Today I eavesdropped on a conversation between Star Trek: The Next Generation's Wesley Crusher, I mean Wil Wheaton , and MSNBC's next generation newscaster Rachel Maddow about podcasts. Apparently they share more than just a hairstyle )see pic(. Normally this kind of experience would be bought to me by late night pizza and my overactive dream-state synapses.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of checking out the Travel Ad Network's Publisher's Conference, which brings together many of the top on and offline publishers in the travel industry. While I was unable to talk myself into a gig as Lonely Planet's in-country Costa Rica travel blogger I did gain some insight into how paid search can have an impact beyond what can be measured simply through PPC )pay per click( data.

When I was a kid we had to network socially by punching a random bunch of digits into a keypad, )or twirling a dial with your finger â€" a dial!( picking up a big clumsy plastic thing attached to a squiggly wire, and speaking into it. If you were lucky your buddy was on the other end. Worse, it was done one person at a time!  You kids never had it so good! The reality is that even Facebook, a site that was originally designed for college age students and younger,

Rand Fishkin asks the question today: "Why does paid search earn so many more marketing dollars ) than SEO? ("  It's an excellent question and one that sparked some good back and forth on the ol' Twitter stream as well. Rand sets us up by pointing out the disparity in spending:  $9.1 billion on paid search versus $1.3 billion on SEO.

The value of search engine marketing and SEO for a new company seeking growth is enormous. The ability to quickly drive traffic, to derive actionable data about what people are responding to on your website and in your messaging, and the flexibility to experiment make search ideal for taking business to the next level of development. However, most companies don't have the resources to call on a top-tier search marketing firm at the early stages of their growth.

There was a moment on most episodes of the classic TV sitcom Three's Company where one character - usually crusty landlord Mr. Roper but sometimes ascot-wearing landlord Ralph Furley - overhears one or more of the other characters and totally misinterprets what's going on. A simple coat being left at a party turns into a trip to the sanitarium in the fevered minds of the landlords at this particular apartment building.

We have been blissfully oblivious to other blogs' coverage of the Presidential election and Search. Ours is best so why bother really? How do we know ours is best? We have avoided the Wrath of McCain. We know that his campaign only levels charges with the utmost of evidence so that's us off the hook. Unless his minion is lumping us in with those other guys - which would be wrong.

This week Google announced that it was using its vaunted search algorithm to add targeted search ads on its YouTube property.  This underlines the dual nature of the site as both a social media platform where users upload their own )and other people's- naughty!( content but as a video search engine with more search traffic than Yahoo.

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,