This week had a few cool announcements.

eduStyles Award nominations are now open. Feel free to submit a college websites that you enjoy for nominations. Specific categories have yet to be announced, but the nomination process is open. The awards will be presented at the eduWeb Conference this summer and there is still ten days left for call for papers.

The beta of Internet Explorer 8 has been released. This new release is suppose to address web standards which could be a wonderful thing for web developers. I haven’t done any testing with it, but it is available for download. Also Google Analytics offering benchmarking functionality is another really nice feature released this week. As if we needed another reason to use the service.  The services says that it will take a few weeks to compile data.  Hopefully then I can write a follow-up showing this service in more detail.

Now to the links:

• Google, Microsoft Said To Be Preparing Bids For Digg - User-generated news site Digg has been working with influential investment bank Allen & Co. (the ones that recently got Slide a half billion dollar valuation) for a few months now, and pitching big tech and media companies on a sale.
• Social Networking: The New Face of Recruiting - A Q&A with Brad Ward, electronic communication coordinator for Butler University, on new methods for reaching prospective students
• How Google handles 301 Permanent Redirects
• Beginner and Comprehensive Guides to SEO, Link Building, PPC, Social Media, Affiliate Marketing and Blogging
• Whatever happened to $900 Google? - Google stock faces the same problem that Microsoft and other tech companies have faced: Once growth levels off, their share prices drop…
• Evolution of Dance No Longer King: An Era Has Ended - I have to admit the Evolution of Dance is much better than this new video, but the story that this article tells is what is important.
• WordPress: The Social Network - Can WordPress become the basis of a social network? Automattic founder and WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg hinted on his blog that WordPress might go in a more social direction.
• The Recruitment Long Tail - Brad gives us a look at the long tail of websites and these forgotten about pages.
• Top 40 Free Icon Resources for Web Designers (Updated)
• 100+ Resources for Web Developers
• Using Twitter for Higher Ed - Jeremy Wilburn did a little open brainstorming about Twitter.
• The Future of Social Networks at Graphing Social Patterns - ’social networks will be like air.’ In other words, it will be ubiquitous as you navigate across the web and sites will feel inadequate (like you can’t breathe) if a user’s social network isn’t part of the experience.
• Internal Use of No Follow Tag - I nice visual layout explaining No Follow link tags to anyone.
• Google Sitelinks: The Ultimate FAQ - Everything you could want to know about Google Sitelinks in one place. Although there is still a lot we don’t know this is a great place to start. This is something that is important for every College Website as we all want Admission, Athletics, and others to display in the sitelinks
• Advances in Crawling the Web - There are 3 major parts to what a search engine does. What are some of the problems facing crawling programs?
• 10 Keyword Research Tools to Add to Your Arsenal
• ASK Up 18% From Feb 2007 - Monthly search engine traffic update provided by Hitwise.
• 4Q - free simple survey solution - A tool that allows you to survey visitors to your site. It’s free.
• Inside Obama’s Surging Net-Roots Campaign - A look at how one presidential candidate is using social networking to organize his campaign. This isn’t an article about politics, but more of a case study about how social networking has successfully worked for one presidential candidate.
• Blogging Is Good For Your Social Life: Study - A new study has found Bloggers are better adjusted and live healthier, happier social lives.
• Zogby Poll: 67% View Traditional Journalism as “Out of Touch” - Internet is the top source of news for nearly half of Americans; Survey finds two-thirds dissatisfied with the quality of journalism
• 7 Great Online Image Editing Apps - Picnik isn’t the online online image editing app.
• Forget Access: 8 Online Database Tools - An intimidating subject for many, with a rather high learning curve. As with just about anything else nowadays, you don’t have to be a MySQL or even MS Access expert to build a simple database.

That’s it for now.  Have a great weekend!