Spending on online advertising and marketing will surpass print in 2010 for the first time, according to a new report from Outsell.

Companies will spend $119.6 billion on online and digital strategies, from search engine keywords to webinars, while committing $111.5 billion to print such as newspapers and magazine ads. Overall, U.S. spending on advertising and marketing will increase in 2010, but only by 1.2 percent to $368 billion.

Back in 2008, Google filed a patent, which was recently published for public viewing. The patent is called "Segmenting Printed Media Pages Into Articles," and appears to imply that the company wants to take individual articles from print publications and turn them into individual articles on the web. The abstract says:

After a long debate, the New York Times has officially settled on an online pay model and and implementation timeline. The meter system will be introduced at the beginning of next year.

As we rapidly approach the end of the second quarter of 2009 there is still news trickling in from what happened in Q1. As suspected, that news is not good. A study by TNS Media Intelligence was reported in today’s WSJ and ad spend for media including TV, print and online display ads fell 14% year to year to $30.8 billion.

Google has been directing a lot of attention toward Google Profiles lately. They begin offering a vanity URL feature for them, and began displaying them in search results. Now they are actually offering business cards for them. The company is giving away  10,000 sets of 25 Google Profile business cards for free.

It seems that the only time we write about newspapers these day is to write another obituary or speculate on which newspaper is on its last legs