I feel sorry for any tech company trying to announce any news today–just about all focus is on Cuil. Still, these brave souls decided to take the plunge:

• Live video streaming web site Mogulus has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from media conglomerate Gannett. Pretty lame to announce funding, but not the amount–don’t you think?
• Yahoo’s "News Direct Display" algorithm–akin to Google’s Universal search–is ramping up and showing news results in the main search results.
• It looks like Google won’t be buying Digg after all.
• Women bloggers–aka those "without the Y chromosome"–are trying to break through a supposed glass ceiling. I don’t know, judging from the article, it appears to be broken already–or at least has lots of cracks.

If you thought it strange that Google would all of a sudden start talking about the size of its search index again, today we know why.

Cuil.com.

The stealthy start-up search engine launched last night with both arms swinging, and Google in its sights. Cuil’s “about us” page makes the bold claim:

Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.

But, that’s not the only attack Cuil is making. The new search engine claims to be better than Google et al in a number of ways, including:

• More than just PageRank – Cuil claims to rank pages based upon content and relevance, not just inbound links.

While we go about our daily mission of trying to make sense out of internet marketing–and make a few bucks while we are at it–there are some things happening in the background that we should keep an eye on. Recently, there have been discussions in high places about online privacy and there continues to be legal wrangling over who truly controls access to the internet.

Here’s one for the “taken for granted” section of our internet existence. As internet marketers it goes without saying that we want (and actually need) unfettered access to the internet by everyone. When I say unfettered I don’t mean free because we know that most free models don’t work over the long term (regardless of the product or service). What it means is simply that if we are legally gaining access to the internet then there should be no one or no thing that restricts us in any way. That is crucial to getting our messages across to everyone else who has that same freedom.

You have only until the end of day Thursday to register for my Online Reputation Management Workshop and get the discounted rate of just $997. After July 31st, you’ll pay full price to attend.

Whether you work for an online marketing/PR firm, or handle the branding for your employer, you’ll want to attend the workshop.

Heck, if you’re an SEO, you should attend if only to learn how to manage a client’s Google reputation. If you’re not offering Google reputation management services, you’re missing out!

Expert training, a small class size, and a free Trackur account are just a few of the reasons you should attend.

I hope you’ll join me on August 7th, in Raleigh, NC!