find other reviews, but my friend’s blog is more relevant because I know and trust the author.

Remove Pages From Google ~Forever Using a 410 Status Code

Last year we started started treating 410 Gone responses as being a stronger signal for indicating when a page no longer exists. So for the situation you describe (where 301 redirects aren’t practical) returning a 410 response is the way to go.

Payvment lets you launch a storefront on Facebook

Their Facebook app is free and dead simple to use. It allows you to sell an unlimited number of items to your Facebook fans, who can now search and purchase your products across any storefront on Facebook.

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