One of the hottest sessions at SES Toronto 2010 was "Speaking Geek: How Marketers Can Work with Web Developers to Achieve Business Goals." Click to read the rest of this post.

One of the many new sessions at SES San Francisco , which will be part of Connected Marketing Week August 16-20, is a series of Search Engine Watch Labs. These intensive two-hour sessions expand upon the very popular SES site clinics. Click to read the rest of this post.

TV, video, iPads and all... we're undoubtedly in an interactive age. Fine, that's a given. How about those trends that seem to obsess marketers? Nielsen says that nearly 40% of people use TV and the web simultaneously each week in the U.S.... Marketers are running for that population. But what about the 'cord-cutting' phenomenon? And speaking of cutting cord )two words, this time(, what do we know about the watching habits of Generation Y and its likely impact on consumption?.

Google has the blogosphere and the media buzzing after a report from Italian daily La Repubblica announced that the company is readying to launch a paid content format to be called "Newspass" by year end. Click to read the rest of this post.

U.S. online ads spending will reach $25.1 billion this year, with search being the single biggest category and social media marketing taking over from display media, according to eMarketer's latest report. Click to read the rest of this post.

Bits and bobs to keep up with search agency news: Magnetic, Kenshoo, WebVisible, Covario, BLiNQ, Ace Metrix and BrightRoll. Click to read the rest of this post.

The Boston globe is among the early adopters of OpenBlock, an open-source platform that offers news organizations the possibility to display local news data on clickable neighborhood maps. The newspaper's move is part of a wider initiative worth a total $450K launched by the Knight Foundation, announced at the MIT earlier today. Click to read the rest of this post.

A week to the day after releasing its new AdWords Analyze Competitors feature, Google is once again launching a new tool - Google Commerce Search 2.0., the newest version of its tailor-made search engine for retailers. Click to read the rest of this post.

AOL has confirmed in an SEC filing this morning that it has sold its ailing social site Bebo to digital media investors Criterion Capital Partners . Although the value of the deal was not disclosed, reports have the price tag at a mere $10 million although AOL had forked out a hefty $850 million to acquire the company in March 2008. Click to read the rest of this post.

At the OMMA Video event this week, MediaPost columnist Steve Smith called the Gulf Oil Spill Tracker created by PBS NewsHour the "biggest online video of the year." He added, ""There is no better example of the power that online video has." Click to read the rest of this post.

Google Adwords is firing up a new tool, Analyze Competition , designed for advertisers to measure how their campaign performs compared to competition. So now instead of solely having their own metrics, advertisers can look at their campaign ROIs within the landscape of relevant/similar keyword categories. That easy. Really. Click to read the rest of this post.

comScore today released a report of the top U.S. online newspaper groups based on the comScore Media Metrix service. The newspaper category represents the first site category for which each of the top ten ranked entities has transitioned to the comScore Media Metrix 360 )Unified Digital Measurement( methodology. Click to read the rest of this post.

I was a keynote speaker at OMMA Video yesterday in New York. If you want to watch the 20-minute keynote, it is available on USTREAM . Click to read the rest of this post.

Facebook is turning out to be a major video destination although it's not what the social site is best known for. Indeed, don't be fooled. Facebook's video ads performance is putting to shame other channels. The secret? Social games' virtual currencies - and yes, inevitably, Zynga. Click to read the rest of this post.

Social gaming platform Zynga is reported to have raised $147 million )13.5 billion yen( from Japanese telecommunication and media group Softbank to fund its expansion in Asia, the region that is widely tapped to be the market with greatest potential in the foreseeable future. "Connecting the world through games," Zynga is really living up to its name. Read on. Click to read the rest of this post.

Twitter launched its 'Places' feature, pulling together local check-in services Foursquare and Gowalla , and meshing them in with data from local search firm Localeze and global navigation solutions provider TomTom . The move was announced by Twitter's Othman Laraki on the company's blog as part of the company's plans to contextualize tweets. Read on. Click to read the rest of this post.

Incisive Media's ClickZ is launching " Connected Marketing Week " on August 16-20, 2010 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Click to read the rest of this post.

Last week, we shared with you a whole batch of news both on the part of Google ) Caffeine , Gmail chat and more ( and Bing ) CashBack , Safari, maps and social results among other novelties( as we reported on their ongoing competition to woo Apple. Both search engines had issued news on their Maps features but news kept pouring in on those apps as the week came to a close. Here's what you need to know. Click to read the rest of this post.

There is no doubt at this point that Google remains the #1 engine for core search in the U.S. as comScore reported in its May qSearch analysis but the search giant has been losing pace while Yahoo and Microsoft recorded increases in their market shares compared to figures from the previous month. Click to read the rest of this post.

Two years ago, I wrote " Online Reputation Management Requires Cabinet War Rooms ." In the post, I asked, "Is your company prepared for the inevitable crisis to come?" Today, one of the most important lessons learned from the BP oil spill, Toyota recall, and Goldman Sachs fraud charges is just how few companies are prepared for a crisis. Click to read the rest of this post.