"Try i Trulli's Recession Remedy," reads the e-mail subject line from one of my favorite Italian restaurants in New York City. The restaurant promises all you can eat and drink at a garden party for $45. That seems steep. But it's still a bargain compared to a trip to Southern Italy.

Together with my esteemed colleague Kevin Ryan, I'm talking search tonight at a Brandhacker MeetUp in New York at 7:00 p.m. - in my own Hell's Kitchen neighborhood. Kevin will cover the fundamentals of paid search advertising, while I'll do likewise on the topic of organic search optimization. OK, so this is slightly smaller in scale than Search Engine Strategies or SMX.

Despite lifelines from Yahoo and quadrantOne, the newspaper industry is gasping for air as its online ad revenues continue to sink. It's worse than ever. Second quarter revenues actually contracted for the first time, following disappointing Q1 growth of less than 10 percent. In Q2, online ad revenues were around $777 million, down from $804 million in Q1 2008, amounting to a -2.4 percent change. Now,

If someone falls for this ad, does he deserve protection from regulatory bodies such as the Federal Trade Commission, or does he merely need protection from himself?

Ouch. McCain's search marketing whiz Eric Frenchman has some strong words for search marketing firm SendTec for reporting what he calls "curious data" on the paid search efforts of the Barack Obama and John McCain campaigns. He also tears into Mediapost for covering the information. "SendTec and MediaPost should just stop trying to figure out what the two campaigns are doing when it comes to Search Marketing.

Barack Obama's campaign spent over $3 million on TV ads in one state on Monday . He's spent about double that on the Web since January . Yep, according to my calculations based on FEC reports, his campaign spent around $5.45 million on paid online media on the Web, into August. How's that for sharp contrast?

Google's jumping into yet another corner of the digital advertising arena. Google announced yesterday the launch of AdSense for Games, which integrates video and text advertisements into Web-based games. Advertisers will be charged based on cost-per-impression or cost-per-click, and ad revenue revenue will be split between Google and game developers or publishers. Google disclosed it's working with a handful of advertisers on a trial basis: Esurance, Sprint, and Sony Pictures.

As McCain-running mate Sarah Palin pairs Barack Obama with "domestic terrorists," the Obama camp is flinging mud right back. The campaign is counteracting the William Ayers-related attacks, while dredging up John McCain's Keating 5 past. You may have heard about the new site from the Obama campaign, which houses videos and links to news articles about his rival's connections to the financial scandal we forgot about: the Savings and Loan crisis.

So on Monday, I sent an RFP out to half a dozen e-mail service providers. By Tuesday, all but one had gotten back to me. By phone. Of these five, only one vendor left their personal e-mail contact information. Now, I don't know about you, but in my book, phone tag is about the most inefficient communications method out there. None of the candidates' messages indicated when they could be reached via vox. And I've called every single one of them back and spoken with.

"You really want to get a headache? Try to understand Internet advertising. Social networking advertising is being discounted because there is so much inventory [of available ad spots], and because methods have not yet been found to make it very effective. Will that get figured out? I absolutely believe it will. What form will it take? Absolutely unknown." -IAC CEO Barry Diller in an interview with WSJ .

It's evident by now that the credit crisis will cast a pall over the ad sector, but how bad will it get? One indicator of the future health of the space is the abundance venture capital. Are any marketing technology start-ups still boasting new funding rounds? Well, there's the one anyway. BlackArrow said today it has scored a $20 million B round investment to continue development of its on-demand ad management system for TV and other platforms.

Our pals over at Media Trust Co. were working overtime last night post Palin/)O'(Biden. It looks as though the John McCain camp launched a couple of brand-spanking-new display ads to commemorate the debate. Here they are, 'cause the American People deserve it, doggone it.

Chair of SEMPO , partner in Sitelab , Dana Todd continues to be something of an interactive marketing force of nature. And now, she's one of the founders of a new advertising/PR hybrid play called Newsforce . The newly-founded company places press releases - in their entirety - in premium ad positions on major publisher sites. Really major publisher sites, like WashingtonPost.com, USA Today, Time, and Slate. As you'd imagine, Newsforce gets the PR game. Naturally,

ClickZ couldn't resist an offer from Dan Solomon, CEO of interactive communications firm Virilion, to examine online marketing lessons from the 2008 campaign for U.S. president. Dan's first column can be found here . The column, "Campaign '08 Lessons," will be in addition to in-depth news coverage written by Senior Editor Kate Kaye in ClickZ's Campaign '08 section.

Wouldn't it be nice if Henry Paulson, Congress, and the rest of 'em would offer the American people a guarantee that â€" if a bank bailout bill ever passes â€" we'll get a positive return on our investment? Ha. While it'd be tough to trust in a guarantee given by the government anyway, online ad buyers may have better luck. Expanding on its "Brand Increase Guarantee" program, Forbes.com just launched the "Total Guarantee.

I meant to post about this earlier, but remember way back when on Friday night when, during the presidential debate, John McCain mentioned a study costing taxpayers $3 million to study bear DNA as an example of pork-barrel spending? "I don't know if that was a criminal issue or a paternal issue, but the fact is that it was $3 million of our taxpayers' money. And it has got to be brought under control," he quipped. Well,

The clock is ticking on the great Google-Yahoo search union of 2008, yet new hurdles keep rising up. The latest challenge: Canada's Department of Justice has retained a big name litigator, David Kent, to look into the deal's underpinnings. Market Watch confirmed with Kent, an anti-trust attorney with Toronto's McMillan LLP, that he was retained by the DOJ but would say nothing else. As with the appointment of Sanford Litvack by the U.S. DOJ,

At ContentNext's EconMusic conference in London last week, music industry executives gathered to discuss the future of the music industry, as physical sales nosedive and P2P sharing becomes increasingly commonplace. The Social Media session threw up the most interesting ad-related insights, with musician Billy Bragg among the panelists, alongside Last.fm's COO Spencer Hyman and Index Ventures' Danny Rimer. Bragg's gripe, predictably, was that musicians aren't seeing enough,

...the Yahoo-Google partnership - according to Yahoo - can be found at this new microsite.

As part of a broader conversation last week, I asked Internet Advertising Bureau VP Public Policy Mike Zaneis what he thought about how the IAB would fare under a Barack Obama administration versus a John McCain administration. Q: Do you have any sense of what administration might be better when it comes to the IAB's goals? A: I don't think we really know. Senator McCain obviously has a long history chairing the Senate Commerce Committee, and bills such as CAN-SPAM,