SEO sources and daily links + Google+

To start off my new SEO career I read a book (The Art of SEO) and started to follow these three blogs: Search Engine Land, Blumenthals and SEOmoz. I read these daily and from now on I plan to post links to the more interesting pieces, particularly if I have a comment or observation about them. I know that there are plenty more good resources about SEO, but this is what I have mental bandwidth for. For now.
But first, the big news of the online world: Google + arrived on June 28. It took me a week to get in, but I joined it on July 5. This makes me an early adopter, but doesn’t put me on the bleeding edge. And for those who haven’t heard about Google+ yet, it’s official description is “The Google+ project makes sharing online more like sharing in real life.” The unofficial opinion about seems to be that it is a new social networking site intended to compete with Facebook .
And now today’s links with my comments in italics:

• Julie Joyce’s tips on how to do (very) low budget link building include: advertise the old-school-way, do online branding (e.g. use Knowem to check on what SNS your brandname is available), guest post on other blogs, conduct interviews and answer questions.
  These tips sounded a bit obvious, but well collected  for clients who want link building. (As you know getting links from quality websites pointing to your site increases your ranking at Google, which is a main goal of SEO.)
• Danny Sullivan went after the story of why Google Realtime (the service that provided search of the latest updates on various fast-paced channels) went offline: because Google’s deal with Twitter, that gave them access to the latter’s special feed, expired.
  I am so curious what’s going on between these companies. I am sure there is much more to the story, than accidental lapse. There must be some big business ideas that influenced a conscious decision before this. I hope the consumer, me, will end up with better services out of the battle of the giants.
• Matt McGee reported that Picasa will be renamed to Google Photos.
  I haven’t been a frequent Picasa user, because I found Flickr a better tool and because the 1 GB limit of the free Picasa account (you can always purchase more space though.) But now that one of the main features of Google+ is “photos”, by which they mean Picasa, I might end up using it more often. I understand that from a  branding perspective Google Photos makes more sense for the company, but I also know that changing the name of an existing product/service is always a hassle and might mean losing existing customers. On the other hand Google probably hopes that with the help of Google+ the number of Picasa/Photos users will increase dynamically. So they gain more users by calling it Google Photos, than they lose by renaming an established brand. I hope that the changes in the service itself will not be too radical, as we just learned with my mother on how to use Picasa’s photo management tool.