In January, four trade groups announced that they would be developing behavioral advertising standards . The groups are The American Association of Advertising Agencies )AAAA(, The Association of National Advertisers )ANA(, The Direct Marketing Association )DMA(, and The Interactive Advertising Bureau )IAB(.

At SES San Jose 2009, I've been asked to make a solo presentation to kick of the Search and Community Track. The title of the session is " How to Optimize for Search & Engage the Community ." I've been working on my presentation, but it lacked a compelling case study that illustrated how a community organization had used search engine optimization and YouTube video to generate measurable results.

Buzz has been building about real-time search. Of course, you can search real-time Tweets on Twitter, Facebook is testing search on its live Feed, and Bing just added limited Twitter search to its engine. Now, FriendFeed is launching real-time search and it has the potential to be the mackdaddy of them all. Here's why. FriendFeed is a social aggregator. It's a one-stop shop to check and update a bunch of different networks, blogs, etc. Now,

If you're a celebrity or some other figure Bing has deemed "prominent," then searches for your name plus the word Twitter will turn up a few of your Tweets above the organic results. You can also search for a person's screen name, preceded by the @ sign. Prominence is deemed by number of followers and volume of tweets. Bing uses the Twitter API to pull in the Tweets. But the feature is inconsistent. Of course, I assumed Ashton Kutcher, the King of Twitter ,

Real estate search sites Zillow and Trulia are seeing big growth in traffic, despite the economy and its housing woes. Zillow saw a 67% increase in unique visitors while Trulia saw a 40% increase in uniques. Zillow averaged 8.3 million unique visitors per month so far in 2009. They're experiencing 35% more listings with a current total of 3.6 million listings. Customers submitted 265,000 loan requests which returned 3.5 million custom loan quotes during this time.

If you can access the mobile internet via your cell phone, then you now have access to newly optimized Google Mobile search . It reaches 38 different languages in over 60 countries. The optimized Google mobile search experience began last December when it was rolled out to iPhone and Android phones in the US. Then in March, it was rolled out to iPhone and Android phones in over 20 countries. The optimizes mobile search incorporates universal search when appropriate.

Like many of you, I was saddened to learn on Sunday that Billy Mays died at the age of 50. My family has been watching the Discovery Channel series Pitchmen, featuring Mays and fellow pitchman Anthony Sullivan. I had been planning this post for a few weeks, but there has been so much search news to cover, I haven't had the time. Now, I'm publishing it to honor the tried and true techniques Billy Mays used to sell millions of products. Mays' style may not be your cup of tea,

Get out your cameras, it's time for a couple of search-related contests. If you enjoy the large images Bing features everday on its homepage, now you have the chance to see one of your images featured on the brand spankin' new decision engine. Bing is holding a photo contest where the winner's image will be featured on Bing.com for a 24 hour period. Photos are submitted via Facebook. You have until July 16 to submit your photos. The winner will be determined by public voting,

Overstock is the next company to drop affiliate programs in states considering or having passed affiliate nexus bills. While North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Hawaii affiliates are already seeing programs dropped by Amazon and Blue Nile , this time California affiliates are also getting the boot. "It's painful to have to terminate these relationships with affiliates, simply because they live in states where counterproductive )and likely unconstitutional( laws are being passed,

StatCounter made news fast and furious in Bing's first week when they offered up data showing Bing had surpassed Yahoo! in search . And now they're making a splash again by quickly releasing data for the whole month of June. Overall, things are relatively steady, but there's an ever-so-slight increase in Microsoft search share. The data shows Bing gaining .5% search share in June compared to May. But Live Search had gained about .5% in May over April.

I've been attending SES San Jose every year since 2003. And each year a healthy proportion of attendees are attending their first search engine marketing conference ever. This is healthy because it expands the number of marketers who "get it." I can't tell you the number of times when prospective clients mistakenly assume that search engine marketing )SEM( isn't rocket science.

Google has updated their Toolbar for the Internet Explorer browser to make language translation easier. Instead of manually copying and pasting text into Google Translate, the Toolbar now automatically detects if a language is different from the one set as your default. Google will then serve up a message saying it has detected a language foreign to your own and asking if you would like it translated. Simply click the "Tranlate" button in order to receive the translation.

YouTube is now allowing advertisers to incorporate a "Call-to-Action overlay" on their videos. With the overlay, advertisers can drive traffic to their sites where they can make purchases, sign up for email newsletters or whichever action an advertiser wishes. The Call-to-Action overlays are available for Promoted Videos only. Promoted Videos, you may remember, are essentially the paid search of YouTube. They were once called Sponsored Videos ,

If you are searching for a good current "real-time" example of how twitter can help publicize your cause celebre, look no further than the latest being tweeted out today by the likes of such "twitterers" as @wholefoods @WholeFoods - tomorrow, July 1st, is the monthly Twitter for Food event - it would be great for you to join in again! http://tr.im/m1Pq And what are your instructions once you click on the link?

Chris Crum at WebProNews.com has pieced together some very interesting pieces of information regarding Facebook, a former Googler and a new payment system. Facebook in May announced that it was testing a new payments system that would deal in real money, rather than virtual currencies that it had been using for any number of applications. This might work fine for Mafia Wars and other light games that Facebook has increasingly added, but if you were to want to move into, say,

We've been tracking the affiliate tax debacle involving Amazon and the state of North Carolina . Now, affiliates in more states are being affected. Associates in Rhode Island and Hawaii are receiving emails notifying them of the cancellation of their affiliate accounts. Rhode Island passed a bill making affiliates consist of a physical location for web retailers, which forces them to pay sales tax in the state. Hawaii is considering a similar bill. Blue Nile,

This week, there are a couple of executive hirings in Silion Valley related to the search and social networking industries. First up, Penny Baldwin has been tapped as senior vice president, global integrated marketing and brand management for Yahoo! Is there any room left on her business card? That's quite a long title! Previously, Baldwin served as Managing Partner of Young & Rubicam Brands, Y&R Advertising and Wunderman Direct Marketing. "One of Yahoo!

You only have a couple of weeks left to submit an entry to this year's Search Engine Watch Awards . The deadline is July 17, 2009. The objective of the SEW Awards is to recognize excellence, as well as inspire innovation and encourage new ideas in search marketing. The SEW Awards will honor 14 outstanding search marketers, search engines and technology providers, as judged by a panel of industry experts and the Search Engine Watch editorial staff.

AOL Canada has relaunched their homepage and in case you couldn't tell, Pepsi has bought some advertising )Click on image to enlarge(: The relaunch is based on the update of the AOL.com homepage in the U.S last fall. That relaunch has been good to AOL, with increases of 23% in unique visitors, 34% in total page views and 61% in total minutes consumed year over year, according to comScore's Media Matrix for May 2009.

At the Society for Human Resource Management Conference, CareerBuilder announced a new recruiting tool built with the Bing API. It's called Applicant Explorer and it uses the API to integrate online results such as social networking sites, blogs, and corporate websites with CareerBuilder's results. "One of our key goals with Bing is to simplify search and make it easier for people to find what they are looking for online; searching for the ideal job candidate is no exception,