The battle for dominance of the mobile developer space is a two-party fight between Google and Apple -- and, for the moment, Apple's winning. Not only does it have four times the number of apps, but its stricter controls make for a higher quality inventory.

Google Search is a marvel and keeps getting incrementally better. And it remains wildly profitable. Still, with Facebook, Twitter and even LinkedIn nipping at its heels in the social sphere, Google is under increasing pressure to figure out how to better compete, even as its core search business hits its inevitable plateau.

I thought this week I'd take a short departure from SEO tactics and talk to you briefly about PPC. Yeah -- who knew? I found a little bit of PPC knowledge in a corner of my brain I forgot existed. End result? Hopefully you will benefit from it. Let's jump into some thoughts about negative keyword lists.

Funny, how our brains make us hang on to things that make little sense in the new scheme of things. For as plastic as the brain is, there are worn grooves that cannot be denied. Every time I cross the Atlantic, where history is the natural state of things, I gain a new appreciation for this clash of the new and the old. It creates a fascinating juxtaposition of digital efficiency and deeply carved human habits.

Search has become a bit boring. It doesn't get the headlines. It doesn't pack the halls at conferences. It doesn't trend on Twitter. But still: From social to mobile to video to display, key attributes of SEM are being incorporated into emerging online ad platforms and content development best practices. And it won't be long before the convergence of the online and offline world -- see Google TV -- brings the search mojo to traditional channels. Here are 10 reasons why SEM professionals are positioned well to rule the marketing roost:

Tony Judt died this week. I hadn't even heard of him. A friend forwarded me the first chapter of his book, "Ill Fares the Land." Judt's essay is more thoughtful and more reasoned than Michael Moore's whiny movie "Capitalism: A Love Story," but the essential question is the same: In all of our worship of free markets, unfettered profit-seeking and individualistic success, how can we make sure we still attend to the social good?

SEO is a laborious and, to be frank, rather tedious task. So it's lucky that once you have SE-optimized your Web site in English, you can just have it translated without the need to repeat all that effort in foreign languages, right? Unfortunately, no.

The Yahoo-Bing search alliance is moving ahead with full head of steam and we are starting to see some significant Bing click volume from Yahoo search pages. It's not too early for marketers to start monitoring these results, assessing the impact on their Bing campaigns and making appropriate adjustments to their paid search campaigns.

Is it just me, or is search getting boring? It's been months since we've had a good, ruckus-raising tidbit to get our teeth into. The Bing-Yahoo integration? That's the best you can do? Yawn.

If my title premise is correct, then my point has already been made, and this column should really end right here. But what really amazes me about online publishing these days is the power of the headline. Every day, both great and godawful articles alike thrive or die by their headline quality, or lack thereof. In just a few short words, writers have the opportunity to relay the crux of their point, to include relevant keywords that might encourage scanning or clicking, or to just simply engage overall with a potential reader who may never see anything other than the …