Under the guise of the weekly personal financial profile called "Me and My Money" in the Globe and Mail, reporter Tony Martin teases out an interesting local tech story from investor Will Ashworth that refers directly to Geosign's click-arbitrage-oriented business model . Holy moly! For those just beginning to score at home, Geosign's properties included a site called TrueLocal, along with several thousand other websites that showed sponsored links,

Google currently holds $46 in cash per share , and its book value per share is $87. Going with the most optimistic figure, if you bought Google stock today at $287, it would be like getting it for $200. An amazing bargain? Personally, I think so - recession and all. Another point to consider is that Google's EPS is dampened by massive expansion. Any belt-tightening at all, or a hiring freeze, could goose profits and add to that cash pile.

Google has been unusually active with product releases and good-news announcements all of a sudden. Historically, this has often coincided with a PR strategy to blunt the impact of bad news in the immediate news media and blogosphere reaction. In the last few days, we've heard of upgrades to Google Ad Planner, major new developments with Google Analytics, the release of Google video chat,

Somewhere in the world, business carries on more or less as usual. This report shows Canadian auto sales hitting a record in October, while US car sales are reaching new heights of terribleness. Automotive industry expert Dennis Desrosiers wonders whether Canadians opened their "investment statements" in October. Don't they know they're poor? But hey, that's thinking like an American!

...for a long, long while. Pretend Investors: I was recommending you dollar-cost-average your way into tech stocks, by buying GOOG and YHOO at bargain prices. Today is another sickening day on the markets, so what better time to get our buying over with and go back to sleep for another five years. I no longer feel strongly about following up with more YHOO, however. If you like gambling on takeover offers, then take a plunge here at $12.04,

As an interim entry for the annals of the Annual Internet Infinite Regression Awards, I note Best News Site Prediction of Its Own Demise )This Week( - Techmeme on the new Google Blog Search. Will have to check it out. Old Google Blog Search was so bad and so spammy.

To continue the off-topic nature of recent blog posts... Whenever I tune into a radio station like 92.5 JACK-FM )"Toronto's best music mix," one of several similar best music mixes available(, I'm reminded of why I hate it when somebody is so overtly trying to target "people like me". Sure, if you had to target "people like me," I guess you'd try really hard to follow up a song from Green Day with some bad Platinum Blonde. On paper, I like both - or have, some days,

Of all the responses to the Chrome announcement, three stood out for me. 1. The most obvious approach is to download it and try it, as I've just done. If you like it, predict world domination for Chrome! The thing is lightning fast, and bound to improve. So the commenter on the previous post, Mark, makes a compelling case when he argues: "...while my [Twitter] friends are hardly a representative sample of anything other than agency technogeeks,

This is one you just have to cheer, for the "hey, cool!" factor. Today Picasa is set to release a feature that will recognize a series of faces in your collection as being the same person, and offering the ability to tag them all quickly. Now that's sharp! I sort of stumbled into using Picasa as it was one of the first photo organizers I used seriously - Flickr notwithstanding. I'm glad I stuck with it. They keep adding features and I find it a joy to use.

The Reggies are back . Oh - perhaps I should explain in case they're not quite a household name yet. It's time for the annual installment of the Infinite Regression Awards. We're handing out the hardware to the best self-referrers in search, Web 2.0 and beyond. Ever since the movie Scream broke down the rules of horror as it unfolded on the screen back in '96, deconstructing one's self has been oh-so chic. Without further adieu, Traffick presents to you the Reggies.

Stale news, but interesting: Jeremy Toeman received a notice from UMG regarding his posting of a video on YouTube that included copyrighted content )U2's Beautiful Day( in the background. The offer from the copyright owner, facilitated through YouTube, basically said, go ahead and leave the video up if you wish, but we'll be showing advertising on it. To some this might sound heavy-handed; to others, a nice compromise. I tend to think the latter. As Toeman writes,

I just got through a bit over half of Bryan Eisenberg and John Quarto vonTivadar's Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer , on the plane on the way from Toronto to San Jose. In the last hour of the flight, I quickly scanned the remaining chapters. Funny and all too familiar story: I left the book in the back of the seat when I got off the plane, so I expect United Airways personnel, or the next passenger,

So basically, what SearchMonkey does is allow publishers to push their customized content look and feel right into the Yahoo Search results. Well, not push, actually, but make available, based on open formats. So for users who opt into the widget for any given company's rich content, if the listing for that content comes up in search results, custom look-and-feel info included. So if it's a Yelp review, you get a bit of the Yelp "richness, look, and feel" right on Yahoo.

Linkworthy for a Friday: Yahoo is now automatically enabling formatted Yelp , LinkedIn, and Yahoo Local results via its SearchMonkey rich data / open formats platform. I'm a big fan of SearchMonkey and happy to see Yahoo forging ahead with it. P.S. Yahoo should acquire Yelp and LinkedIn. This dude is dumping Outlook for web-based email. Welcome to the club, finally!

This very timely post by Google Fellow Amit Singhal gives us a brilliant capsule summary of past and present trends in information retrieval. Most of those who pay close attention will be familiar with the high level trends, as well as some of the bells and whistles that search engines have added that do a great job of guessing at user intent. In nearly every bullet point though,

TechCrunch reports that at the 11th hour, Google walked away from a deal to acquire Digg. Given the perfectly good news-recommendation features being used by more and more users at sites like Yahoo already, it looks like it may not be a great fit for anyone; thus, Digg might indeed have to raise more capital and go it alone. It would be overzealous of Microsoft to acquire it, IMHO, but maybe a strengthened partnership is in the cards.

SES Toronto has officially begun'sort of. For anyone seeking a brain primer before hitting the main festivities tomorrow and Wednesday, the event kicked off with training sessions on Monday. I arrived to find two buffets â€" one was a tasty continental breakfast and the other was the choice between two different training sessions: link building tools and SEO tactics. I went with link building and joined several dozen fresh faces,

Through the magic of dynamic keyword insertion in title, GM's AdWords ad serves up the headline "2009 Chevy Cobalt" when you type "2009 Chevy Cobalt SS". When you click, you're taken to the page for the 2008 Chevy Cobalt, of course, since they're still trying to clear those out. Time to back button: less than a second. General Motors can sort of afford the lost click )for about $2-3( misleadingly applied to their own brand term,

So a man got 668 clicks on his ads through one portion of his Google AdWords, and zero conversions. And for that, it's seen as good enough reason for a lawsuit . Ever heard of testing? I'm no lawyer, but it looks like the complaint is shoddily written and inaccurate. The thinking here is that the suit has limited merit because: There is little truth to the claim that the ads had "little or no chance of converting.

Danny's trenchant analysis of this recent court order to Google starts by playing the WTF card, but does much, much more. In this detailed post, he cogently argues for a savvy national Internet privacy act. Absolutely. We cannot endure repeated episodes of clumsy application of outdated law, with judges spinning theories about cookies and IP addresses, sometimes ignoring real privacy concerns,