TechCrunch today has no treatsand no joy, no, not even Almond Joyfor Facebook in reporting about its projected financial woes . For a company once valued at $15 billion , things are looking grim as the cash supplies may dwindle long before Facebook is ready or willing to go to IPO. There's no denying that Facebook continues to enjoy incredible popularity worldwidebut that could be part of the problem. Facebook's worldwide growth has been strong over the last year,

After many requests, I'm happy to announce that we've launched a new "Agency" service level for Trackur . The online media monitoring service now offers PR firms and marketing agencies the following valuable options: Your logo displayed on the dashboard! Client's can see your brand, not Trackur's! A custom URL for login. Want Trackur.com/youragency? You've got it! Unlimited saved searches! Not only can you organize your Trackur account by client campaigns,

Happy Halloween! Basically, you have two choices this evening. Turn on all your lights and spend 2 hours praising little kids' costumes, while they take all the good candy. Turn off all the lights and eat the candy yourself. I'm not revealing which option I'm taking this year, but don't be surprised if I have chocolate around my mouth when I wake up on Saturday. Today's Picks are especially spooky* This could come in handy.

How much processing power does Google have at its fingertips? It must be a lot because the search engine giant will now included scanned documents in its search results. In the past, scanned documents were rarely included in search results as we couldn't be sure of their content. We had occasional clues from references to the document- so you might get a search result with a title but no snippet highlighting your query. Today, that changes.

I'll admit it, I'm not a heavy user of paid search services, but today's Google AdWords Quality Score changes have me picturing SNL's Weekend Update team going "Oh really, Google?" More precise Quality Score calculation Clickthrough rate )CTR( is the most significant component of Quality Score because it directly indicates which ads are most relevant to our searchers. As you probably have observed,

I'm going to stick my neck out and say that I do not believe Google had any intention of going through with a partnership deal with Yahoo. Further, I believe that the only reason this deal was done was to prevent Microsoft from getting its grubby little hands on it. For one thing, since when does Google delay a deal for a significant amount of time, so that regulators can carefully look at the details?

Wow, is it Thursday? I thought I felt that post-Wednesday, pre-Friday slump. It's been a year since Hulu launched ? While I know I joined in the universal berating of the company from its announcement last March , I join TechCrunch in saying, " I'm Glad You Guys Didn't Suck. " SoloSEO has some great ideas for improving stickiness and getting your visitors to come back every day and yes, the list does go beyond "post every day.

Today the WSJ profiles a number of video search engines that actually seem to be getting smarter. Instead of relying on external meta data to determine the content of a clip, these engines are looking to data internal to the clip itselfincluding dialogue and people )or characters( appearing in the clip. And yep, one day YouTube might not be the #1 video search engine )although they may still be the #1 video hosting site(.

If you've ever read one of my posts and thought to yourself, "Pfff, I could do so much better than that!" Now's your chance. For the next week, we will accept applications to become a guest writer at Marketing Pilgrim. We're looking for writers who can write informative posts, are passionate about an area of online marketing, and can share their opinion without being offensive )believe it or not, that is hard for some folks(. You'll be writing for the fame and glory,

How much of a shock is it to return from Hawaii to North Carolina and face 50F days? Let me show you what I just left: **sigh** Oh well, on to today's Picks: Thanks to Inc. magazine for inviting me to share my thoughts for this excellent article on analyzing web analytics to discover marketing ideas. I love the case study Diane Aull uses in her article on pricing your products/services. You only have until November 5th to enter the 2009 Effie Awards Competition .

I think the next GEICO "celebrity" TV ad should feature AOL. You know the ads I'm talking about. GEICO brings in a celebrity that once lived in the limelight but now, sadly, can't get any better work other than co-starring with an animated gecko. I say this because AOL has seen better days. Once the 800 gorilla of the internet, AOL has spent the last few years trying to find that one big comeback role that will revive its career.

Unless you have a lot of friends on Facebook that are illiterate, I'm betting you won't have too much trouble identifying the latest attempt to infect your computer with the Koobface trojan. Here's the type of message that typically accompanies the attempt to infect you: "Sommebody uupload a viideo witth you on utubee. you shuold ese" Even my dog can spell better than that. OK, so the hackers are likely deliberately misspelling words so as to avoid spam filters,

I'll admit it. I've put off purposefully joining Open ID for no real reason. But now, whether we want to or not, you and I )well, I'm guessing you are, anyway( are being jumped in to the world of Open ID. Because not only are Yahoo Mail and Windows Live Mail )aka Hotmail( joining the Open ID ranks, allowing their logins to become Open ID logins, but so is Gmail. If you've forgotten/never learned what Open ID is, it's like a universal login for participating sites.

Social network advertising is not only not annoying but surprisingly effective in some segments, according to the results of a new survey by Razorfish. In FEED: the Razorfish Consumer Experience Report 2008 , Razorfish surveyed "connected consumers"1006 people with broadband access who spent at least $200 online in the past year, used a community site such as MySpace and consumed or made some type of digital media including videos and music. And of those people,

It's time for another HUGE book contest giveaway. And, when I say huge, I mean 627 pages of search marketing awesomeness! We have 3 copies of the second edition of Mike Moran and Bill Hunt's book Search Engine Marketing, Inc.: Driving Search Traffic to Your Company's Web Site . If you can call a book "the granddaddy" then this book would be deserving of the title. Even if you've practiced SEM for a number of years, Search Engine Marketing, Inc.

I'm not quite sure how MarketingExperiments is able to do this, but it's offering a FREE online workshop designed to help marketers prepare for the holiday season-while the economy is less then buoyant. Here's what it's offering: 'a special, 2-hour virtual clinic on optimizing ecommerce for the holidays, with an emphasis on powerful strategies you can start implementing right away.

So many Picks, so little time. You too can build your very own Yahoo applications . A republican congressman is the latest to question the Yahoo/Google deal-is it now doomed to failure? Hitwise reports the 8th consecutive weekly drop in traffic for top online retailers. A silver lining to the doom and gloom? Local advertising ad spend might actually be higher than expected ! Start-ups that actually charge for their service could be back in fashion .

Some good news for Yahoo! It's share of US searches in September reached 20.2%-up from 19.6% in August. Bad news for Google. It's share dropped a massive 0.1% from 63% to just 62.9%-that should freak out the Wall Street boys. The good news for everyone? The data comes from comScore, which means that it probably has a treasure chest of excuses ready -in the event this all just one big rounding error. PS. Please don't panic about the Google drop,

At Aloha Summit Peter Shankman was adamant that LinkedIn was a waste of time-he really didn't see the value in it as a social network. Others claimed LinkedIn was a valuable site that allowed you to connect to your business network-as opposed to simply throwing sheep at someone. I wonder what Shankman et al will make of today's news that LinkedIn has launched the first of its applications -first announced at the end of last year.

All right!! The tremors can stop, we're back to the regularly scheduled LG that we all know and love! You know how you see a business finally bring their key, core aspect online, and you think "What took you so long?" Yeah, that's what MTV Music finally bringing music videos online is. But with the number of music videos on YouTube )not to mention the recent YouTube/Amazon/iTunes deal (, is it too late? Unless they buy Yahoo,