Shimon Sandler is on target in tackling how adding relevant content can boost search rankings.

Product names and category listings aren't enough for natural search, so writing articles that talk about your industry or issues du jour can pay for itself several times over through better placement. Blogs are a great way to do that, but even better are "how-to" or primer articles that discuss the best way to use a product or service.

Sites such as Ask.com and Wikipedia are dominating search results because they have exhaustive archives on just about every topic. While most of us can't compete with these sites, we can learn from them by adding content on the things that we already know about. Putting your knowledge about the latest in fashion, technology, or whatever you offer (and hiring an editor) into words can be much more economical than SEM, and it has staying power since an optimized site continues to provide benefits into the future.

The frenzy to build free city-wide Wi-Fi has begun to fizzle, but perhaps advertisers can still save the day. San Francisco has just bailed on its Wi-Fi plan as a result of EarthLink's implosion, and similar projects in Chicago and Springfield, Illinois have also died.

EarthLink is pulling out because it found it too expensive to maintain WiFi networks and too few customers signed on. Municipal WiFi needs the backing of major brands that can pay the hefty sponsorship fees needed to generate sufficient revenue to offset the cost.

Google can not generate enough money alone through search, so it's time to bring in targeted ads from companies such as Coca Cola, Wal-Mart and Dell. The folks that would use free Wi-Fi tend to be middle to lower income, and these companies certainly know how to make a buck from a diverse audience. Google should work with these advertisers on tracking behaviors to develop targeted ads that are more effective for advertisers and consumers.

The other limiting factor is the "digital divide" that eliminates a portion of the audience from going online. Developing a free PC service based on advertising would take some creative marketing schemes.

The adage goes that sharing is caring -- about the bottom line. News organizations are teaming up to share content for the upcoming election cycle, further indication that online publishers will have trouble going it alone.

CBS and the Washington Post are Mashable.

By analyzing the sites that you and your friends have bookmarked and the personal pages and links on them, profiles are created that rank results based on your likes and dislikes. I can see some value in this approach as we go down the path towards personalized search engines. You can also build your own custom search engine that specifies the indexed sites, such as Google Co-op.

Custom search is a nice compliment to generic search engines, but people will continue to also rely on generic search and browsing to not miss out on the greater world. Also, relying on your friend's links can expose you to new content, but may also yield unrelated results since everyone out of high school retains some of their own individuality.

Search marketers are starting to smell the money to be made in optimizing images for Google's Universal Search and other image search engines.

StraightUpSeearchand SearchEngineLand and SearchEngineWatch have articles on how to optimize images for search, which will become increasingly important in SEO.

Using images of celebs has been bait for luring bulk traffic, but relevant images complimenting content will help with SEO as search engines factor in images to their algorithms.

Let's take a poll: who out there is not using an RSS reader to keep track of the latest marketing haps? Fess up!

If you aren't, start today, because there's just too much important news that is essential to your business, and you can't afford to go to each website one at a time. Readers can cut your news trawl time by 75 percent. Online information management is one of the biggest opportunities today.

Attensa has put out a new free reader aimed at corporate types, but it should serve all information junkies well. Attensa's technology watches the stories that you read and dynamically puts the feeds and topics at the head of the list. They also sell a server version so that workgroups can pool their intelligence.

Bloglines has a new beta version of its web-based feed reader that is more visual, and then there's Streamy, a combined RSS reader/social networking mashup. Finally, there are more mobile readers in development too.

I see demand for a web-based online-marketing specific feed reader to organize the chaos, putting ClickZ, MediaPost, search engine watch etc. all at your fingertips. Any volunteers?

Apple has taken some heat over the iPhone's limited support for video formats, specifically an inability to display Flash videos. Adobe may or may not be fixing that problem soon, but certainly needs to make Flash more mobile friendly. (Flash is an overused technology, but don't get me started.)

Social networking site KickApps is trying to lure more members by optimizing videos for the iPhone. The site will automatically convert Flash videos to Quicktime so that they can be displayed on the iPhone's Safari browser.

The iPhone is barely out of the womb, but the pressure is on to make it more versatile, hence the hacking to make it run on other phone networks.

One of the unwritten laws of being a bleeding edge early adopter is that you pay twice what people will pay in 18 months for a product or service that isn't fully cooked or compatible with industry standards.

Mark Cuban has ruffled more than a few feathers with his series of posts about the Internet being dead and boring. He's right if you can reframe his argument the following way: the Internet has become so ubiquitous and essential that "Internet companies" and "innovations" don't generate the pizzazz they did during the first dozen years. We now take them for granted. The Internet has been internalized and absorbed into the fabric of our work and life that it is no longer an exciting "other;" it is part of us and how we do just about anything. You wouldn't say the power grid or banking system is dead because your life would radically change if they stopped functioning, and now the same can be said for the Internet. By boring, I believe Cuban is saying that the major innovations have already occurred, and that another Wall Street bubble won't happen (although recent interest in social networks, interactive ad agencies and vertical networks suggests otherwise). However, just because we won't see another run-up of IPOs doesn't mean that innovation is over. Most of the changes will be in other industries taking advantage of the Internet's pipes/wireless spectrum. The not-boring activity during the next two years will come from TV/video online delivered by new and old media alike (IPTV), from better ways of narrowing information (custom Wikis, smart filtering of RSS feeds and news aggregation), and perhaps most importantly, through websites becoming the new corporate identity. The generation that is now in school will learn more about a company through what it sees online, replacing the chairman or a character like Ronald McDonald as the most identifiable corporate symbol. How does Wal-Mart, or Coca Cola or MTV talk to me online? Is it through blogs, videos, interactive website, personalized search assistants? Are they entertaining me, being honest with me, or just after my money? Because the "dead" Internet will be more important than TV, movies, or music, marketers will be spending the majority of time honing their online presence (even including a SecondLife existence). The Internet is dead, long live the Internet!