In addition to today's Internet Marketing Monitor coverage, we felt these stories were worth pulling out of the multitude of news items for March 19, 2007: 

  Possible Microsoft Live Search March Update?  [Search Engine Roundtable]

I might see a difference in some Live Search results.  I really haven't noticed any related to the Internet Marketing Monitor.  But I did notice that a search for my personal blog brings up a link to a now defunct companion group at Google… and the error message that it no longer exists as a supplemental result.  Neither of these were previously showing.  If there was an update I guess I can't say it didn't do anything for me.  *Rolls eyes*  Haha.

  TWITTER:  Dear self-obsessed nerds  [Valleywag]

Yowsa!  Quite the biting critique of the service!  It's written in the form of a letter and the author (Dave Ewalt) makes it glaringly obvious that he doesn't care what people are doing on Twitter.  I guess I'm not the only one who doesn't get it.  I think my take was a little less "in-your-face".  Is it wrong that this made me laugh quite a bit?

  The First Question You Should Ask Your SEO Consultant  [Scoreboard Media Group]

The question is fair enough:  “If you can rank a site in lucrative markets, why would you do it for clients instead of for yourself?”  I bet that would put more than a few consultants in an odd position.  Three example answers, along with explanations for each, are given in the post.  I'd be curious to see what real-world answers people have received after asking this question.

  Social Search Growth, Speaking at OMMA Hollywood  [Hitwise]

In preparation for a speaking engagement tomorrow, LeeAnn Prescott has posted some traffic stats from a number of social media sites:  Digg, del.icio.us, Technorati, and Google Blog Search.  As she points out, all have experienced substantial growth over the past six months.  But one thing I wanted to point out in the graph was Technorati's rather sharp decline since February.  All of them seem to have taken a little dip in the same period… but Technorati's dip is far more substantial.  At it's peak it was was well ahead of Google Blog Search.  But it seems to have taken a sharp decline.  Technorati has taken a traffic hit lately and I'm guessing it's due to performance issues as of late.  Am I the only one that's noticed?