For official google updates http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/ for general seo news http://www.seomoz.org/blog http://sphinn.com/
Google has not changed their recommendations for best SEO practices for at least 8 years. Go to the Google Webmaster Blog to see what they are. I am becoming more of a believer that overdoing SEO with backlinks, etc. does more harm than good.
Get the monster SEO compendium from here; it contains everything you need to know; http://www.simplecashblogreview.com/download/SEOcompendium.pdf
aside from the links above, if you know exactly what you are looking for, then you can do a google search for them as well. for example: mayday update
Thanks for the links! Man I hate it when I run a search for this stuff and come up with a great looking article only to find it was written in 2002. They keep saying content is king, they talk the talk, but they don't walk the walk. They rank offsite factors way more than onsite.
gotta echo the SEOMoz.org recommendation, also SEOBook.com both high quality, white hat SEO expert sites with huge communities and lots of tools.