Remember when we all thought that search engine ads couldn’t get any weirder than those put out by Ask.com.
Ladies and Gentleman, the crown has now passed to Bing.
OK, so they didn’t technically create the latest Bing commercial, but they did select it as the winner of a recently held Bing jingle contest. The winner is “Bing Goes the Internet” by Jonathan Mann:
Whether you pray it never comes to your TV set, or you hope to see it during the next Super Bowl, says a lot about you. 
It looks like the Internet marketing industry could be staring at an age of government regulation and oversight that could change online advertising in major ways. While this kind of news should come as no surprise based on the new age of government intervention in business it is still enough to make even the most seasoned online marketer take notice.
The New York Times tells of how things could look very different for the online advertisers in the future
The new head of the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the Federal Trade Commission, David C. Vladeck, says it is time for that to change. In an interview, Mr. Vladeck outlined plans that could upset the online advertising ecosystem. Privacy policies have become useless, the commission’s standards for the cases it reviews are too narrow, and some online tracking is “Orwellian,” Mr. Vladeck said.
Yeah, yeah, yeah—I’m sure we can all name some anecdotal evidence of teens who either hate Twitter or who can’t get off it. But by and large, according to a new Nielsen report, teens just aren’t on Twitter.
Or are they? The chart from the report looks at users on Twitter.com (as opposed to on phones or desktop clients):
Let’s start with the facts: In June of this year, teens and young adults made up 25% of the online population, which means that they’re disproportionately not using Twitter. Or Twitter.com. I can accept that.
OK, I’ve made you wait long enough.
Here are the five finalists for our 4th Annual Search Marketing Scholarship contest. In no particular order:
We’ve heard back from all of our judges and I’m counting the votes. On Friday, I’ll announce our winner and also reveal the visitor, bounce rate, and time on page numbers for each entry.
That’s all! 
It’s been eight months since TechCrunch announced that they would no longer honor embargoes, with several other sites jumping on that bandwagon in the interim. One of the issues here was undermining the credibility of the blogosphere at large. As Trisha Lyn Fawver put it,
A lot of the complaints that real journalists have about blogs is that they don’t adhere to the same ethics and standards as real journalistic endeavors do, or real reporters.
This is just another one of those things that proves them right :/ It makes bloggers in general look bad in my opinion.
No worries, folks! Now, the mainstream media is joining in—the Wall Street Journal has a new anti-embargo policy for its editorial staff. Rather, like TechCrunch, they’ll accept exclusives, and honor embargoes when the story is big enough.
When Google decided to enter the web analytics space, fear spread throughout the industry at the thought of a challenger that offered a pretty comprehensive package–for free, no less!
Well, after the initial trembling of the knees, web analytics companies re-grouped and came out swinging. The latest development comes from WebTrends, which appears to have finished a considerable upgrade to its user interface.
In fact, Douglas Karr–who provides the screenshots below–sums it up nicely:
The new interface with Webtrends 9 is elegant, simple, clean and has exceptional usability. It feels as though you just sat down in a new Mercedes.
Karr has a number of screenshots on his site, but here are a couple that jumped out to me.
RSS Overlays
Did you know that if the revenue per search, under a Microsoft/Yahoo partnership, fails to match Google’s estimated revenue, Yahoo can kill the deal?
Did you know that Microsoft must hire 550 Yahoo employees, whether they need them or not?
Did you know that the entire deal is in jeopardy if not completed by July 29 of 2010?
Did you know… OK, enough already!
While these fun facts might not make it into the next edition of Trivial Pursuit, they do make it into the latest 8-K filing from Yahoo. eWeek has a great recap of the fine print not previously announced, and it makes for interesting reading.
For example:
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