TechCrunch has an interesting post today about Blip.FM making a new beta API available so that developers could add Blip.FM's functionality to their tools and sites. Like most good posts it made me curious - I hadn't tried Blip.FM .  I signed up quickly and found that as advertised, it's like Twitter for music fans. The interface is very similar to Twitter and it even links you up with your Twitter account so that you can crosspost your Blip posts there.

A new study released by UCLA shows that using search engines actually improves brain activity associated with intelligent reasoning, especially in older folks. In your face Nicolas Carr! Carr of course wrote the now infamous Atlantic cover story titled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" to which I mentally replied at the time, "Not us'maybe just you?"   The UCLA study would seem to put to rest most of Carr's reasoning as it includes actual rather than empirical data.

I think it's good form to begin a post by referencing the great Staten Island philosophers the Wu-Tang Clan. They once titled a song "C.R.E.A.M" which meant: Cash Rules Everything Around Me. Never was that more true than in our current economy in which GM looks at hooking up with Ford, 401k's melt like ice sculptures in the Sahara and dogs and cats are living together â€" mass hysteria!

The negative campaigning continues. John McCain this week suggested that Obama was some kind of crypto-socialist terrorist Muslim while Obama pointed out that McCain is, well,  John McCain. Surprisingly though the harshest attack came from atop the mighty Googleplex as CEO Eric Shmidt called the Internet a "cesspool." At press time the Internet had responded with the charge that Schmidt was once seen in an elevator with Bill Ayers.

Earlier this week, Ask.com unveiled a new, stripped-down and speedier redesign of its search results that the engine hopes will help it better compete for market share. Gone is the Ask 3D results panel which brought up relevant audio, video and image files in a sidebar next to classic link-and-description search results. 3D drew a lot of critical praise after its launch last year but unfortunately, the short term traffic boost didn't ultimately convince In its place,

As SMX winds down the panels get ever more wonky â€" and that's a good thing for the search marketing geek.  Case in point: The "Ask the Paid Search Buyers" panel moderated by Range Online Media founder Misty Locke. Reprise Media Managing Partner Josh Stylman was on hand repeating the mantra "When in doubt, test."  The other panelists â€" iProspect's Andrew Wheeler, Emily Scott of online travel site Kayak and Molly Hughes of J. Crew, all nodded in agreement.

On the heels of a New York Times article on the subject, the McCain campaign over the weekend, primarily in the person of Governor Sarah Palin, eschewed talk about the ailing economy and instead talked up Senator Obama's purported "palling around" with former Weather Underground member and Chicago area civic fixture William Ayers. To their great credit, the Obama campaign launched a gold-star search engine marketing response to the attack,

The Javits Center is a cruel place at 8:30 AM â€" especially when Search Marketing Expo East is sharing the cavernous steel and glass girdered barn on the far, far west side of Manhattan with a few other shows. I'm not sure that I had enough coffee in me yet to properly express my horror at being asked "Are you here for the kid expo?" "Christ, no!" is apparently not the standard response.

Millions of consumers and business who have accounts and dealings with Wachovia and, last week, with Washington Mutual, found themselves wondering some pretty basic questions: Is my money safe? Do I have to switch banks? Is the other shoe going to drop? Increasingly the first place Americans go to when that want answers fast is a search engine.

Successful search marketing campaigns require marketers to execute a multi-pronged strategy the right way.  For a political campaign )and any campaign that is impacted by rapidly shifting events( search campaigns must be 24-hour-news-cycle-ready, and if the landing page isn't spot on it may as well not be run at all. As we noted earlier this week, the Obama campaign appears to have become a lot more aggressive and quick on the draw with their search marketing strategy.

Back in college I used to experiment some. Google never grew out of this and does it every day. Just as in college, these experiments sometimes entail stepping out of your comfort zone and trying things that initially might seem contrary to your core beliefs â€" like snorting ricotta cheese or joining an a capella groupIn Google's case these means cluttering up their relatively clean search results pages )SERPs( with banner ads â€" in particular their Google Images results.

Last Wednesday, Reprise Media's Managing Partner participated in Media Bites â€" a breakfast seminar hosted by Advertising Age at the Paley Center for Media in Manhattan )nee the museum of Television and Radio(. The event ) additional coverage here courtesy of Ad Age (, which was part of last week's Advertising Week festivities, focused on search marketing for large corporations,

When last we reported , John McCain had pretty much ceded social media to the already brilliant Obama strategy but instead had set up his own, quite effective search engine strategy to get to the undecided and independents â€" those most likely to use search to find out where the candidates stand.  Many observers including this blog and Reprise Media Managing Partner Joshua Stylman publicly drew attention to this disparity in resource allocation.

I decided this week to NOT do the weekly round-up, suspending it for the sake of the economy. Hah, for real though, Ad Week gave us all enough to chew on that there wasn't time to look at some of the tidbits and trifles that normally stud my weekly round-ups like so many raisins in an oatmeal cookie.

John McCain announced on Wednesday that he would be pulling all advertising and suspending his campaign while he hurries back to Washington to help "fix" the nation's ailing economy.   A number of observers have wondered why the campaign would have to be suspended   and from the looks of McCain's search advertising the candidate is wondering the same thing.

It seems like every few weeks Google launches a product â€" a knowledge resource )Knol(, a browser )Chrome(,  a phone )the G1(, a personal deodorant )QScore â€" the Smell of First Page Ranking( 'OK I was joking about the deodorant but still' When your share price is still north of $400 and you are insanely profitable I suppose it's your corporate right to launch whatever darn products you want. It ain't no thang but a chicken wing and all that. The question I have is,

It's Ad Week here in New York which means a big tent in Bryant Park, leggy models pushing away their tuna nicoise at fancy outdoor cafes and Tim Gunn running around in a tizzy. OK, wait, that's Fashion Week " my bad. Ad Week is totally different. One way you can tell it's indeed Ad Week is that Advertising Age's Digital Bites Series has a killer official event.

We figured that inviting the attendees at this year's OMMA New York event to come on down to the Reprise Media Wi-Fi lounge to play the hit video game Rock Band would attract some interest. What we didn't expect were the throngs of folks lining up to click the sticks, strum the guitar and even to sing their hearts out. This was especially true around cocktail hour when inhibitions were low and the need to belt out "Living on a Prayer" were at a peak.

Stop by the Reprise Media Wi-Fi Lounge at OMMA Global in New York this Thursday and Friday where we promise to rock you - with hit video game Rock Band no less. Relax, take some time to hit the laptop, and then play your heart out against the best rockers in the industry. Even better are the 2 free tickets to see legendary rock band The Who which we are giving out in a random drawing, just for plugging in. Also, just for my SearchViews fans, Thursday only,

Reprise Media had another highly successful yearly Offsite event yesterday at the Bowery Hotel on New York City's onetime-skid-row-turned-hip-Mecca boulevard The Bowery. Although we had a series of informative and eye-opening sessions I think my favorite was a presentation from influential Morgan Stanley online and technology analyst Mary Meeker who, as the kids say, "dropped some crazy knowledge." Meeker is a big adherent of online video,