The social search engine, Prefound announced today that it will begin sharing revenue with topic experts to provide the most relevant and up-to-date information on specific topics of interest to the PreFound.com community.

PreFound’s “Featured Findersâ€? will benefit from the international exposure as domain experts as well as receive 100% of the advertising revenue that their individual pages generate.

More details via the press release.

ClickZ reports blogvangelist, Steve Rubel is leaving CooperKatz to join Edelman. Rubel will senior VP in charge of winning word-of-mouth (WOM) business.

Best of luck Steve!

If The Kelsey Group’s predictions are correct, the global market for local search, including online Yellow Pages, will grow at 30.5% per year in the next five years, reaching $13 billion in 2010.

Via MarketingVOX.

ClickZ has details of a new study that suggests the continued shift of ad dollars to online marketing.

This year, online marketing spending is expected to increase 19 percent. This is eight times TV and radio’s expected 2.4 percent rise, and six times print’s 3.3 percent…search engine ad spending is set to grow 26 percent this year. Budget allocation for Google amounts to $3.7 million; $4.6 million for Yahoo!; and $4.6 million for MSN.

Blog marketing is also predicted to see huge growth this year.

Spending on blog and wireless marketing sits at two percent of the online budget. Blog advertising should grow 43 percent; and wireless is expected to increase 19 percent.

This is hilarious stuff. Google’s Matt Cutts decides to sneak around Ask Jeeves’ offices after hours.

Meanwhile, Ask’s butler is equipped with a spy camera and busts Matt snooping.

Harry Tsao (co-founder of Mezi Media, which includes our clients Smarter.com and Coupon Mountain) has written an excellent insight on the U.S. government’s relations with China, for CNET.

As the co-founder of a U.S. Internet company with operations in China, I understand that politics between China’s Communist leaders and the U.S. government has a strong impact on my business. However, during the next 40 years, the diplomatic approach that the U.S. government takes in working with its Chinese counterpart will need to evolve. Mixing business with politics is not just bad for business; it is bad for international relations. The Chinese government will increasingly see the U.S. government as an unreliable partner that ties trade and business policies to the then-status of U.S.-China relations.

[Andy's note: If you're a regular reader of Marketing Pilgrim - or my old blog - you'll recognize the regular comments by 'MikeOK'. I've always enjoyed Mike's point of view and so recently asked him if he would like to contribute an article on the topic of his choosing. So the following is by Mike O'Krongli]

Internet giants Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL should be held accountable for the decline of usability of email, the most basic communication tool on the internet. They all have email services that filter spam and send blacklist and sometimes whitelist messages to a junk or spam folder. This action is leading to a ballooning email spam epidemic with many faces.