Posted on January 1st, 2010

Ivory Tower
Search moves at the speed of light, so staying current is crucial.  This list of over 1,500 search industry articles, ideas, tweets, tool reviews, notes, snippets and snark is our 2009 internal agency-training library of  content. The AIMCLEAR team has embraced systemic review of this “Daily Training List” and it’s a cool part of the routine.

This mutual commitment to reading helps our shop keep a fresh awareness of current developments and is an important component of our training. We often discuss these posts as a group informally, and refer back to them as resources. I personally revisit the archive, send links to clients,  tweet, etc… It takes hours every day to read this much and we’ve found a lot of value in keeping discoveries in the link roundup format. Try searching this page for anything that happened in search last year and chances are you’ll find a useful resource.

We’ve decided to publish last year’s daily training notes for two reasons: First we want to gratefully acknowledge the bloggers and publications we depend on each day.  I’d like send special thanks to Barry Schwartz, the DailySearchCap,  SEOmoz, SearchEngineWatch & AllTop. Second, skimming the list of over 1,500 bulleted entries provides a sweet overview of our industry’s evolution in 2009.

2009 was an awesome year for our industry. Expansion, complexity, specialization and raw intensity increased exponentially, ratcheting up over the course of the year. Whew! Reciprocally a tremendous amount of content was produced by an ever increasing community of bloggers. Thank you! We’ll start with content from New Year’s Eve and work our way back to the beginning of 2009.

12/31

 

7/24

6/22

5/30

WordPress Security tip: add .htaccess in /wp-admin

5/19

4/27

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  • Jody Pirrello

    Wow this is a great list. Thank you for sharing!

    What strikes me is the obvious collective effort and the commitment to use it regularly. That in itself is impressive! I’m curious how you curate and share these links within the agency. Delicious? Yammer? Intranet? A wiki?

    I’d love to get something working for my team.

    • Marty Weintraub

      @Jody Pirrello: We use GoogleDocs, after trying a number of other methods, including email, Wiki, etc..I suspect we will migrate to GoogleWave when it is a bit more mature. aimClear does not do well with programs like BaseCamp because we need a truly collaborative environment, to where we literally see text changing on the page as other team members edit.

      It starts with me actually and grew out of personal commitment to industrial reading to stay current, which I’ve had for over a decade. I try to never miss a day, even if I get to that day several days later. It’s easy at the team level. They just check in and read. Sometimes I reach out and email or IM specific links to certain staff members and clients. We’ve tried making formal plans to discuss, but it’s better left informal IMHO, unless it’s a monumental development.

      Thanks for reaching out. Happy New Year. I’m glad the post is useful to you.

  • Jody Pirrello

    @Marty – Thanks for sharing your experience. I was curious because in my experience these efforts usually come together and stay together because with one person taking the lead. It’s comforting to hear your experience has been similar.

    This will be a great application for GoogleWave, especially given how you’ve described your team likes to work. And I agree about BaseCamp – I’ve tried it with several engagements now and haven’t found it to have a long-standing impact. People make the effort at first but then they lose steam (which usually means it wasn’t a good fit to begin with…)

    Happy New Year to you too!

  • Ivan

    Thanks for the list!