Jamie Riddell is 2.0 by Jamie Riddell

Knol, Google's Wikipedia beater has been in beta since December 2007. Last week we saw the wrapping come off and Knol opening up to accept new content entries. Knol, short for Knowledge, is on a steep slope to compete with Wikipedia. With 9.2 million UK users [according to Nielson], even with Google's size, trying to achieve over 8bn articles [and counting at Wikipedia] will take some time.

Yahoo recently launched their open source search tools, under the name BOSS ( Build Your Own Search Service ). The published aim of BOSS is to grow the breadth of search offerings using the Yahoo technology. Use of the Yahoo technology is free in return for Yahoo selling ads against the search results. There are plans for Yahoo to start sharing [what little] revenue they achieve from these new search tools.

Around 47 A.D, the then Roman Emperor, Claudius, invaded Britain. Without too much detail, this led to the Roman occupation of Britain, where, despite the misgivings of Monty Python, they did in fact do a great number of very good things, including build roads. Nearly 2,000 years later, we can draw parallels between this and the current online environment.

On the day the Google Doubleclick deal goes ahead, we see the launch of Google Ad Manager. Their free ad management tool.

Late last week, a 19 year old guy started to write his blog, the subject was on his travels to India and Thailand and as he says is will be a report on ‘partying’ and ‘finding himself’…

Normally a blog like this would have been dismissed but this blog was special as it was on the Guardian newspaper website and the man in question is Max Gogarty.

Paying attention to your brand can be easy and invaluable. Many larger brands employ tools or services to monitor offline mentions and communications, but how many are connecting this fully online?

At the most basic level, monitoring references to your product, brand or service can be achieved simply through Google Alerts. There are more advanced solutions that can track the importance of the content, the importance of the poster and the potential influence of a post, but we'll leave that for a later post.

Google has been working to increase the frequency of its indexing, so how does this affect your SEO?

We have seen Google indexing blog posts in under two hours over recent weeks which is fantastic news for fresh content like this. However, one of the cornerstones of the natural search algorithim has always been links to the page.