Yesterday, my most recent contribution to the Bruce Clay Newsletter went live. Improving Search Marketing Efforts with Analytics was aimed as a follow-up to my March 15th article, Search Marketers Need Web Analytics.

If you have some time, check it out and let me know what your thoughts are. As always, props goes out to Lisa Barone, Virginia Nussey and Susan Esparza for their mad editing skills.

Before I start in with today’s list, I’d like to give recognition to Brendan Picha of Squareoak Media. I met Brendan at the SMX Social Media in New York last October, and since then — I’ve learned a lot from the man.

One of the more recent tips that Brendan passed along to me was to check out PopURLs — a handy site that pulls the most popular items from digg, del.icio.us, reddit, flickr, newsvine, metafilter, truemors. YouTube, Google News, Yahoo News, tailrank, spike, wired, slashdot, boingboing, last.fm, fark, nowpublic, stumbleupon, mixx, clipmarks, dzone, videosift, mahalo, AOL Video and literally hundreds of others including Twitter.

So, with that housekeeping note out of the way, here are the links I wanted to share for Sunday, March 9, 2008!

News / Articles: Sunday, March 9, 2008
• Why is switching XP for Vista an upgrade? (via Digg)
• 33 Body Enhancement Photoshop Tutorials
• 36 Beautiful Resume Ideas That Work
• Pharmaceutical Drugs Found in Drinking Water

Video Items: Sunday, March 9, 2008
• Unbelievable Hockey Fight (Digg)
• LEGO Indiana Jones (Spike)
• Amazing Paper Toy (MetaCafe)

Image Items: Sunday, March 9, 2008

Rhode Island Desert by Brian Higbee

Forgotten Morning by Deltasly

Horizon (*) by Alessandro.Piras

I’ve already slacked with my “daily” segment. Note to readers… Having a one year old at home and a lot of personal business issues makes it tough to dedicate yourself to consistent habits.

Enough excuses though… Here are the links I came across and felt the need to post.

• 10 Things That Scare Men
• Phun - the 2D physics sandbox
• Toddler Abuse In Car Wash Caught On Tape
• Steve jobs face designed with apple products
• Eight Year Old Boy Passes Law School Test
• Man Buried Alive Survived Through Air Trapped in Hat

Let’s jump right in and get started with this new segment, shall we?

Social Media Links of the Day: Wednesday March 5, 2008
• Patrick Swayze Diagnosed with Pancreatic Cancer
• 1,000 (Colorful) Places to See Before You Die
• Pirate cat won’t pay for his downloads
• Internet Explorer 8 Has Arrived
• Bill Gates is On LinkedIn (with 4 Contacts!)
• German Jet Wing Scrapes Runway; All Safe
• 7 Insane Conspiracies That Actually Happened
• The trouble with Steve Jobs

[Note!] Just before I posted this, I checked Digg and found Patrick Swayze Diagnosed with Pancreatic Cancer, Has Five Weeks to Live. It was worthy of putting up there first as I’m sure it’ll own the Digg home page for the next few hours. It had 216 Diggs when I found it, and now shows 345. While the article is flagged with the common [Reported by Diggers as Possibly Inaccurate], Swayze’s publicist reported to TMZ the following:

Swayze’s publicist issued the following statement to TMZ: “Actor Patrick Swayze has been diagnosed with Pancreatic Cancer and is currently undergoing treatment.”

The statement continues, “Patrick’s physician Dr. George Fisher states, ‘Patrick has a very limited amount of disease and he appears to be responding well to treatment thus far. All of the reports stating the timeframe of his prognosis and his physical side effects are absolutely untrue. We are considerably more optimistic.’ Patrick is continuing his normal schedule during this time, which includes working on upcoming projects. The outpouring of support and concern he has already received from the public is deeply appreciated by Patrick and his family.”

I really, really hate cancer. Best of luck to both he and his family at this time, as dealing with family loss impacts too many people.

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1,000 (Colorful) Places to See Before You Die
Being the media whore I am, I love killing time and browsing through wonderfully beautiful places. Or, obscenely funny cartoons. In this case, we’ll focus on the former and not the later with 1,00 Colorful places to see before you die. I chose a photo of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow, Russia taken by Flickr user mira_o

Sad fact of the day? My mother has run a travel agency for more than 20 years. And I’ve never left the country, except for one trip to the Dominican Republic — which doesn’t count as a passport was not required.

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In other news,

Pirate cat won’t pay for his downloads but Digg’ers know that Trent Reznor makes $750,000 even when the music is free.

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Internet Explorer 8 Has Arrived
Being a ‘net geek, I can’t look past a new release of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, even if I haven’t used the browser on a regular basis for the past five years. When IE7 released tabs, the masses suddenly realized how cool Firefox, Opera and others were before them. Sadly, the crappy font smoothing that IE7 packed out of the gates left a really bad taste in my mouth - so I never use it for anything other than a test of some CSS or new design.

According to ReadWriteWeb, Microsoft is touting Standards Compliance, Facebook Integration, eBay Integration and even integration of Me.dium (which packs like what, 3 users?). Anyways — the real reason I’m happy to see IE8 is because it’s supposedly integrating Live Maps. As I mentioned in my panel last week at SMX West, LiveSearch sucks at delivering local results. Hopefully as more people get forced into using IE8, the maps and their accuracy of local search results will improve.

To give IE8 a spin right now, just download it from Microsoft.

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Bill Gates is On LinkedIn (with 4 Contacts!)
Matt McGee of Small Business SEM sent me this link early this morning and I simply loved it. Even if it’s a fake profile, it’s still entertaining to see Gates with only four contacts. It makes me feel like a networking pimp with my amazing feat of 61 connections.

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German Jet Wing Scrapes Runway; All Safe

While I heard about this on the radio today at the office, it wasn’t until I caught Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable posting the YouTube video on his Cartoon Barry Blog. There’s an Associated Press story of the incident as well if you’re interested.

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7 Insane Conspiracies That Actually Happened
This article was rocking and rolling on Digg all day long and I just realized it also made Reddit’s front page with 540+ points and 115 comments.

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The trouble with Steve Jobs
CNN/Money slash Fortune Magazine ran a story today that is incredibly in depth. The cliff notes version says that what makes Jobs a wonderful CEO — is what puts the company and investors at risk. I’m going to go ahead and call it as BS though, as he’s doing a phenomenal job and the same damn publication referred to Apple as the most admired company just two days ago. Silly iHypocrites.

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Hopefully today wasn’t too lame… I realize that the amount of viral content is lacking — but work with me here folks. The Celtics are playing the Pistons and my C’s are up 9 with 6 minutes left in the first half. Rebecca, get ready to hand out that link!

Today, I’m going to launch a new effort here on my blog. If you’re actively involved in the search marketing industry, you’re probably familiar with the impact that social media has on traffic, links and ongoing rankings.

Truth is, many in the SEM field participate in social media optimization for their clients — but not for themselves. While I’m one of those people, I also want to provide some benefit to those with successful efforts.

It’s a win - win, really.

So here’s how it works. I’ll scan the Digg’s, Reddit’s, Mixx’s and so on with the end goal of finding a few quality pieces of content to link out to. Sometime in the evening, I’ll then throw them all into a post and provide some links out to them. So, I get to see what’s being successful — and the owners score a free backlink without a nofollow attribute applied.

If you have any tips, resources or sites I should be scanning for quality nuggets of social goodness, please by all means, let me know!