Do you respond to comments to your posts? Do you spend time making comments on other blogs? Have you set comment guidelines for yourself? It may be worth revisiting how you think about comments, both in terms of how you deal with the comments to your posts and those you make in other blogs.

In this age of conversational marketing, responding to comments helps you show your readers that you are listening and participating. That's important especially if you are in the service business. The action of referring to the content readers share with you and addressing any further questions will set you apart. It shows your commitment.

The U.S Presidential election is something I've followed quite closely in the past few months. Politics is a thrilling topic for me because I'm fascinated with how politicians play the game of power.

It's kinda like reality TV. Serious individuals deal with real life issues while competing aggressively against each other to win your vote. You have all the power in this battle of wits.

On day one of SMX West in Santa Clara, I will be speaking on Local Search and Blended Results. While that panel will be focused on the generation and optimization of local search listings — I have a much broader knowledge of the local search products offered from Google. Owing Google some love, this is a more forward looking view of Google's Local Search offering.

On a seasonally slow Friday, much is being made over some seasonally slow numbers that comScore released about Facebook and the other top social networks. Actually, we posted about these numbers a couple weeks ago, but focused on the engagement aspect - users spending less time on social networks, versus the unique visitor count, which has essentially been flat since August of last year. At the time, comScore had reported that users on Facebook were spending 10% less time on the site than they had in the same month the prior year.

Usability really is a science but some of it is instinctual. I remember having many an argument with people about usability when I worked as a Product Manager. There are simply some things that are a given - such as how eyes track across a screen (left to right), how they skim downward, and how they expect an action on bottom right.

Health 2.0, web-based apps and services for the healthcare sector, is a nascent but potentially huge market for web 2.0. As of now, many of these apps have an emphasis on communication, information sharing and community. These are relatively easy things to address using Web tools. However we're starting to see health 2.0 apps try to tackle the enormous inefficiencies in the healthcare system - check out our description of Carol.com below. Also, in the longer term, we will see the Web being used in medical diagnosis and practice.

Welcome to Part 2 in Gaetano's series on procrastination. Knowing where it starts seems to be a great place to dig in.

Procrastination Mini-Series - Causes

by Gaetano Caruana

The first step to deal with your procrastination problem is to identify its causes, the reasons why you procrastinate. It is common that a lot of people procrastinate due to a subconscious reason; that is they don't know exactly why they procrastinate. Others think they know all causes for their procrastination problem. When I started researching procrastination I thought I formed part of the latter but to my surprise, I discovered that I knew only half the reasons why I used to procrastinate.

This post is by Michael Stelzner.

Looking for a credible source to strengthen your article, blog post or white paper? Need a quote from an expert to bolster your case?

There's an excellent source you may not have considered—LinkedIn. Chances are you have received dozens of emails from friends, colleagues and total strangers asking you to join LinkedIn. Turns out more than 17 million business professionals are using the networking site.

Starting out with my first website in 1996, I hadn't realized that one of the most important pages that I had put on the site was a contact page. With a copy of "Learn HTML in 2 Weeks" at my side, and a design that reflected my limited skills, I wasn't aware of my limitations, which was a probably a good thing at the time.

Acquiring Digg costs $300 million, we hear. Learning how to game the social new site, however, only costs the time to write an offer. At last night's Founders Club party in New York -- well-attended by executives from CBS, NBC, Disney, and IAC -- one media suit inadvertently confessed as much. "Digg traffic is crucial for us," this exec said. So his team called Digg to ask how it all works. What can they do to get more items on the front page? "And they just started giving us all this really detailed information we never expected," this exec was overhead saying. Like how to avoid triggering the algorithm's ire by not having everyone in the company Digg a story until after a certain amount of Diggs, he said. "Only later we realized -- oh yeah -- it's cause we're talking about buying them."