[UPDATED] Sure the weather's great right now, but just in case you feel like staying in and reading, here are some links for you for the weekend. You can also listen to a podcast version:

1. Version 2.0 of MindMeister, a web-based mindmapping and brainstorming tool, has just been released. (They also released MindMeister Offline, based on Google Gears, in Nov 2007.) Note: I received an email msg about V2.0, but the MindMeister blog does not mention it yet. MindMeister is collaborative, so it has an advantage over desktop-based mindmapping software.
2. I love it when people talk about the value of small daily incremental improvements - as Aaron Wall at SEOBook has. This approach is sometimes called Kaizen. I sometimes refer to it as "improvement by slow degrees," which doesn't overwhelm you. The small successes along the way motivate you.
3. A must read: Aaron Wall writes, Google thinks you are a black hat SEO.
4. Loren Baker discusses Alexa's new web page ranking system, which doesn't rely as much on the Alexa toolbar. Unfortunately, that means a lot of sites are seeing big changes in their Alexa rankings.
5. Jason at WP Elements has released yet another free WordPress theme, Charred. It's based on the previous incarnation of his site's theme and has magazine-style elements, including two sizes of post thumbnails.
6. Barry Schwartz wrote at Search Engine Land that Google Mail servers are having trouble supporting IMAP accounts, possibly to the point of removing it as an option. Although I haven't tried in a long time, I can't remember ever being able to get my IMAP accounts integrated into GMail.
7. Want to run a contest on your blog but not sure where to get prizes? Jennifer Chait at Network Blogging Tips has some suggestions.
8. Zoe Marlowe at Devlounge has an indepth review of photo storage sites.
9. It's spring time, and a young person's thoughts might just turn to... podcasting. But what do you podcast about? Stiff offers five ideas for podcasts, over at Audival. If you plan on experimenting with podcasting, here's an important tip: warm up your body before recording more than a few minutes of voice. I like to wear a hoodie because of throat problems. When your body is warm, there's less stress on the vocal chords.
10. If podcasting is so Q1 2008 to you, maybe you're into vodcasting or general web video production. If so, check out TubeMogul. They bill themselves as "a free service that acts as a single point for deploying" video to the top video sharing sites. That means you upload once and they get your video out to other sites. They also collect stats from each site and present the aggregation from their panel.

Happy reading. Or you could go outside and play.

Maybe I'm more obsessed with Google PR (PageRank) than most, due to being a math and stats (and computer) geek and needing to measure everything. Sure, PR is not an accurate measure of your site's worth, but it is a measure nonetheless, which for some ad networks helps determine how much you'll earn. And love it or hate, it just changed. Or is changing. Right now. If you haven't seen the change, you probably should over the next few days.

Only moments ago, I checked one of my sites that's too new to have made the last rollout in, what was it, late January or early Feburary? So lucky for me, it went from PR0 to PR4. Which really is meaningless because traffic is still transient. I haven't posted even once per week regularly, despite my promise on the site. Anyway, until I do get consistent traffic, I have no plans on monetizing it. I'm taking a wholly different approach this time, unlike most of my other sites. [I'm talking about my personal site, which will never have contextual ads, but may have other types in the future, after it hits PR5.]

Still, my experience over the past two years is as follows. Take any keyword phrase and search for it. Usually, but not always, the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) listings will have higher PR pages at the top. That means, since most people are lazy and don't check past the first page of SERPs, more traffic goes to the first ten pages listed.

The unfortunate thing about this new PR rollout, at least to myself and a friend, is that his PR5 tech site just dropped to PR4. (According to the two tools I've found to be most accurate. Other tools show a mix of 4 and 5, though they used to show all 5.) I had intended on buying it in a few days, but the change likely means both a strong drop in traffic and revenue. He let the site sit dormant for too many months after he left the United States.

Which means any zomblogs (zombie blogs) out there are probably losing rank if they are not at least gaining new backlinks. This may mean that Google has decided to implement some important algorithm changes - such as the momentum metric Ryan Caldwell suggested.

So, if you have a site and have let it slide, you may want to quickly find someone to write casually, before the next PR rollout. If you can't pay, maybe guest-write on their side. Or you could sell your site at Performancing's Blogs for Sale section. You should be seeing a few of mine for sale soon, as well as few job listings.

Note: If you want to check your PR, you could use Data Center Watch [via SmartWealthyRich], but i find it's inaccurate. I prefer Aaron Wall's SEO for Firefox plugin, which embeds results into Google and Yahoo's SERPs, or Search Status for Firefox.

Folks,

I thought I would take a moment to explain what this website does and how to use it. Yes it is actually an SEO tool center, not a 'gimme your money' site.

The main productivity area is the "directory", it just started out that way, as I began to toss the tools in with my links area. I wanted to rename it to SEO Center or something like that but I don't want to lose links and haven't really come up with a good enough reason to do so yet.

First you will find over 250 good linking sites with respectable page ranks and friendly submission policies, obviously I've got many more but until I get around to confirming links, this is what I have, it grows constantly. By the way, you really should be scraping sites like freelinks.info with a tool like SEO Elite and you can build your own experience about them and share em with us in our Forum.

That brings us to the Blog/Forum, it is an SEO fortified wordpress Blog, yup, plenty of pinging and if I have the time I will add optimized title's, keywords and meta descriptions to your posts before they get blasted out ... at the very least they will carry the built in tags for the category, not just my Blog URL.

The tools center (Directory) is really for stations with two or more monitors, if you are only using one screen, then stop reading this and go get a graphics adapter that supports multiple CRT's and a few monitors, we'll still be here when you get back.

Let's take a look at the search engine, it is an SEO only Search Engine, as I get the time, I continue to add authority sites like SEO Chat etc, so when you search for a tool or an article, it WILL be SEO related. I think that alone is a good reason to stop by, I don't know why all SEO's aren't doing this but it is just so obvious to me. If you know of any really great SEO sites with lots of collateral let me know and I will check them out and maybe add them.

While the 'links directory' is sort of a manual way to build links (which is the friendly way to do it), there are other useful tools here. They are fair if you don't have any of the Top Performers, you know, SEO elite WebCEO, IBP etc. (it seems that each have their varied uses) and the Directory area is set up so you can use them together (provided you have multiple screens) to get things done.

The page rank tool is also a sort of mini backlink checker as well, for quick checks when your sizing up an upcoming project or you competitors ... but the BackLink Analysis tool does some pretty cool things and outputs chart friendly .csv ... if you can push the 'next button' on the Excel chart wizard, then you can produce some good graphic analytics with this tool.

While not a full-fledged scraper, the 'List Stripper' works great to take raw scrapes like HTML links lists and thin them into something workable.

The phrase generator is something I use all the time, you never know when a keyword will pass you by. I generate tons of them and run em through WebCEO to check the KEI's and you would be surprise what you can drag up with this nifty little free SEO tool.

Of course I have a good keyword analyzer built into the Online SEO tool suite but if you haven't got the real champions for keyword analysis, you really should consider getting them and learning how to get the most out of them.

There are more tools in the Directory and I add them as I find them ... There is even an Easter Egg or two on the site ... but this should give you an idea what to expect when you arrive at RELAX SEO Services.

There's no pressure to do anything, we just enjoy having you here rather than surfing all over the place trying to find stuff. If your my age, you'll probably forget what you were looking for anyway :-)

So drop on by, post to the Blog, join the Forum, send an email ... just say hello. We're all in this together, it's us against the Big Spidery Machines: Google, Yahoo! MSN and the rest.

I won't talk about Adsense, Adwords, Clickbank etc. here but I had to throw them in to make sure this is bot friendly copy (wink).

Dave
CE - PSEM - RELAX SEO Services
www.relaxseo.com