ClickZ’s reporting RH Donnelley Corporation, which publishes the yellow pages, has acquired the 40-person search marketing firm, LocalLaunch.

“We’re trying to provide a one stop shop for the small- and medium-[sized] businesses…online and off,” explained Sean Greene, VP digital strategy and business development at RH Donnelley.

If this is your “bag”, you’ll find extensive details in the Click article.

Tom Drugan of Naymz.com, has put together a free guide aimed at rebellious college students (and other young’ns) that are now just realizing the damage they’ve done to their reputation via MySpace, Facebook etc.

It’s a quick read, but provides some useful ideas for those looking to clean-up the search results for their own name.

If you need further help on actually monitoring what’s being said about you, don’t forget our reputation monitoring guide.

ClickZ has details of MSN’s rollout of behavioral targeting for adCenter.

The behavioral targeting technology will place Web customers into one of 18 segments as dictated by a combination of their online search habits and Web pages visited. Based on their segment, customers will be served display ads that are relevant to their interests.

It seems ESPN is not happy with the quality of the ads Yahoo has been serving on the sports network, so the company is switching teams.

The young rookie, Quigo, is taking over the baton and poised to make a dash for the endzone by offering better targeted contextual ads.

According to ClickZ…

Under the deal, ESPN will feature the Quigo text link ads across its site…advertisers will be able to bid on the text links by site, site section, keyword or topic through Quigo’s platform, or purchase the pay-per-click ads directly from ESPN. The sports publisher will most likely include three to five text ads per page, according to Dolman, who added Quigo ads will not appear on the site’s search results pages.

We only just had a report on the growth of Internet Advertising and now, TheStreet.com brings details of data released by TNS Media Intelligence.

Internet advertising was the fastest growing medium between January and June, growing 18.9% to $4.69 billion.

That’s an impressive number, but not as high as the 49% growth Nielsen discovered in their report. That’s a huge difference.

It seems that just about everything that comes out of the mouth of a Google exec, ends up as speculative story on the company’s next move. Either Google’s cringing every time an executive opens their mouth, or their quietly working the system.

Anyway, the lates buzz is that Google is getting ready to launch a video service in Japan, if only it can find some content partners.

“We haven’t yet been able to introduce Google Video in Japan, and hope to do so soon,” Google Japan’s President Norio Murakami said during a conference in Tokyo. “Going forward, Google’s services can’t work without cooperation from contents partners.”

I’m sure Japan’s not the only target for Google’s video service expansion.

Via Reuters.

After getting tired of keeping track of the hundreds of blogs discussing the search engine marketing space, Jonathan Nelson decided there must be a better way of tracking the hottest news.

Using the model made popular by Digg and other social bookmarking sites, the Shopzilla employee decided to create Search N Sniff as a way to keep track of the most popular search engine news.

I asked Jonathan to share what was the driving force behind the creation of Search N Sniff. He told me, “I think it’s fair to say that we have seen all sorts of “web2.0″ community based sites popping up all over. We’ve seen Digg as a social medium for tech news, YouTube for the aspiring videographer and of course Wikipedia as an online encyclopedia. With all of this happening, I still couldn’t find a great way to consolidate the plethora of search related news I read every day. Search N Sniff is an attempt to help solve that problem. My dream has been to help the search marketing community. I hope I’ve done that with this project.”