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John Howard has been an inspirational leader for Australia for the last 13 years. As the second-longest serving Australian Prime Minister, he has helped to turn Australia’s budget deficit into a surplus that led to tax cuts and a more competitive economy.

I was privileged enough to be flying with Mr Howard on the way back from the Beijing Olympics and managed to have a quick chat with him. I would love to say we had an amazing, eye-opening and insightful conversation, but alas the man is popular and the plane was not going to wait around for us (well maybe it would have for him). We did however talk about where we live and connected on familiar issues within our respective neighbourhoods.

Online reputation and social media are having a significant impact on politicians reputation and campaign messages of late in the U.S. as Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama competed to make the presidential ballot - and now Barrack and John Mclain campaign for the Presidency. Barrack Obama is making the most stir online as his supporters have on more than one occasion used the power of social media to push his messages to millions of people across the web.

Last year’s election here in Australia saw each of the parties dipping into new mediums such as YouTube to try and get their messages out to more people, and Kevin Rudd had a fairly catchy campaign and website dedicated to “Kevin 07″ for which the domain now redirects to the ALP website. This also, however, opened the forum for every Joe Bloe to express their opinions through comments, discussion and parody. The power of social media is going to continue to have an increasing impact on the popularity and perception of our leaders and online reputation management will no doubt be taken very seriously by the parties, as too it should be by business owners.

Mr Howard hasn’t made too many headlines or public appearances since losing out to Rudd in the last federal election, however it is great to know he was still over in Beijing to cheer on his country with passion. It was a pleasure to meet such a strong and decisive leader and I was lucky enough to grab a quick picture with him on my mobile phone for our Flickr albums.

According to a post on Search Engine Roundtable their are rumours brewin’ that AdSense data will soon be integrated into Google Analytics for a site - saving AdSense publishers time and headaches when matching up data. Apparently the first post to crack the news has since been removed so this may well just be hearsay, but such a feature would be welcomed by many - granted that adequate care was taken not to disclose any information through Analytics’ industry benchmarking data sharing that should be kept private. This has been a long awaited feature by many AdSense publishers, who in the mean time have tried different bandaid solutions such as special javascript goals (that offered sketchy data at best), and as an AdSense publisher myself I hope that the plans will go ahead.

It comes as no suprise that since Yahoo has made a few announcements about its plans on mixing TV and Internet, Google also it seems has been working hard on a similar project. Google wants to take its massive search marketing model and transport it to the television, replacing mouse clicks with remote control clicks. To be able to tell what time and program a television viewer switches over from an ad is possible with the latest in digital television technology.

Whilst this does sound good in theory, once again its not just a matter of implementing the network and away Google goes. AdWeek reports:

“I don’t think Google is going to own TV advertising,” said Roger Barnette, president of SearchIgnite, an advertising bid management system. “They can in search because everyone goes to Google.com to do a search. They’re not going to own TV networks. They’re going to be a technology middleman.”

“It seems that the television establishment, both the buyers and sellers, are likely to want to buy it person to person,” said David Graves, an analyst with Forrester Research. “Changing the way TV is bought and sold is a not-insignificant task.”

If Google plans on pushing its weight around on the television advertising world, a tried and tested medium for decades, they might not get the welcome that they are desiring or expecting.

Intel Corp and Yahoo are working extremely hard on merging probably the two biggest forms of media in the 21st century - Television and the Internet. These companies are not the first to try this, nor will be the last, but they have the time, money and resources to be able to have the best attempt at this so far.

They are considering using the current ideas of ‘Widget’ technology that has been incorporated on many desktops across all platforms over the last few years. By enabling a sidebar scrolling along the bottom of the television screen, it could be possible you are watching your favourite show, but at the same time check your email on a sidebar, or download the latest stock quotes.

It’s not as easy as it sounds, the Wall Street Journal states:

But they face stiff competition, and the need to rally Internet, software and consumer-electronics companies behind their plan. Intel said it has received support from some big players, including cable giant Comcast Corp., Walt Disney Co.’s ABC unit and hardware makers Sony Corp., Toshiba Corp., Samsung Electronics Co. and Motorola Inc.

If Yahoo and Intel can make this technology accessible and affordable to consumers and get the backing it needs from the electronic industry - I believe the uptake of this technology will prove to be a very successful merging of Television and the Internet.

In July 2005, Google introduced minimum bids for keywords based on their Quality Score. And since then there have been further improvements; the inclusion of landing page quality and landing page load time as factors in Google’s Quality Score.

In the coming weeks, Google is set to unleash further improvements to Quality Score based on feedback from advertisers:

Quality Score will now be more accurate because it will be calculated at the time of each search query

Keywords will no longer be marked ‘inactive for search’

‘First page bid’ will replace ‘minimum bid’ in your account

What does each of these changes mean to your PPC campaign?
Read the rest of this entry »

The past few months has seen Yahoo! in a spin when Microsoft made an unsolicited bid for the company. But they are now preparing to unleash their new company-saving ad system, which is said to become a one-stop shop for selling and buying ads across the Web.

Formerly known as “Amp,” … is seen as key to helping them meet growth projections and maintain independence… It will compete with Google’s DoubleClick, the dominant player in ad-management software.

Yahoo! said its system will make it easier for publishers, advertisers and agencies to buy and sell space while avoiding the hassle of picking up the phone. And unlike DoubleClick’s, Yahoo!’s will be free.

The initial feedback has been positive, but only time will tell if this will get Yahoo! moving ahead to where it needs to be. Read more about this on New York Post

Jerry Seinfeld is set to help Microsoft shed the “frustrated old geekster” image that Apple has so cleverly branded Windows users with through it’s ongoing series of “I’m a MAC, and I’m a PC” commercials.

A new advertising campaign of some $300 million from the software giant will feature, among others, Jerry Seinfeld, in a series of adverts with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates (as if he’s not an old geekster himself). The tagline for the series, which will apparently add $10 million to Seinfeld’s kitty, is reportedly something along the lines of “Windows, Not Walls.”

Below is a parody of the orignal series of Ads by Apple;

The original series itself has spawned many a viral video on youtube.

As reported on Google’s official Mobile Blog, the company has started trialing ads for the mobile version of YouTube.

You may have noticed that we started running a test of display ads on select pages of the YouTube mobile site in the U.S. and Japan. This is our first step in testing mobile advertising for YouTube — it will give you a new way to interact with content on the go, while allowing us to learn how video viewers engage with mobile advertising. Our test advertisers will also have an additional branding tool at their disposal and the opportunity to reach the millions of people who visit YouTube every day on their phones.

Google has been trying desperately to uncover a successful revenue model for YouTube since purchasing the company back in October 2006.  Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt has been quoted in the press as saying finding the right form of advertising on YouTube is the “holy grail”, and this represents another step in the quest to tap the potential of YouTube’s billions of monthly page views.

At the annual Facebook conference for developers, Facebook has revealed its new features to extend its online presence and to maintain its relationship with recent developers of the popular social networking site. Facebook has also revealed its new design as well as “a wave of social Web sites built on top of the information users give to social networks.”

More importantly, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, believes that the future idea of social networking sites is to focus on the decentralisation of social applications. One of these demonstrated is the “Facebook Connect” in which other sites can integrate part of Facebook’s service, where  users are asked for their Facebook login details instead of creating an account on the site to verify their identity.

In regards to the popular applications, Facebook will concentrate on having more meaningful applications rather than applications that clog up the site. Applications will have to meet a criteria of being not only secure but also trustworthy.

For further details on the future of Facebook, please read the New York Times article.

Google has hinted that it will soon be increasing its DoubleClick integration; technology it had paid billions for.

 Among the planned additions are frequency capping, frequency reporting, and view-through conversion measurement capabilities. None of the enhancements is available yet, and none will be for “a few months,” according to a Google spokesperson. Still, it’s clear the firm aims to ensure advertisers, publishers, and company observers that it’s working at incorporating DoubleClick into its ad operation.

More details of when the features will be provided will be available in the coming months. Google expects all of the additional features to boost ad quality. For more information, check out ClickZ