Nick Wilson at the Performancing blog does a great job of summing up what it takes to increase your traffic to your blog through search. Extremely straight forward recipe for success.
Wilson says it comes down to three things:

1. Copywriting
2. Links
3. Networking

I encourage you to read the full article for all the details. Print it out and keep it by your computer everytime you write a post.

Steve Rubel thinks Yahoo! may be ranking RSS feeds. Jeremy Zawodny from Yahoo! responds in the comments.

If this is true, what is the ranking based on, traffic? As a seller of RSS ad inventory, not all feeds are created equally. Measuring traffic alone doesn’t work in the advertising world. What is more important is who is reading it (demographics, decision makers, etc) and how active the feed is. Feeds that have 50 subscribers can make just as much money as those with 1,000. It all depends on the audience it reaches.

If your a blogger looking to generate revenue from your feed, don’t be too concerned about the size of the feed. If you are reaching a highly engaged audience that advertisers want to speak with, your feeds may be more valuable than you realize. However, if you do have a feed that is not highly targeted or the content is not tighly focused, don’t expect the money truck to be backing up to your front door anytime soon.

Steve Rubel links to an AP article today about how younger email users are favoring other newer forms of communication like social networking sites, instant messaging and text messaging – and they see email as “a good way to reach an elder – a parent, teacher or a boss – or to receive an attached file.”

Email’s problems have caught up to it, and the early adopters and the more tech savvy younger generation have been quick to catch on and are looking elsewhere for more appropriate communication mediums:

“And there is a very strong sense that the migration away from e-mail continues,” says Lee Rainie, the director at Pew.

For many young people, it’s about choosing the best communication tool for the situation.

As email emerged as a mainstream form of communication, we still used the phone, but transferred many phone tasks to email. Some things just didn’t need to be done by phone, and in fact, worked better over email.

The same goes for email and new communication mediums, but now email represents the phone and people are transferring tasks away from email by using other technologies like RSS and text messaging.

Email is not going away, it still has plenty of uses, but people are thinking outside the inbox and adopting new technologies .