Despite Bing being a major sponsor of The Colbert Report , Stephen Colbert couldn't resist having a little dig at Microsoft's expense. Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog</a> Video Archive The best line? "For the first time ever, someone's search history has been busted for something other than porn." LMAO!

The 2011 conference season is starting to heat-up! PubCon South at Austin is just around the corner, then the mega SES New York kicks off on March 21st. SES continues to offer a great mix of search and social sessions and really is a great event for any east-coast marketers-newbie and seasoned-pros alike. In case you were on the fence about attending, SES has kindly given us an exclusive 20% discount code for anyone that wants to attend. When you register ,

Well, they've been a long time coming, but Twitter ads are finally ready to go mainstream'almost! MediaPost reports that the self-service version of Twitter's promoted tweets are being rolled out to advertisers-albeit a select few. So far, Clix Marketing's David Szetela is the only one talking about it and he's landed Guy Kawasaki as a Twitter ads client. As part of the roll out,

It looks like Google is hiring again. The search giant says 2011 will be its "biggest hiring year in company history" which means it will likely hire more than the 6,000 it added in 2007. Still, we all know how hard it is to get a job at Google. If you don't have a PhD, then you may as well look into janitorial positions at the company. Don't have any kind of degree? Yeah, good luck with that. You won't get in, but you know what?

If you're not a fan of Twitter's new sponsored tweets ads, then you're going to be somewhat grumpy by the time you get through reading this post. You see, Facebook's decided that it too would like to turn status updates into sponsored ads and is launching something similar. According to AdAge , advertisers will be able to convert a "like" or check-in-and some other kinds of brand interaction-into a Facebook ad. How does that work?

You've seen it. I've seen it. We've all seen it. And now even Google's head of spam prevention, Matt Cutts, has seen it. What am I talking about? This: In a post today, Cutts admits that Google has "seen a slight uptick of spam in recent months." Keep in mind that this is the company that doesn't like to admit anything is ever wrong over at the Googleplex. Mention click fraud, search spam, or anything else nefarious and you'll get flat-out denials. So,

If you missed today's earnings call from Google, here's what you missed: Google did $8.44 billion in revenue -a jump of 26%. Net income was up 18% to $2.2 billion. Google ended the quarter with with $33.4 billion in cash and 23,300 employees. Oh, and Eric Schmidt is no longer the CEO. Say what? No kidding! Google's CEO for the past 10 years is stepping down from that role.

Now that we have a bona fide managing editor in place at Marketing Pilgrim, it's probably time to assume that you don't already know that I'm the CEO of social media monitoring tool Trackur . Hence, the "sponsored" added to this title, just in case. Anyway, after much success with our previous Apple iPad giveaways, Trackur has just launched a new contest- this time you could win an Apple iPad 2 . Huh? Say what?

It appears there's some unrest among Google's AdWords users-or at least a small, vocal fraction of them. Google's little-known "session-based clicks" algorithm is starting to get noticed by advertisers who are seeing their ads displayed alongside seemingly unrelated search queries. Case in point ' 'Mr. Dorfman, the New York dentist, said he wanted to show his ads when people searched for things like "cosmetic dentist nyc" or "orthodontist.

You may have noticed a trend over the past few months. While I've personally been blogging less and less, Frank Reed and Cynthia Boris have been hitting it out of the park! Case in point, Frank's excellent interview yesterday with Mike Blumenthal . So, why have I been slacking? Honestly, Trackur is growing so fast it's time to turn my attention 100% on building the world's best social media monitoring tool . )Yes,

Surf around the internet and you'll see all kinds of security , privacy , and trust seals-pasted to consumer web sites. With good reason, too! These sites want to assure visitors that it's safe to do business with them. You can trust the transaction, the shipping, the experience. But what about after the transaction? Where's the seal that says, "Hey, once you become a customer, we're going to take great care of you"? Oh wait,

Over at Forbes, I've been moonlighting as someone that writes well enough to, well, write for Forbes. I'm pretty " chuffed " with my latest article which shuns the trend of making 2011 predictions and instead focuses on the unwritten laws of reputation management in 2011. Here are the first three to whet your appetite' Law #1 - Everyone has an online reputation We all have an online reputation to maintain. Don't believe me,

Thank you for all of your support during 2010. From all of us at Marketing Pilgrim, we wish you a very happy New Year!

If you are working, then let's be honest, you're not really working. Right? It's the day before New Year's Eve and your mind has already checked-out. So, rather than an in-depth, verbose post about how internet users are sharing online content, how about some eye-candy from AddThis instead?

Just how close Google was to handing over $6 billion for Groupon, no one can say for sure. What we do know is that Groupon has converted that interest )or perception of such( into a cool $500 million in venture capital funding! According to an SEC filing )reported by Fortune.com (, Groupon has found $500M of the $950M it is hoping to raise. What's the purpose of such funds? Well,

What is today really about? Here's an explanation-with some help of Google, Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare. Merry Christmas!

One of the cool features about Trackur's social media monitoring is our InfluenceRank scoring system. For every web site, blog, or Twitter user, we've always shown you just how influential they are-with a simple score out of 100. With news sites and blogs, we provided further analysis with screenshots, traffic details, backlink numbers and more. Today, we've added a similar dashboard for Twitter users influence. As you can see,

Marketing blogs don't get to do a lot of "unboxing" videos, but thanks to a free gift from Google, I get to be one of the first bloggers to get my hands on the new Google Cr-48 Chrome Notebook .

As is tradition for this time of year, Google has released its annual Zeitgeist -the most popular search queries for 2010. Sure, there are other search engine "top query" lists, but we all know that Google is the king of search. Something different this year: Google has an interactive map of searches and a pretty engaging video that sums up the year in search. Pilgrim's Partners: SponsoredReviews.com - Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!

Sometimes, merger and acquisition rumors are juicy, thrilling, with a sense of mystery. Other times, they're a lame duck and you wonder why anyone-let alone Reuters -would waste the time writing the story. Exhibit A: Exclusive: AOL mulls breakup, then merger with Yahoo Ooh, that's a BIG story, right? AOL, trying to reinvent itself and Yahoo, looking at a boatload of options to survive. This is a huge story for a Monday in December.