Jennifer Laycock's kids have taught her a lot about creating content, building a community and increasing engagement rates for blogs. Among those issues that relate to both raising kids and blogging are short attention spans, reaching out to begin the friendship, and relating to others through similar interests. Addressing the first topic, Laycock writes, "Anyone who has spent more than 35 seconds with a preschooler knows they have the attention span of a squirrel on crack." Internet users aren't that different. Tweets on Twitter have taught us to communicate in sound bites and many users have no interest …

What did football fans want to know about the Super Bowl prior to Sunday's game? Google Hot Trends reveals 35 of the 100 searches on Sunday include the words "Super Bowl," and another 27 are Super Bowl-related, according to Vanessa Fox. Fox provides a list of what searchers sought most, but details many problems in search queries retuned on Google, Microsoft Live and Yahoo. Questions about the game drove queries, but when searching for the start time of the game, the search engines either ranked news stories or provided outdated information at the top of the list, she …

If you have ever wondered how Yahoo might automate SEO, then take a look at Bill Slawski's latest post. He dissects a Yahoo patent application published in early January that details how the search engine might automate optimization for search engines. The patent filing provides example on updating page titles, URLs for pages, meta descriptions and meta keywords, alt attributes for images, and headings on pages. Slawski explains that the patent application details some basic optimization for individual pages, but ignores many technical issues to make sites and pages search-engine-friendly. Yahoo also ignores "the potential for conflict of interest …