Good news to everyone in the online marketing arena according to statistics published on USA Today (Stats acquired from PQ Media). We can expect a sharp increase in ‘New Media’ spending in the next 4 years despite all the economic worries.
“…companies will spend more than $160.8 billion in 2012 — up 82% from 2008 — [...]

Here is a list of acquisitions made by Google I found on wikipedia today. The majority of the companies acquired by Google are actually based in the San Francisco Bay Area of the United States (silicon valley).
A total of 51 companies have been acquired as of March 2008.
Click the image below to see the full [...]

Today, Google Israel is having a blackout! This blackout is in honor of Earth Hour, a global initiative to turn off the lights for one hour across the world at a specific date and time. Google results pages is still in white however.

In the US, Earth Hour will take place on March 29th at [...]

A recent announcement by Yahoo press center states that they have joined the OpenSocial Foundation. Open Social is a Google initiative that already includes MySpace and other social networks and is a nonprofit organization to promote a universal standard for applications on social-networking sites (OpenSocial.org).
Google also officially welcomed Yahoo to the foundation on their official [...]

A recent New York assemblyman called Richard L. Brodsky has put together a bill that if passed will make it punishable or even illegal to collect personal information about internet user and the clicks they make on advertisements.
He assemblyman stated:
“Should these companies be able to sell or use what’s essentially private data without permission? The [...]

I cam accross a very nice presentation called: The Future of Marketing + Advertising
It was composed by Paul Isakson and tries to present ideas on where we are heading to with modern marketing.
You can watch the presentation here:
http://www.slideshare.net/paulisakson/whats-next-in-marketing-advertising-318143
Basically, the take home message is: Modern Marketing = Make Peoples’ Lives Better

There is a very interesting discussion thread over at Google Groups involving Matt Cutts.
Basically, a website owner complained that his website was penalized by Google and many rankings where lost (-xx penalty). After a leangthy discussion, Matt Cutts joined in and pointed this out:

ShyBoy, have you been collecting backlinks in any unusual ways? It
looks like [...]

HA! Found it :) Here is the full Google Human Editors Manual and Guidelines! Its a very interesting read actually and tells you what Google human editors (apparently around 13,000+ human editors!) are looking for in oder to penalize websites listed where they should not be.
I like the final note on spam (Web Spam):
When trying [...]

Nick Carr, the author of The Big Switch made an opening keynote at SES New York this week. Nick Carr discussed how computer systems and software algorithms are at the center of business today, and the implications for privacy.
Nick gives a recap on his New York SES keynote talk about Microsoft’s unsolicited bid for Yahoo, [...]

I recently discovered (shame on me!) that Yahoo Site Explorer allows a webmaster to actually tag an inbound link to their site as ’spam’ and reject it as being counted as inbound link weight. Well, I checked to see if Google allowed this same feature within their Google webmaster tool and fair enough they did [...]