Marketing Pilgrim

Raise your hand if you’re a Microsoft adCenter user?

1…2..3…4……OK, four of you.

Well, you four are going to be excited about a whole host of new features and upgrades just announced by the adCenter team.

Account Management Updates

New features include:

• Use Windows Live ID to sign in to adCenter
• New home page and alerts
• A better way manage your account settings

adCenter Desktop (Beta) Updates

Changes include:

• Manage more keywords and experience faster speeds
• Update existing ads in bulk and update bids at the group level
• Edit as you browse
• Preview imported data
• Target customers by city and state

Content Ads Updates (U.S. Only)

Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt gave the keynote address at Carnegie Mellon’s commencement ceremony over the weekend.

During his speech, Schmidt shares a rare comical side to his personality, cracking all manner of jokes. He explains the differences between his generation and those in the audience:

“We didn’t tell anyone about our embarrassing moments, you post yours to Facebook and YouTube every day!”

He also jokes that there is no reason to fear the recession:

“I did some research, using my favorite search engine of course. The great depression spurred some incredible innovations. Rice Crispies, Twinkies, and the beer can. You would have never have gotten through college without these things!”

I’ve met Schmidt a couple of times–and seen many videos of him–but I don’t ever recall him being quite so whimsical.

Google’s working on its Blog Search behind the scenes, according to emails from the head of the search quality group in Google’s New York office, Jeremy Hylton, and Search Engine Land’s Matt McGee:

Google’s changes are more about what powers Blog Search, not what it looks like.

“With [Thursday's] update,” Hylton says, “the whole collection of ranking changes provides a more authoritative set of results. I think it’s really a great set of bloggers talking about current events.”

Hylton says they’ll continue tweaking the algorithm and interface moving forward to improve the overall user experience.

Some of the changes, however, will be more visible: Google is also subtly updating how it displays the clusters of stories on the homepage. The new design is a bit more streamlined, shifting the blue-boxed images from the left of the clusters (old version) to the right:

Pingdom reports that Google made a stunning $209,624 profit per employee in 2008.

Perhaps just as impressive is Microsoft’s $194,297 per person. When you consider MSFT has 4x the employees as Google–which typically means a lot more "non revenue generating" jobs–that’s quite an achievement.

Any surprises on that list? Yahoo, anyone?

The online world is noisy enough as it is. Everyone is trying to get everyone’s attention to sell whatever it is they have. They fight and scratch and claw to get above the din of the marketing noise. They fight to protect their brand and on and on and on. They also complain a lot. Seems like a lot of the news these days is about how some of the biggest enablers of online business like Facebook and Twitter are screw-ups and aren’t doing the right thing. Well, for the foreseeable future these two may be able to enjoy some relative peace and quiet as Google pops open its newest can of worms around its AdWords offering to allow trademarks of others to be used in certain ad copy of any advertiser. The fur is already starting to fly on this policy that will take effect on June 15.

So Twitter caused a bit of controversy this week as they changed their @replies feature in a way that actually effected just 3% of their users but the backlash felt like they had flipped Twitter nation the bird. One couldn’t help but be reminded of the terms of service soap opera that Facebook endured in the past few months as well.

So what’s one to learn from this? Well, if you are Twitter co-founder Biz Stone you learn the ropes of blogging before you do your homework. In his post from late in the day on Thursday he talks about some of the mistakes he made in this process as well as attempts to explain the whole situation more clearly.

As for his mea culpa Stone said the following: