New way to get free traffic with BlogRush

As you can see there is a new section right under the AboutMe section called BlogRush widget which helps you get free additional traffic by displaying your blog post snippets on other blogs submitted to the BlogRush advertising program. This way you take part in so-called-by-me "Traffic Exchange" for free.
Check out BlogRush by yourself.

Web Directories manually penalized by Google!

It would be ridiculous if we say we did not see this coming but after all we all did not want to believe it will happen. Already a fact - Google started manually removing from rating in the SERPs some of the well known (or not so, at least for me) web directories.
Anyway as it seems in some news posts the specific reason has not come from the inside of the G. Rumors say that Rand Fishkin (SEOmoz), who people know as a complainer against and disliker of link buying, expressed his dislike against the link buying to his buddy Matt Cutts (no need to explain who he is) and the result was Matt Cutts manually penalizing some web directories (not sure whether by himself or not:}) . Very nasty of Rand in my opinion... but anyway here are known directories penalized:

Aviva
Alive
Big Web Links
ewebpages
Directory Dump
Elegant Directory