If you use Twitter at all, you’ve probably seen plenty of people lobbing questions to their followers– when they could have easily just gone to Google and searched for the answer.  This habit actually has its own hashtag, #lazyweb, and InboxQ and Column Five Media created an infographic laying out exactly the types of questions people tweet out when they’re too lazy to search. But it reveals a lot more than the depth of people’s laziness — it also betrays the types of things that current search technology just doesn’t find very well.

via Infographic Of The Day: How Twitter Exposes Google’s Limits | Co.Design.

The New York Times asked an expert in online search, Doug Pierce of Blue Fountain Media in New York, to study this question, as well as Penney’s astoundingly strong search-term performance in recent months. What he found suggests that the digital age’s most mundane act, the Google search, often represents layer upon layer of intrigue. And the intrigue starts in the sprawling, subterranean world of “black hat” optimization, the dark art of raising the profile of a Web site with methods that Google considers tantamount to cheating.

via Search Optimization and Its Dirty Little Secrets – NYTimes.com.

I’ve had the pleasure to work with the Twin Cities local AMA and AdFed chapters to brand some crazy and wonderfully successful events.  But, did you know (and this is for you out-of-towners) that Minnesota is also home to the oldest and one of the largest interactive marketing association in the country (maybe in the world).