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Despite the slowing down of the overall media market, a new report from Frost & Sullivan predicts that Australia’s online ad market will expeience strong growth for at least the next two years and revenues for this year alone are set to exceed $481 million - a 24 percent increase from 2007.

As reported on Computerworld, the market has not been entirely unscathed by the slowdown, as revenues grew less than one percent for the first half of the year. However now back in the swing of things the growth is expected to be strong well into the next year, and why wouldn’t they with the ever increasing awareness of the power of online marketing both for sales and brand awareness. Australia being somewhat behind the USA when it comes to uptake of the latest trends and technologies means there is still plenty of opportunity for strong growth as consumers and advertisers alike become more acustomed to the emerging technology.

Mediums such as integrated content and online video are tipped to be the driving force behind continue growth into the future as advertising models are developed and refined. Newer tactics such as the “choose your own adventure” style YouTube (example of which can be seen below) videos offer up some interesting new opportunities for savvy marketers to leverage the massive traffic that a viral video can generate.

Valleywag reports yesterday on a new patent application filed by Google that details plans to build a “Water-based Datacenter”.

Features outlined include;

• Power generation using the ocean currents
• Ocean water used to aid cooling of the servers
• Use of wind energy to generate further power

Valleywag also points out the opportunities that having their data floating in international waters would present to Google from tax and legal points of view. A very interesting patent application indeed - it’s this type of “outside the box” thinking that keeps Google ahead of the pack.

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 McCain 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.

When we wrote about Microsoft giving up on Yahoo for now we knew, as well as anyone following the saga, that it was merely the end of chapter one. The bell has rung and round two of the saga has now commenced with billionaire investor Carl Icahn announcing in a letter to the chairman of Yahoo, Roy Bostock, that he has purchased 59 million shares in the company and formed a 10 member set of rivals for the Yahoo board of directors. Further to this he has applied for clearance from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to avoid any antitrust issues as he aims to purchase up to $2.5 billion in Yahoo stock.

We will continue to post updates on the drama.

Yahoo recently began offering a new type of search engine results pages (SERPs) to it’s users in India known as Glue Pages.  Along with the normal search results, Glue Pages also display a heap of other information related to the search. This information includes, features such as recipes, medical information, Wikipedia entries, stock charts, Flickr images, train schedules, restaurant lists, news, and even Google blog search results.  As well as leveraging Yahoo’s strengths of being more of a portal than Google, pages like this also present an array of monetisation opportunities for Yahoo, be it sponsored search results, display advertising, product listings and so on.

The pages were developed by Yahoo’s Indian team, as Yahoo encourages each of their teams to develop services that they feel will work well in their own markets. Beta testing is live on the Indian Yahoo pages, however at this stage there are no plans for launching the service on other Yahoo domains unless it really picks up and takes off during testing.

Google have partnered with SalesForce to provide sales software and Enterprise solutions for businesses. This will mark the first time that Google has openly gone into competition with Microsoft by joining forces with a rival.
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Internet Jobs site careerbuilder.com is working with Facebook to offer recruitment services within the social media landscape.

The aim is to attract potential employees that no longer utilise traditional forms of media such as newspapers and job hunting websites.
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Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing originally invested $60 Million dollars US in the Facebook startup. It is now reported that he has added an additional $60 Million to make his total investment $120 Million in Facebook.

Facebook is still valued at $15 Billion US since Li Ka-Shing’s initial investment, taking his ownings percentage to 0.8%, which is exactly half of what Microsoft own in Facebook.

Big things appear to be happening for the Facebook group!

It is reported that eBay is cashed up, has zero debt and is on the prowl to purchase companies that will compliment its existing branch of companies; eBay, PayPal and Skype to name a few.
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Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin along with the Google CEO Eric Schmidt, have renewed their contracts again at only $1 per year salary opting instead to just continue holding their shares.

Falling stock prices has wiped $8.5 Billion off their total net worth but it is reported that they are not phased, as they still have more money than any one person could spend and a belief in the fact that Google’s correlation to the stock market is still very minor.
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