What I like most about the possible Yahoo/MSN merger is that it will raise the profile of Ask.com which, to my mind has possibly the best interface of them all.

Saw the new Google search results page design and decidely do not like it. It seems forced and is redundant in ways.

Haven’t seen it? Google Blogoscoped has it covered.

Have a good one.

~The (SEP) Guy

On the heel’s of Rupert Murdoch’s surprise bid for Dow Jones, or more appropriately, the stalwart Wall Street Journal, comes whispers that Google may actually be interested in making a play for the property as well.

Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand thinks there’s not much substance to the rumour but why wouldn’t Google eventually make a content play?

It’s a step removed from search to be sure, but it’s not a step removed from advertising which is where Google’s makes it’s money, profits and margins. Google gets high margin business.

The wisdom of crowds is, every so often, not so much with the wisdom. In fact, the mob community mentality can do a lot of damage, whether by exerting its collective brute force, or by standing by and collectively doing nothing.

Digg co-founder Kevin Rose discovered that the hard way yesterday when the crowd mentality overwhelmed Digg, essentially taking it hostage.

The wisdom of crowds is a funny thing. A few weeks ago, the search community got together to make Stephen Colbert the Greatest Living American and now the Digg community has turned on its own to the point where the co-founder has essentially thrown up his hands.

After yesterday’s post, my boss a friend and I had a discussion about what it all meant.

His take is that while the IAB is predicting significant slowing in online advertising in the coming year, this is just a pause so everyone can take a moment to stop and catch their collective online advertising breath.

It plays out like this, states he: The mindshare for Internet usage is give or take 25% of time and as such, the online advertising budget should be approximately 25% of the total advertising/marketing mix, not the scant 8% it currently is.

According to The Globe & Mail and Keith McArthur, online advertising in Canada surpassed the one billion dollar mark in Canada in 2006, and is expected to rise a further 32% this year. It also represents an 80% increase over 2005.

This is apparently about 8% of the total advertising spend in Canada, but those numbers will be confirmed in coming weeks/months.

So how does it play out?

According to the article, the lion’s share at 36% is display advertising; with search advertising at 35%; classified at 27% and email advertising at 2%.

MSNBC and the David C. Churbuck article Google and the Rebirth of Banner Ads provided not only some interesting insight into the Google Doubleclick deal, but also this little nugget way, way, way, way down the article, and it’s a long article so perhaps if reading it, you might have zoned out. It is after all Friday.

On the heels of the Google Doubleclick story, and the Google Clear Channel story and the Yahoo print story and the ebay TV story and the Spotrunner tv story and the…

Well, you get my point.

Onilne advertising is only beginning to heat up. And while traditional advertisers have their eyeballs askance and their eyebrows furrowed at the antics of the upstarts, the upstart as looking at traditional advertising models with disruptive technologies in mind and rate cards in sight.

Red Herring announce today in its YouTube Lining Up Summer Ads article that pre-roll and post roll ads will become a part of the YouTube experience this summer.

Images to represent text may look very nice but they really do hurt search engine wise. Search engines don’t see, read or understand text on images at all. Just plain don’t. No plans to change that either.

So, for styling, for making that headline or logo look just the way you want, you have to resort to CSS.

Now although there are literally thousands of fonts out there, one of them closely matching the style you like, you have to keep in mind which fonts users have installed. Oh, and Mac users might have different fonts, of course.

Jen Evans of Sequentia spoke this morning at AIMSCanada regarding etribes and online communities.

She listed seven reasons why a company should consider a community or Web 2.0 strategy.

They are:

Each on its own is a good reason. All of them together are compelling.

Sometimes one kicks in an open door. With force, if needed.

Imagine an important business meeting where the company’s web strategy is discussed. Boombastic it comes from one of the speakers; “We need a web site!”

Well, yeah; duh! That is a given. Without a web site, no web strategy. This is not really something we should have to talk about.

Search engine friendliness is like that. It shouldn’t be something we have to talk about. It’s a given. Deciding not to make your site easy to browse and use, whether for handicapped or mobile users or for search engine spiders, that is something that warrants a conscious, clear decision.