Facebook has done themselves a favor by hiring long-time Googler Sheryl Sandberg as their COO. Sandberg was one of the brilliant early thinkers in the Google AdWords program and part of the reason Google maintained its monetization "compass" for so long... leading to enormous long-term profitability.

If you're an outsider looking to come up to speed on what's going on in the world of online advertising - particularly with regard to the complex machinations of the paid search algorithms which line search engine companies' pockets - look no further than this post by Magid Abraham and James Lamberti of comScore.

I'd like to congratulate my friend Mike Grehan on hosting a successful SES London conference. With that perfunctory collegiality out of the way, it's time to get those polite but increasingly competitive Canadian juices flowing. Canada, it's high time we outflanked London on the world map of search marketing. Sure, the old country has its advantages: a pleasingly inflated currency unit, Leicester Square, green grass in February, and those fabulous accents.

All search engines but Google were, true to form, only moderately competent in last night's Search Bowl trivia game , hosted by Danny Sullivan, who quaffed "girly drinks" while making loud sarcastic comments throughout. Alex Trebek's job is not in jeopardy. Yahoo seemed savviest, but they had a penchant for losing points after winning them. Two steps forward... one step back... etc. The search marketers team had the loudest cheering section, but the most woeful performance.

I just learned that Yahoo Search Marketing is introducing reserve pricing in their keyword auction. Although the Panama system already included a quality index, this was for ranking purposes only. Now, similar to Google's auction, Yahoo can raise minimum bids to dissuade low-quality advertisers further. It can also, presumably )like Google( use this system to optimize )i.e. increase( its own revenues, concurrent with improving the user experience. Win-win, n'est-ce pas?

I'm taking in Danny Sullivan's keynote at SMX West right now. He's talking about social search and the as-yet-unrealized potential of communities like Facebook to influence search results in deep ways. Although this will raise privacy issues, it underscores the value of Facebook right now. It's leveled off slightly, maybe, but it hasn't backed off by much. MySpace, on the other hand, seems increasingly like the trailer park of social media.

In an SES London session on Click Fraud I had made a reference to the fantastic series Mad Men , using a thought bubble over Don Draper's head that said "Baby, our whole industry is a fraud!" Mad Men were Madison Avenue ad execs, and the series is set in the very early 1960's. Few of my American and Canadian colleagues have watched the show, so I shouldn't have been surprised when no one in the UK audience admitted to ever having heard of it.

Phew. I was getting worried Danny Sullivan would run out of material soon. Luckily the attacks on SEO never cease - this one by popular PR guru Steve Rubel , in connection with social media marketing. And so it goes within the part of the world of search visibility that calls itself the "SEO industry." Wandering around in London Thursday with Anne Kennedy and Mona Elesseily, prior to catching Spamalot )irony unintentional(,

Sergey Brin finds a potential Microsoft Yahoo deal "unnerving" because of the control that a big corp like Microsoft might exert on the "open" Internet in part by "tying up" top sites. Sergey, this is just unbelievable! Where to start? Perhaps with a reality check as to the power you have when you have these market share numbers in search . Or that "tying up" )acquiring( one of the top 10 sites in the world, YouTube,

I'm fresh from moderating a very useful Fundamentals session on "Ad Program Strategies: Compare and Contrast" with Thomas Bindl, Steven Kaufman, and Richard Gregory. After the presentations I polled the audience: "from your standpoint as a marketer using these ad platforms: would you prefer that Yahoo remain an independent company, or that Microsoft and Yahoo merge to form a single #2 vendor in the space?

I just got out of one of the main panels of the day - the "All-Star Analytics Team" Orion Panel )get it, they're stars(, which included Bryan Eisenberg and Jim Sterne and several other distinguished voices in the field of "Measuring Success." Chatting with our multiloquous co-chair Kevin Ryan )and moderator of the session( afterwards I sensed that he is concerned about the entertainment value of SES sessions,

I have a pet peeve with Basecamp . If you use this app, you know that when you create a message, you are automatically going to slot it into a "category". This works like tagging - all messages in a category are grouped for future reference. Things are also findable by project and chronologically. But the default is that you MUST enter a category, and although you can make your own categories,

On the general concept of metadata, Steve Yegge : " Metadata is any kind of description or model of something else. The comments in your code are just a a natural-language description of the computation. What makes metadata meta -data is that it's not strictly necessary. If I have a dog with some pedigree paperwork, and I lose the paperwork, I still have a perfectly valid dog. " Woof!

Some of Yahoo's shareholders are trying to figure out if they can get Microsoft to bid just a teeny bit higher. Amazingly, the New York Post has that scoop . All signs point to a deal. But we're still waiting.

"Black eyes aren't necessarily bad as long as you can still see out of 'em." - MattKeegan, commenter on yet another story about bad PR for SEO Indeed. Stiff upper )fat( lip, all you 21st-century used car salesmen!

So on the heels of news of a war of words between Google and Microsoft )complete with counter-punch (... It's evident that "what's good for consumers" is trotted out constantly as the justification for big companies' new initiatives, including M&A's or complaints against them. A lot of those platitudes, I agree with. Google, in particular, has been a revolutionary company.

According to a source at Techcrunch, News Corp. is trying to put together a syndicate to launch a bid for Yahoo. But I tend to agree with Paul Kedrosky's and Mathew Ingram's tak e, that Microsoft's high bid means it's already headed off potential rival bids. Yahoo is worth more to Microsoft than to any other company, and especially to hostile bids by opportunistic hedge funds. Yesterday, I reminded you that I advocated a News Corp. bid for Yahoo in 2001. Back then,

Wow, I just received email from a PR person acting on behalf of some broadband Internet buying guide website, that referenced "The On Ramps to Info Superhighway" [sic]. It's a series of tubes, people, and there are some real smart folks out there who just invented slipperier ones. Get to it!