Formal writing is really frustrating because it requires you to dress up simple ideas in complete sentences, edit your work for grammar and spend an unholy amount of time writing what it would take you a few minutes to express verbally. When you come up with new ideas or discover new stuff as often as I do, that can get really frustrating.

So I’m hereby inaugurating what I hope will be a regular column here: Scratchpad (scratchpad picture courtesy of one eye fish). I’ll share my latest ideas, in a raw scratchpad type format and be paying even more attention than usual to your feedback. (The Post #88 reference was the pre-naming version of this post’s title and I found it quite appropriate to an informal column.)

For this first issue, I’ve got

1. New uses for Google’s Keyword Tool External,
2. Mined ideas from Google’s Press Days 06 and 07,
3. Revelations of what the PPC arbitrageurs (more…)

Eli wrote about desert scraping, which is the practice of digging around expired sites on archive.org, grabbing their content and reposting it on your own sites. Cloning expired sites is a similar idea that (more…)

Mikkel deMib Svendsen is an expert SEM and he’s been kind enough to share his thoughts with me on SEO business models. Interestingly, he’s going against the popular grain (more…)