I have to admit that I was a bit sad this morning to discover that my little competition with Matt here at the office didn't go so well for me. We were both writing blog entries late last night, both convinced that our post was the more linkbait worthy. Sadly, Matt schooled me - his post received 1500+ Diggs, made del.icio.us/popular and hit Techmeme. Mine, however, was read by less than half of our RSS subscribers and got a whopping 21 Diggs (though Barry was kind enough to throw me a sympathy link from SEW - thanks buddy, at least I can count on you).

I'm trying to just let it go, but then Matt sent me this nice cartoon via email. On the other hand, getting Dugg doesn't do a whole lot, business-wise, for SEOmoz and I should really be paying attention to clients and the blog audience - far better to keep you happy than the erstwhile social taggers of the web.

On that note, I've dugg (no pun intended) up some content that hasn't been on the radar this week from around the tech world. If you read the same blogs/sites I do, you've no doubt noticed that every single post feels like deja vu. Let's break the echo chamber with some new stuff:

• LifeDev has a fascinating post that echoes Donna's sentiments about being taken offline. He suggests that by shutting off the computer at 6pm and not revisiting it before 9am the next day, one might actually get more accomplished. Great idea, but not something I'll be testing anytime soon. My addiction is far, far too strong.
• Rae Hoffman, who's quickly becoming one of my favorite folks to chat with, is baring all in a highly personal post about her entrance to the SEO world. I love to see this type of content from folks I respect.
• If you haven't bought Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think (I keep my copy under my pillow at night to ward off poor user experience), you can now read an excellent excerpt on how users satisfice and muddle through websites.

In one last piece of disturbing, but interesting news, it appears that the website for the new book, Mavericks in the Workplace, is being sandboxed by Google. Poor guys can't even rank for their exact site name, despite having 100+ very high quality links over the past month.

Search for: Mavericks at Work Blog

• Google - not in top 200 results
• Yahoo! - #1
• MSN - #3
• Ask - n/a (I'd love an example where Ask ranked something before Google - that would make my day)

Once upon a time, you could use allinanchor, allintitle, allintext to remove Google's "boxing" parameters, but it appears that time has ended. The only way I could get Google to rank them at all a was to use inurl:mavericksatwork, and even then, they trailed behind their own YouTube post.

Now it's your turn - any news items, links, posts that you think merit a shout out?