Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls. If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned.

—Derek Powazek has some pretty unequivocal advice for search engine optimization. In short: do things the right way, any other advice is, and I’m paraphrasing, bullshit. [via el Gruberino]

As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.

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White House communications director Anita Dunn on the Obama administration’s unwillingness to engage FOX News.

My biggest problem with FOX is their continued and rather flagrant conflating of news and opinion. O’Reilly and Hannity and Beck cheekily insist that they are news analysis programs but their viewers don’t seem to care about the distinction when they rattle off any number of falsehoods to justify their narrow-mindedness. “Fox and Friends” a so-called “entertainment show” is even more dangerous because, other than being staffed by either convenient fools or complete idiots, they blur that distinction beyond recognition.

But that’s the price of going to a museum – sudden and terrible crippling death twitching in the face of historical artifacts. We all have to live with that risk.

—Jason Scott on the possibility of loading a page full of ‘under construction’ animated GIFs crashing your browser. Scott, in the process of archiving Geocities before it shuffles off this mortal coil in a few weeks time, has assembled quite a collection of this once ubiquitous web totem.

Gratuitous video of yourself talking about what it is you do for a living Friday

Mark “Mediashift” Glaser invited me to come chat about hacker journalists a few months ago at Gnomedex. I managed not to ramble too much.

Louis Gerbarg has a great technical breakdown of how iPhone apps compiled from Flash work

Looks like Adobe tiptoed around the SDK rules, made some decisions that will affect performance (like not being able to cache elements) and have a ways to go before performance is acceptable.

The wait is over! The black Svengali has arrived! I’m on the street turning good girls bad and getting them pregnant!!!

—That’s right, Tracy Morgan is on Twitter. After being lobbied by celeb-stalker OMGICU via a petition at Twacy.org, Morgan manned up.

Some members also worry that a public option (an effective way to bring competition to the insurance market) would compete unfairly with private companies and amount to a step toward socialism. If they object so passionately to “socialized health,” why don’t they block their 911 service to socialized police and fire services, disconnect themselves from socialized sewers and avoid socialized interstate highways?

—Nick Kristof suggests that Congress go without health insurance if substantial reform isn’t passed.

Google has a proposal for making AJAX crawlable

Seems pretty complex, though - requiring your site to run a headless browser that would render AJAX content as HTML to search engines?

Yesterday, the newly minted junior senator from Minnesota, Al Franken, introduced legislation that would prohibit federally funded defense contractors from requiring their employees to sign mandatory arbitration clauses in certain cases. The amendment was attached to the 2010 defense appropriations bill and stemmed from the 2005 case of of Jamie Leigh Jones who was gang raped by her co-workers at KBR, then a subsidiary of Halliburton. The crux of the case is that Ms. Jones was unable bring her case to court because of a bit of legalese in the contract she signed with KBR that specifically requires claims of sexual assault be handled in private arbitration; Senator Franken wants to make such clauses illegal if a company is being funded by federal dollars.

The amendment, which seems like a no-brainer since I can’t imagine any senator wanting to be seen as pro-gang rape, passed with just 68 votes, with 30 senators, all Republican, opposing on the grounds that it seems to single out Halliburton. Even if that were the case, and it’s not since the amendment would apply to any contractor receiving federal funds, I’m not quite clear why that should matter.

Interestingly, The New York Times launched an ambitious new project yesterday, Inside Congress, which tracks and visualizes every vote before the House and Senate. Scraping data from the House, Senate and LOC websites, the Times’ site provides a comprehensive look at what Congress is doing; it’s almost certainly built on their Congress API, which is geared more towards developers than end users.

I love these kinds of projects and I must say, the Times did a great job. Data is an increasingly powerful tool for telling stories and users are becoming more savvy in how they handle lots of information. Big databases like congressional vote trackers used to be the domain of CAR reporters who would sift through big sets of numbers and then condense it into a few hundred words for the paper the next day. With the web, we can make this data available directly to our readers, and can tailor relevant information down to the personal level in a way that would have never been possible with print.

So, now you can see how your senator voted on Senate Vote 308 - H.R.3326: On the Amendment To prohibit the use of funds for any Federal contract with Halliburton Company, KBR, Inc., any of their subsidiaries or affiliates, or any other contracting party if such contractor or a subcontractor at any tier under such contract requires that employees or independent contractors sign mandatory arbitration clauses regarding certain claims.

Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly I tell you, it is hard for a Socialist to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for Van Jones to enter the kingdom of God.”

—Salon fixes the Bible’s liberal bias