Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week:

Three star links:

• Giles Bowkett examines what it's like to be "Internet famous." I'm not exactly sure, but I think it involves cheezburgers.
• SEO Black Hat is offering seats to this year's SEOktoberfest. Want to party in Munich and pick the brains of some of the best super affiliates and black hats around? If so, contact Black Hat and let him know you want in. It's a pricey ticket (5,000 Euros, or roughly a firstborn American child), but he's giving away one free seat if you blog about the event and send a trackback. Hmm, guess that means that this roundup mention is my raffle ticket. Hrm. I don't know how much affiliat/black hat stuff I can wrap my head around, but a trip to Munich sure sounds nice! ;)
• While I've got you thinking about how scandalous black hat tactics are, feast your eyes on some real scandalous content. Paisley SEO crafts up an "urban SEO glossary-dictionary." The glossary is NSFW and some of it is pretty jaw-dropping (don't read the list if you offend easily or don't like low-brow humor), but other definitions are pretty giggle-worthy (a "matt cutts" is the equivalent of "your mom walking in on you while you're doing the deed," which is funny when you've actually seen a group of people at a bar hush up whenever Matt Cutts walks in).
• One of Greg Boser's talented developers, Cesar Serna, is leaving 3 Dog Media to do some freelance app/plugin development. If you need some apps or plugins, contact Cesar and hopefully he'll be able to work his magic for you.
• Tatango is like a private Twitter account--it lets you send text messages to certain groups of friends. I wonder how well it'll do considering how popular microblogging sites like Twitter and BriteKite are doing. Text messaging is soooo 2005. ;)
• Del.icio.us is now Delicious, and the site has been redesigned and updated with new features. ReadWriteWeb has a post detailing all of the new changes.
• Onward Search launched "Where in the World is the SEO Talent? Part 2." This time their findings reflect data from both the SEMPO study and from our SEO survey. It's interesting to compare SEMPO's results to ours, so take a peek if you feel so inclined.
• David Lindop gives a good rundown of the Froogle Performance dashboard. I heard that Froogle comes with a free frogurt...unfortunately, the frogurt is also cursed.
• Forget about flipping houses--flipping websites is the latest trend, and lots of folks are making some serious coin doing it.
• Want to know what Cuil spent their $33 million in venture capital on? Hint: not their shitty search engine. Think more along the lines of lunches, personal trainers and gym memberships, and other stuff that, strangely, will not help your search engine display non-sucky results. Weird, isn't it?
• Dave Naylor reminds us that, despite how much we SEOs and tech nerds bow down to Firefox, Internet Explorer is still the dominate browser.
• For those of you who live on the east coast, Search Camp is hosting an "un-conference" in Philadelphia.

Four star links:

• WhoDugg is a neat Digg tool that shows you how many of your stories your friends have submitted. It's a good way to weed out the duds and optimize your friends list to ensure that they're diggin' what you're submittin'.
• Spreeder is a pretty awesome free online speed reader. Paste text into the box and it'll play the snippet back to you in quick bursts of text.
• EngineWorks has a new intern named Courtney Nelson, and she wrote a post examining the difference between an SEO intern and an apprentice. She interviewed various industry folks (myself included) to hear their take on what the difference is between the two positions.
• The CEO of Pets.com wrote an introspective, honest post about some life-changing mistakes she's made and how she was able to move on. I'd imagine that it's pretty hard to be the public face of the dot-com bubble burst.
• The NY Times takes an in-depth look at Internet trolling. It's frakkin' long, but a compelling read.
• The Long Tail examines the "time/money formula of free." Its short form list sounds exactly how SEOmoz started. How eerily accurate...
• Social Media Trader has visualizations of various social networks. As Rand put it, "It's gorgeous, but I'm not sure there's a valuable application just yet. Link graph, yes. Social graph, maybe someday?"
• Traffic Marks is a new link building tool that helps you locate authority sites and shows you how often these targets link to other sites that rank in the top 10. Matt McGee has a good summary of the tool and its features over at Small Business SEM.

Five star links:

• Fluent Simplicity compiled a list of brands who are on Twitter. The list is pretty comprehensive and is broken down into sector. It's interesting to see which major companies have a Twitter account. (I was especially amused to see that Michigan State has one. I imagine their tweets to consist of either "won the game. students rioting" or "lost the game. students rioting.")

YOUmoz entries:

• Tiers of Transparency: The Ethical Brand Ambassador, versions 1 and 2. AimClear examines the ethics behind brand advertising via fake personas and deceptive avatars.
• The Site Was About...uh, It Was Orange? Sarita wonders if we'll ever see a visual memory search engine get developed some day.
• The Buck Stops Here. Rand issues some apologies over on YOUmoz for last week's blog incident and announces some upcoming site protocols that will be unveiled soon.
• When Should You Switch Search Engines? Toast the most tries I Can't Believe It's Not Google!, and he finds it to be quite delicious.
• Link Building: Evolved Thinking? MattRoberts shares some good resources that you can use in your link building effots.
• Tracking Your "Viral" Video Campaign. Marv1983 shares a tip on how to check to see which pages on the 'net have embedded a video you've created.

Best of YOUmoz:

•  YOUmoz Newb Pwns Cape Cod SEO Market! Darren Slatten escapes from the whale's belly and becomes a real boy! Er, well, actually, he helps out a fellow YOUmoz member by offering some pro-bono SEO advice. It's a nice gesture of goodwill and also proves to be a good case study. Well done, Darren! Now go kick a puppy to balance out the universe.

New events added to the Events Calendar:

• LondonSEO.org August 13 at the Vibe Bar, Truman Brewery, in London, UK

Upcoming events:

• Seattle SEO Meetup August 4 in Seattle, WA
• SMX Sao Paulo August 7-8 in Sao Paulo, Brazil
• LondonSEO.org August 13 at the Vibe Bar, Truman Brewery, in London, UK
• SEOmoz Expert Training Seminar August 19-20 at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA

New additions to the SEOmoz Marketplace:

Featured job postings:

• Production coordinator for AudetteMedia in Bend, Oregon
• Website and graphic designer and PHP programmers/project managers for Krish India Design in New Delhi, India
• Search engine marketing executive for SEOptimise in Oxford, UK
• Search marketing specialist for Sesame Communications in Renton, WA

Featured companies:

United States/North America:

• DataPlus in Atlanta, GA
• FIRST ROI in Austin, TX
• Trinity Insight in Philadelphia, PA
• Deographics in San Francisco, CA
• WebTiger Search Marketing in Baltimore, MD
• Overit Media in Albany, NY
• SEO Honolulu in Honolulu, HI
• Virtually Canadian in Vancouver, BC, Canada

UK/Europe:

• Kingfisher Computer Services in Chester, UK
• Vihtori in Finland

Asia:

• eBrand in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam
• Optimind Technology Solutions in Manila, Philippines
• Krish India Design in New Delhi, India
• Anblik in Kolkata, India

Australia:

• Webtactics in Sydney, Australia

Featured resumes:

Currently looking:

• Annisa Chan in Houston, TX (she's looking to relocate to Austin) is a search engine marketer with two years of experience. She has performed keyword research, optimized pages, built links, set up PPC campaigns, created landing pages and advertising campaigns, crafted monthly reports, and more.

Happily employed:

• Hiren Ponkia in India is a senior SEO analyst for ZealousWeb. He specializes in SEO, SEM, PPC, and uses various reporting analysis tools.