The weekly shopping guide publisher PennySaverUSA.com, part of Harte Hanks Inc., inked a deal with Google that could turn the publisher’s thousands of sales reps into AdWords sellers.

With March Madness having arrived marketers will be vying for the attention of sports fans across multiple channels. Ad spending on the games is estimated to be over a half a billion dollars this year, according to TNS Media Intelligence.

All of the March Madness games combined brings in more ad money than the Super Bowl. More than $2.73 billion has been spent on network TV advertising during the tournament this decade. This year’s March Madness ad spending will be 70 percent more than it was in 2000.

“This is my car. That’s where I spilled coffee. Oh, and this is where the dog vomited.” All right, so perhaps that wouldn’t be the best use of online video advertising. But according to a new report, automotive online video classifieds – and many other types of car-related, Internet-only videos – are on their way.

Fox Interactive Media now has the tools in place to start relying less on third-party ad placement systems and more on what they can sell based on the data they have, like all of those MySpace profiles just hanging around the social networking site.

MSN and Windows Live have chosen to try and gain the hearts and pageviews of China’s growing Internet userbase by teaming their job search with Baidu’s paid search ads.

Larry Page talked about artificial intelligence [Video] at the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (keep in mind that Google wants to build the world’s top AI lab, according to their internal goals):

Akismet is a very smart and effective system for controlling comment spam on blogs, and I know thousands of bloggers swear by it, listing it as their number one plugin for their blogging platform.

Somewhere at the top of the Silicon Valley, Craigslist has upset the status quo of publishing; only the most dedicated websites can survive the hazardous venture into the Valley and face down the Colonel Kurtz of online classifieds.

A partnership with Workopolis will put Hotjobs on the sidelines in Canada while giving Yahoo listings from the dominant job board in the Great White North.

Job boards stand to gain tremendously over the next several years, and the competition between two of the top sites, Monster and CareerBuilder, will increase along with those markets.

Budgets for online advertising get a major lift in 2006.