I was asked by Business Week to provide an opinion piece on Yahoo’s new search marketing platform.

As an opinion piece, I was asked to pick one side and provide supporting evidence to back up my stance. As I’ve already stated how impressed I am with Panama, I went with the positive.

Muhammad Saleem picks up on a post by Rathnavibushana, lamenting the moral wasteland that Digg can sometimes be. Do take the time to read both those posts… they’re worth it.

Traditional search advertising with its contextual relevance and cost effectiveness still has the hearts and wallets of marketers according to the latest survey from the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO).

Google is bringing video to AdSense, and they’re doing it right now. Though there were sightings of the new contextual video ads, real buzz didn’t develop until the New York Times confirmed Dow Jones, Conde Nast and Sony BMG were in on it.

US e-commerce sales were not only healthy for the fourth quarter of 2006 but were at their highest levels in four years according to the US Census Bureau. On an unadjusted basis, sales reached $33.9 billion, up around a third from the third quarter of 2006.

For the fourth quarter of 2006 e-commerce estimate increased 25.0 percent from the previous year while total retail sales increased 4.0 percent in the same period. E-commerce in Q4 2006 comprised 3.3 percent of total sales.

Three weeks ago, Yahoo introduced its new ranking model to the search world. Armed with new ad grouping, geo-targeting, and quality score features, the platform already seems to be yielding very positive results for the company.

Many sellers on eBay likely report their gains for tax purposes as they are required to do. Some people may not know they are supposed to do this, or actively choose not to pay. The Internal Revenue Service wants to make eBay and other auction sites part of the process that reports that income.

Even though Google has been drawing more Korean users to its search and Gmail services, the company still has work to do to make the local government happy with its AdSense practices.

For those of you that have not heard yet, yesterday (February 24^th) was the big kick-off for Entrepreneurship Week USA.

I had not really heard about this event before, but it has been brought up on a number of blogs that I read, so I thought I’d go check it out.  As a passionate, but introverted advocate of entrepreneurship, I thought I’d look into the event and what it means.

Digital Marketing Forum, an event organized by Cristian Manafu and Evensys, brings to bear the newest platforms of marketing and communication: online advertising, mobile marketing, blogging, viral marketing, podcasting, online research, 3G.

Blogging

The user-friendliness of blogging software has made it easy for anyone who would like to communicate with the world to do so. That explains a large part of the millions and millions of blogs that now populate the blogosphere. Others who see the moneymaking potential of blogging by adding advertisements to their blogs add to the flood. Given this cacophony, how does anyone with a serious view to express ensure that it stands above the crowd?

I am actually not going to tell you much about this, other than it is totally legitimate and could act as a source of high quality links and trafffic… the type who not only might click through to read what you say, but also write about it.

Some sympathy here for Tim O’Reilly’s comment on this post about Google Earth and the new capabilities being unleashed for developers. "People should be jumping up and down about this!"

I’m guessing the people who usually jump up and down don’t understand it, and the people who will be working with it aren’t given to jumping up and down.

The MyBlogLog Blog: Everybody hurts… sometimes So I’ve kind of watched from the sidelines the past few days as this MyBlogLog drama has unfolded. I’d joined MyBlogLog in the past after reading about it on Fred Wilson’s blog but never seemed to really get into it. Maybe I just need to spend more time with it to figure it out, but anyways.

Wouldn’t it be neat if Google offered developers a way to write scripts to extend the functionality of Google Writely, Google Spreadsheets, Gmail and so on?

I love it when developers come out with cool, fun stuff and what is more fun than a “widget.” I mean, even the name connotes fun.

No one can deny that the web is being widgetized. That is particularly true of blogs. Typepad has dozens of them, as does WordPress. I just found a site called Widgetbox that allows you to turn your blog into a widget using an easy 1-2-3 step wizard. The beauty of this idea is that it allows your content to be syndicated on other blogs.

A major Microsoft AdCenter bug costs advertisers to shell out huge amounts. This bug makes the advertisers may a blasting amount as compared to what they have bid for.

A Webmasterworld thread addressing the same issue has tremendous amount of posts where affected advertisers have addressed the situation. 

My daily spend increased almost 10-fold from $140 to over $1350 yesterday!

A recent post on Search Engine Watch informs about 11 Guidelines for Getting Authoritative Links. Authoritative links ensures value to web promotion strategy. It is obvious that search engine will give preference as well as value to out bound links from authoritative sites. 

In the past, we’ve urged marketers to do it wrong quickly. But how can you make quick content changes when you have to translate into other languages? For global companies, translating their content into other languages can be a time-consuming process that delays the launch of new pages and campaigns. So, exactly how do you speed up your ability to change content when you have to do all that translating at the end?