Jeff Jarvis lists some of the ways of competing with google including the view that specialised search has real potential.

Digg has launched some visualisation tools on digg labs – a site dedicated to building tools on top of the very popular Digg recommendation site.

John Batelle discusses selection criteria for getting a site listed on Google News and concludes that there are opaque editorial processes going on which Google is doing little to shine a light on.

Where does all the Google traffic go? Bill Tancer’s Hitwise blog provided the answer – a breakdown of all the US Google traffic by Google site. The main Google site still attracts 80% of the traffic, and images comes in at #2 with 8.6%.

Matt Cutts, the Googler who blogs mainly about SEO, has posted some simple guides to SEO onto Google Video. As he says, the quality is not polished as they were shot at home using amateur equipment and uploaded without editing. Worth a look.

John Battelle reports on more online sleuthing which has unearthed experimental services from Google.

In the experimental bin sandbox.google.com, added 14 services to his “sandbox” account. Some of these are already disclosed, so only the surprises are listed here: Google Events, Google Guess, Google Online Assessment, Google Real Estate Search, Mobile Marketplace, New Service (AKA Workplace), and New Services.

Onstartups, a blog for entrepreneurs has 17 Pithy Insights For Startup Founders. I particularly like number 13 – “The problem you solve should be ugly. The solution you build should be beautiful.” Can’t say this description springs to mind all that often, though.

According to a report from Mintel, posted by  AOP the UK now does more of its Shopping online than any other European country.

Wired’s Monkey Bites blog has a write up on a new WYSIWYG web editing tool called Aptana that it says helps to get Web 2.0 effects quickly and easily.

MenuTree is a new mashup which shows restaurants on a map. It’s a lightweight mash-up, and is pretty light on content at the moment, but anyone publishing hospitality content should take a look.