Is it time to be rethinking our dependence on Google? It might be… Why? The American model of capitalism tends to create giant behemoths in many industries. While this obviously makes some things efficient, it also generates a huge backwash of effects that are less obvious.

For us in the online world, Google’s Page Rank ‘bomb’ has devalued many of the links and online relationships that we have all spent a lot of time and money developing. Should we be helping Google take money out of our pockets, just to put it in theirs? Because to me that’s exactly what it looks like:

Don’t buy or sell text links (Except ours).

Don’t mess with your SEO (Or we will).

… and exactly why should we conform to Google’s will? Are you willing to pay for my server? Are you willing to handle the queries from my visitors? Are you willing to generate my content? Or do you Google just want me to slave away at my keyboard for sweatshop payments from your Adsense program which pays cents per click when you are generating dollars per click. (Can you sense if I’m angry or not..? 😉 ) So let’s hear it here!

Let’s hear your thoughts in this discussion: What happened to your blog? And the PR? Do you care? Or not? Why?

Isn’t StumbleUpon wonderful? I have found so many good websites there, but this one at “Blog Law” has a very good article on 12 Important U.S. Laws Every Blogger Needs to Know.

I’m not a lawyer, even if I were, I cannot give advice about this kind of stuff, especially on its accuracy with regard to the laws where you are. Still, there are some legal minefields mentioned that you may want to avoid. New bloggers will probably be put off this kind of stuff, but once you’ve blogged for a while, you may want to read this! It covers 12 areas, including: disclosing paid posts, deep linking, IP, images, trademarks, privacy issues, spam laws, etc. While the issues and the legal complications will vary HUGELY from place to place, there are some general pieces of information that would likely apply to all users, and some suggestions that are just good common sense.

It’s worth a read. But print it out, if you are very concerned, and go talk to your laywer, as you will likely get accurate, pertinent and helpful information for where you live.

For bloggers who write regularly, and those who read blogs frequently, it’s second nature that reading on any kind of monitor at the moment entails sacrifices on the part of the reader as much as the writer.

If you are writing for the web in any form, it’s wise to pay attention to the conventions that the medium imposes on readers in order to make an impact on your reader: paragraph length, choice of font, shorter sentences, using separate pages for longish articles with lots of text (so that readers get a break!)…

UseIt website answers the question in just two words: They don’t.

People rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences. In research on how people read websites we found that 79 percent of our test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 percent read word-by-word.

What other tips have you found on writing for the web? What helps your readers? What doesn’t?