europeforvisitors - 3:47 pm on Feb 22, 2005 (gmt 0)

The PressLink blog at New York University has some interesting quotes from Jakob Nielsen and others on the About.com acquisition, including a statement by a v.p. of digital operations at The New York Times Co. who said: "Frankly, they bring a lot of competencies to us. They're the leaders in search-engine optimization."

$410 million for SEO? I'll bet they could hire Marshall Simmonds, About's director of search, for a fraction of that. Marshall would could buy up his home town in Oregon and appoint himself mayor, and the NYT would have $400 million left over to spend on developing real Web content.

See the story at:

[journalism.nyu.edu...]

(By the way, I can't take credit for finding this; I learned about it from a fellow ex-guide at About.com.)