A number of early stage investment outfits have popped up over the last few years, making what would amount to tiny investments in as many as a dozen companies at one time and then recouping their investment plus some as those companies mature and either build viable revenue models or become acquisition targets of other related businesses.

Neil Patel recently announced that he has joined the Founders Co-op. The Founders Co-op has a goal to invest between $10,000 and $250,000 in a number of niche software start ups. Neil has said these startups should be in Seattle or be willing to relocate there if they are interested in receiving the investment.

Marhsall Kirkpatrick of Read Write Web makes a supposition that may be inherently incorrect.

A huge number of people online don’t know the difference between their browser’s address bar and search bar. Let’s keep that in perspective. What will it take for them to learn?

That particular point has created a great conversation over at Read Write Web including an extremely well thought out response from John Andrews.

The path to Amazon.com via Google is a richer experience for her [a user] than the direct navigation path, without much cognitive overhead and without much perceived risk.

To read John’s entire response head on over to Read Write Web. I however believe that another commenter, Jahbuh, got it right when he said;

Many established and well respected blogs within the online marketing community have recently started to make their audiences available to a variety of new voices. The opportunity for new bloggers to communicate their ideas on internet marketing, email marketing, search engine optimization, paid search, affiliate marketing, and social media marketing have never been greater.

Today Michael Gray announced on his blog that he was ready to start accepting guest bloggers. He didn’t say how long this opportunity might exist but he said he would try it out and then see how it goes. In his post he makes it clear that this is an opportunity for any blogger to have a chance to reach out and communicate to his audience, not just another “A” list blogger.

If I didn’t know better Charlie O’Donnell and many others are reading my mind. Lately I have been seeing a lot of discussion around social media noise and our inability to filter it out or manage it in such a way as to continue to make it a productive part of our days.

Perhaps my lack of enthusiasm for Friendfeed has to do with my goal to reduce the amount of digital noise – an approach that regularly sees me turn Twitter off until at least noon to reduce the number of distractions.

It is not just Friendfeed though. It is the desire for budding entrepreneurs to create new social media services, tools, and resources that add too, aggregate and multiply the noise exponentially and create an endless number of entertaining distractions.

If this is not the complete guide to optimizing a WordPress blog then I have not seen it yet. I am not saying there is not a better free guide out there and I challenge anyone who knows of one to link it in the comments of this blog post and share with us what we all have been missing.

In my mind however Joost de Valk has come thru with an extremely useful and detailed guide showing how to effectively optimize a WordPress blog. The Guide covers seven major topics plus it provides a conclusion all of which are worth reading. The seven major topics are:

Basic technical optimization
Template Optimization
Advanced WordPress SEO and Duplicate Content
Altering your blog’s structure for high rankings
Conversion optimization: get those readers to subscribe!
Comment optimization: get those readers involved
Off site blog SEO