That's a great article.

Knowledge is power and people/entities in govt are all about the pursuit of power.

This reminds me of an episode of Castle.

Is it easier to increase your rankings by a) building solid quality backlinks to your site or b) building tons of spam links to your competitors' sites?

If the answer is b), which I suspect it might due to reading some comments here citing fiverr examples, then allowing negative SEO is decreasing the quality of search results.

Also, my guess is where the damage is really done is w/ long tail searches. That's when I almost always encounter random, irrelevant, spammy sites - when I search for something very specific in Google.

This seems like an open invite for people to create blatant spam content.

This reminds me of a product features framework I saw once. It mapped features to a 2x2, which categorized features into 4 buckets. The lead bullets were considered "table stakes" (core features that were necessary and everyone had) and silver bullets are probably "fool's gold" (features that are distinctive, but don't necessarily drive adoption).

I use both odesk and elance a lot. I find that the former is better for work that's more commoditized.

E.g.,

For PR work, I'd go to elance. For SEO work, I'd go to odesk.

For a mobile app, I'd go to elance. For wordpress customization, I'd go to odesk.

Her reaction seems a bit too emotional.

I agree w/ what Bloomberg is saying here.

College doesn't make sense for many people/careers. In those cases, whether college is affordable or not is beside the point.

It would be interesting to see someone test this on a public, shared computer.