If you didn't hear, NPR's Marketplace Morning Report ran a brief piece on online political advertising, for which I was interviewed. Check it out , and if you're into the political thing, make sure to keep an eye on our regular coverage of the online presidential campaigns in our Campaign '08 section . Better yet, sign up for the dedicated ClickZ Campaign '08 RSS feed !

Does your agency do multivariate testing? A few weeks ago when I sat down with Jonathan Mendez to discuss his new company Ramp Digital he said most of the companies doing multivariate testing had been acquired, and "Traditional agencies don't really have that knowledge in house to deliver that to clients." Over lunch last week with Widemile 's CEO and president Robert Bergquist,

Declaring "we're at a major turning point in the history of computing," author Nicholas Carr today said major change is underway with ramifications for business, commerce, marketing, media, and the society. Carr, author of "The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google," likens the change in running computer systems to electricity generation. In the second half of the 19th century, factory owners had to build and operate their own power generation facilities. Then,

Rather than attracting the luck of the Irish on this St. Patty's Day, it looks like ValueClick has fallen prey to Murphy's Law. The firm already garnered unwelcome headlines when it announced its settlement with the Federal Trade Commission a month ago, an agreement to cough up $2.9 million for allegedly violating the CAN-SPAM and FTC Acts. But it looks like they've grabbed more ink this time around,

Some Web sites fall flat because they're designed by hippos. That's the name Avinash Kaushik , Google's analytics evangelist, gives to the highest paid opinion, or hippo, in the room. In citing an example, he said he did a search for a bathroom sink and the search results turned up Delta Faucet; the link took the visitor to a Web page featuring faucets, not sinks, Kaushik said. "What the hell are they thinking, selling me faucets," he said,

There used to be a running joke at DoubleClick that the company should hire a VP of widget technology. "It'd be a short-lived career," VP of Advertiser Products Ari Paparo told me in an interview last August . He uttered the somewhat mocking remark by way of acknowledging that ever more advertisers were asking for widget capabilities. Six months later DoubleClick is giving them what they want. The Google-owned firm today announced support for widget )i.e. "embeddable"( ads.

Companies fall into a trap when they collect Web site statistics. They report statistics, not analyze them, said Matthew Bailey, president of SiteLogic Marketing. Bailey, addressing an audience at SES NY , said a company must first know what its goals are, and then identify key performance indicators to track such as sales leads or downloads. "Then focus on a goal and ask how are we reaching that goal," he said.

Growth in global online ad spend will slow significantly in 2008 and 2009, according to forecasts issued today by media communications agency Carat. The forecasts estimate that global digital spend will slow from 27 percent increase year-on-year in 2007, to 23 percent in 2008. This figure is expected to drop further in 2009 to around 18 percent. In North America it's a similar story, with online growth slowing from 18 percent in 2008 to around 15 percent in 2009.

Recently, I upgraded my Verizon DSL service at home. A rep called last night with a bunch of customer experience questions, all of which I responded to with a "satisfactory" or "very good." Except one. The rep was stunned when he asked how likely I was to recommend Verizon to a friend on a scale of one to 10. "Zero" was my emphatic reply. He was kind of stunned and asked why. " Verizon's position on net neutrality ," was my immediate response.

TED conference attendees hear talks from some of the planet's most inspired minds, the fruits of which were unavailable to the public for the first ten years of the event's existence. That changed in 2006, when TED's organizers began podcasting the presentations through an exclusive sponsorship with BMW. The deal blossomed into a more involved collaboration on TED's expanding Web site as well as the event itself.

Interactive television won't succeed until cable companies reach agreement on measurement standards, said two Starcom MediaVest executives. An initiative undertaken by six major cable companies, called Canoe , is a step in the right direction, said Jen Soch, MediaVest USA's VP and director of advanced TV. Tracey L. Scheppach, vice president/video innovation director at Starcom USA, said flaws include video-on-demand's poor navigation and an inability to insert ads dynamically.

I just noticed WSJ.com is free today, sponsored by ING. Initial entry into the site is met with a roadblock ad, while this homepage unit links to WSJ's site subscription sign up.

Social networks have flooded the market with inventory, pushing down ad rates based on CPM, according to one Microsoft executive. Dean Carignan, Microsoft's director of ad business strategy in the entertainment and device division, made that disclosure during a panel discussion today at the McGraw-Hill Media Summit in New York City. "In most environments, the ads showing up have no context. People talking to people [isn't] relevant to one product category," he said.

U.K. Internet Service Provider Talk Talk, one of the launch partners for behavioural ad-targeting company Phorm , will require its customers to opt-in to participate in Phorm's controversial new Webwise system. Speaking with ClickZ News today, a Talk Talk spokesperson said "We believe in offering our customers a choice, and as a default they will be opted out of the system. Nobody will become a part of this that does not want to.

Robert A. Iger, chief executive of The Walt Disney Company, said he doesn't see Google as a threat to the media and entertainment company. "They typically need our stuff in some form. They want an association [with us]," Iger said, responding to a question posed to him today at the McGraw-Hill Media Summit. He said Google delivers value to Disney. "When they provide consumers with great search, search gives consumer access to Disney," he said.

A newspaper and a retailer that sells surveillance devices each bought the keywords "Eliot Spitzer" on Google a day after the news broke that the New York governor was allegedly a customer of a high-end prostitution ring. Newsday.com, the Web site for the Long Island, NY, based newspaper, calls attention to its coverage of the Spitzer scandal . The sponsored result, headlined "Spitzer Prostitution Ring," promises news, pics, and gossip about the guv.

Executives from Comcast, Time Warner, Cablevision, Cox, Charter Communications, and Bright House Networks have banded together in what the New York Times has reported is a codenamed Project Canoe. The collective are working together to come up with a targeted advertising initiative. Thing is, the networks themselves, and cable companies like Comcast have somewhat beaten Project Canoe to the punch with the content and advertising on the Web.

Speaking at the Bear Stearns Media Conference in Florida today, News Corp. Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch put to bed rumors of a possible tie-up with Yahoo, stating, "We're not going to get into a fight with Microsoft, they have a lot more money than us." He went on to say that Yahoo had "missed out" in the search arena by failing to invest in Overture quickly enough after acquiring it in 2003.

The SXSW conference has been all about bottom-up media; individuals and crowds creating, selecting and elevating content above and beyond whats doled out to them by traditional media outlets and corporations. Sure, Business Week journalist Sarah Lacy's keynote interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg yesterday was a trainwreck, an abortion, went down in flames and every other metaphor for disaster. Why? Because Sarah was all about Sarah,

One of the coolest things about attending the keynotes sessions at SXSW is watching Sunni Brown and Marilyn Martin graphically record the proceedings - quickly, compellingly and more succinctly than many of the journalists or bloggers in the vast session rooms. They manage to get words, images, portraits and the whole flow of the hour-long conversations.