I've had a few friends ask me about blogging lately. I've generally recommended it, especially if they're in an industry where contact with potential customers on a regular basis would be useful. For example, our friend David makes custom furniture. It's something that many people are inherently curious about. A blog would let people follow his construction process, and learn more about what goes into making a one of a kind item. There are some great examples online. If you're interested in what goes into make a custom tailored $4,000 suit, you can visit English Cut. How bout promoting a winery? Check out what Hugh is doing with Stormhoek.

The $39 Experiment: Asking Random Companies for Free Stuff - Friday afternoon's fun link. And, it does raise the bigger question...what's your companies image, and how would you want it to respond.

Jeremy from Yahoo has a post on Edgeio. And on the bizzarre fire alarm at the Sheraton. After a two minute alarm at midnight, a distorted voice coming from a hidden speaker in your room, announcing false alarm, ten minutes later? And, then doing the same thing in another ten minutes? That's a recipe for a good nights sleep :)
Ok, back to Edgeio. I find the business model interesting; the idea of finding content that's widely dispersed and aggregating it seems like it would have a good chance to succeed. You'd have the ability to run ads against it, and it could scale, assuming a good tech infrastructure. The downside is that most fairly well known niches already have a goto site. Auctions? I'll go to Ebay. A used couch? CraigsList. I wonder if by being early, they'll get enough traction with users to succeed.

I'm at Search Engine Strategies (SES) in NYC today.
Some notes for the two sessions I've seen:

At the intro to the search engines panel yesterday, MSN and Ask were impressive, and Google was not as much.
MSN: fascinating demographic data. Assuming you've got a targeted brand, this could be very useful once they have more traffic.
Ask.com: Formerly Ask Jeeves. They're really making an effort. The VP they had on stage emphasized how they were reaching out to the search community, and how little overlap they had with Google and Yahoo.
Google: The manager who spoke Katie, just gave a quick overview of what's new. The ability to cut and paste ad groups within campaigns was featured prominently. I've tried it, it's very difficult to get it to work correctly.

SEM toolbox was very good. There are always one or two tools that you've never seen before. Jim Boykin from WeBuildpages.com had Jim Boykin - Webuildpages.com/sesny2006/
Whois.sc got mentioned a few times as a good resource.