More than just technology companies and marketers are taking advantage of the widget concept. Political activist group MoveOn.org has released several of them for use on blogs and open platform social networking sites like Facebook.

Jeremy Chatfield has a question for Google about AdWords, and why the search advertising giant appears to be concealing impressions.

Although the Cadbury’s Gorilla advert on TV looked like the worst kind of pencil-chasing activity, it became a lot more interesting to me when I noticed how popular it is online. 

Odds are decent that you see at least one of these establishments every time you leave the house.  So Hitwise has pulled up some data and examined whether Starbucks or McDonald’s will win the high-priced coffee war.

One assumption underlying some client conversations I have is that community comes cheap.  It may have something to do with the hippy-trippy quality of the word. 

An update to the Google Directory has webmasters puzzling over an apparent discrepancy in PageRank scores.

Retailers increased their email volumes by 45 percent during the holiday season according to the Email Experience Council.

A survey of 12 people is unlikely to accurately represent an entire segment of the population.  Still, British chief information officers don’t seem too excited about Facebook, as a new poll found that only one out of 12 uses the site for business reasons.

Jenna Jameson announced to a stunned audience at the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas that she will never perform in a porn film again.

Here is her announcement:

For Netflix customers, it’s time to consider buying a better office chair and investing in a nicer monitor; the service that’s best known for mailing DVDs will allow many people to view an unlimited amount of video online.

Marketers in the United Kingdom say that search marketing is the best way to generate leads.

Advertisers spent 44 percent more on search during the first half of 2007 than they did during the first six months of 2006 according to eMarketer. Search marketing comprises the majority of online ad spending compared to other formats.

Allegations of patent infringement by Google earned Northeastern University and the company licensing the technology a countersuit from the search advertising company.

Today is a unique day. Do you know why? Simple, when else will there be a January 14th, 2008? See, unique isn’t it?

Here are today’s unique picks:

Valdosta State University sophomore T. Hayden Barnes protested a multi-million dollar garage construction project by the school. College president Ronald Zaccari responded by expelling him.

Students taking classes with University of Brighton media studies professor Tara Brabazon will have to give up a couple of things: Google and Wikipedia.

60 Minutes did a good job with a segment on Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg considering that Mark had very little to say. He seemed overly briefed by lawyers and PR types and as a result was stiff and uncharismatic for someone who has accomplished so much. Mark is definitely more of a Bill Gates than a Steve Jobs, both of whom also started their companies in their early twenty’s. As Bill Gates has, I am sure over time Mark will improve his television appearance skills.

I know a segment of my readers are sick to death with anything to do with Google PageRank updates, and I haven’t even bothered mentioning the most recent update up until now… there wasn’t really anything newsworthy in it.

For years many of us in the advertiser camp have yelled about the fact that vendors like Google AdWords lump domain traffic in with "search" traffic without giving you much control over the situation.

A lot of this was justifiable yelling – but as with much about the content networks (and stuff that should be in the content network but was in the past classified as search), today’s reality seems to have improved.

In the search marketing industry, face-to-face events seem to abound. If you’re a bit lost, here’s the beginnings of a rough working guide to the next 4-5 months in the field and what to expect.

The Big:

Yahoo! has been a very influential provider of social services online for quite some time.

Over the last few years they have either created or purchased online social sites, here is a quick breakdown of some of the major start-ups and acquisitions:

Microsoft is spending a lot of money creating useful tools for advertisers, and when you go to their tools page they list contextual ads for "all the data mining". If they would just let me know what that ad placement costs I am betting I would be willing to pay more than that thin arbitrage site pays. But I would pay much less than what it would be worth just to keep their tool pages clean so they can help build market adoption.

I recently spotted a blog post by Adam Senour over at Walk My Path. The post outlines why Gene Marks is right on certain comments from the blog post. I must say I didn’t think I would find someone defending Gene marks comments like Adam has.