MediaPost reports the Advertising Research Foundation is planning to publish a new guide to online advertising, designed for brand managers new to the web, this November.

The publication, “The Online Advertising Playbook,” is designed to be “a go-to guide for advertisers and their agency partners who are seeking to get maximum benefit out of the Internet,” said Taddy Hall, one of the authors. Hall, chief strategy officer at the ARF, added that the book is geared toward “brand marketers eager to tap power of Internet, but who have shied away because of lack of confidence in how to use the medium.”

The 320-page guide will include interviews and case studies.

Being over 30, I’m not quite as hip as I used to be, so forgive me for never hearing about MetaCafe until today.

Apparently it’s one of the top 100 sites in the world and has been streaming 280 million videos a month. Unfortunately, my lack of awareness may be indicative of why the company just raised $15 million to try and compete with YouTube, Google Video etc.

Full story at Mashable.com.

By Al Scillitani

Dear Google,

My head hurts. Almost everytime I log into an adwords account something has changed. I knew when I decided to enter the search marketing field over 5 years ago things would continually change. I found search engine optimization and paid search to be to interesting. I knew it would be a challenge to keep up with changes, but this is crazy.

How is a single adwords account owner supposed to keep up with all your changes? It is hard enough for a full team of specialists nevermind the small business owner that is maintaining their own adwords account. Just when I think I am all caught up, more news comes out about another new feature, tool, format, etc… or I log in and there it is. Oh my head!

Have a fun and safe 4th of July. This is my first as a U.S. citizen, so I’ll enjoy celebrating my own personal freedom from those red coats.

I can remember only a few years ago, if a company was letting an employee go or the employee left a 2 week notice, most employees would try to leave on good terms so they can use the company as a reference. There was not much of a benefit for the company to “take care� of this leaving employee. My, how things have changed. Enter the bloggers.

When was the last time you went to Google, Yahoo, and MSN and searched your first and last name and your company’s name? You may be unpleasantly surprised. If one of your employees has a personal blog or forum they post on, a simple statement like “I worked for -insert your company name here- and they suck because….� can end up being on the first page of some of the top search engines.

So maybe the reason Google’s product launches fizzle out is because they do actually focus on search. That’s what Google’s Douglas Merrill (VP of Engineering) told the BBC recently…

“Our position is that search is a very hard problem. We have still a lot of work to do,” said Douglas Merrill, who looks after internal engineering…Mr Merrill said Google’s search focus for the future included better search for mobiles, personalised search, language translation, accessing offline information and defeating web spam.