Things are going well for the Rubicon Project, an online advertising platform that launched in private beta in October. Over the six-week period they’ve been around, the company is announcing they’ve sent up 1.4 billion ad impressions.

They were served up in some pretty high-trafficked areas too, like Zoominfo, AOL/Userplane, and Belief.net. Rubicon says it works with 13 sites that generate 100 million impressions per month.

That’s decent exposure for the 2000-plus websites that signed up for the private beta.

If you want to discuss the business aspects of two major corporations, this article’s not for you.  We’re here to talk about netball and fundraising, since Google and eBay recently faced off in a game benefiting the RSPCA.

Ever hear of widgets? It’s the buzzword of the year for the Web, but few still appreciate how to best use them. How can you use widgets to increase the inbound links to your site? Are there widget directories you can optimize for? What social media strategies are most effective?

Moderator: Bill Flitter, VP, Marketing, Founder, Pheedo

Bill Gates has invested $390 million dollars in Mexican brewer Femsa through his Cascade Investment Fund, according to the brewer.

AOL’s continued lack of success, combined with its ongoing layoffs, has a lot of onlookers nervous.  The corporation can still push through an acquisition, though, and demonstrated its ability this week by finishing up the Quigo buy.

A couple of days after showing how deep their affection is for users finding the right privacy features in Google products, the company acknowledged the European Union for its acceptance of open standards.

Spanish media company Prisa is suing measurement firm Nielsen for revising audience numbers to reflect less traffic than its newspaper Web site El Pais actually received.

In September the company said they would be taking legal action against Nielsen after the ratings firm decided that traffic going to an ad for ElPais.com, which was on other Web sites, was being counted as part of the traffic for the newspapers own Web site.

In the official press release, forms of the word "merge" are used four times, "purchasing" comes up once, and "acquire" and "buy" are nowhere to be seen.  Nonetheless, the bottom line is that Kayak.com secured a spectacular round of funding, and proceeded to take over SideStep.com.

With Yahoo being on the sidelines while Microsoft scooped up Viacom’s graphical ad serving needs (and booted out DoubleClick in the process), Kara Swisher think Jerry Yang should make a sale.

A couple of days ago something strange began happening on Twitter. Avatars of the people I follow began sporting peas. Peas in the background, in the foreground, pea pods, pea hats. And I’m all, "what’s with the freakin’ peas?"

To protect the innocent, etc., the editorial "we" won’t get into any details, but earlier this morning, the danger of living paycheck to paycheck was neatly illustrated.  So it seems especially timely that we’ve now received a report about the popularity of searches for money management tools.

If you’re wondering what was popular in 2007, check out Google’s Zeitgeist for the year, where they list the fastest rising searches of the past 12 months.

Is there such thing as a pure search engine marketing agency anymore? Increasingly, search marketers are following the engines’ lead by planning banners, rich media, video, gadget and widget ads, blog and RSS ads, behavioral targeting, and sometimes even traditional media buys such as radio, print, and television. What expertise do search marketers bring to the table when expanding their offerings? Are there pitfalls of stretching themselves too thin? How can the various channels be measured together?

Criminal phishing in 2007 escalated in both the number of attacks and the financial losses resulting from them, according to a study from Gartner.

HarperCollins Publishers is partnering with MySpace to launch MySpace/HarperTeen.

Harper says it is an interactive community for teen readers to read authors blogs, connect with each other, post photos, communicate on message boards and participate in HarperTeen contests, programs and online polls. Starting in January 2008, HarperTeen authors will regularly interact with readers on MySpace through chats.

Managing a global search marketing campaign offers fresh opportunities and challenges for marketers pursuing customers in a worldwide market. How can marketers maintain effective and cohesive brand strategies while efficiently reaching targeted customers at different international local levels?

Moderator: Matt Kain, SVP, Business Development, 24/7 Real Media

Every day, MediaPost’s Search Insider columnists illuminate the search landscape. Now it’s time for them to get off their pedestals and face your toughest questions first-hand. They’ll mouth off on all the most pressing search issues and the hot topics discussed at the Search Insider Summit so far.

Lately I’ve been seeing far more ads on Facebook supported by implicit endorsements from friends. I’ve also had other friends share screenshots of ads and applications that I endorse.

They set out to recruit young, would-be scientists, not necessarily to break records. But the next-smallest Bible is 50 times bigger. For context, that’s about 50 grains of sugar. This one has been printed on a gold-plated silicone chip less than 1/1000th of an inch.

I dunno. Lately I’m finding that if I notice that I’m still logged into Google that I rush to sign out. It just creeps me out to know that everywhere I go on the web if I’m signed in, Google is following me.

Economic, housing market, and energy cost concerns aside, consumers continue to hand out the cash at e-commerce sites.