Terry

One of the people I've known in the SEO industry for a long time is Jill Whalen. I respect her ability and "tude" and thoroughly enjoyed our sometimes spirited discussions while we were both Super Mods at IHY forums. Jill recently gave a seminar at SES Toronto and listed some do's and don'ts. We don't agree on some techniques... but ... we both have very strong ideas about what works and is important.

This article titled Google's Paid Click Business Slipping - ComScore has got to be one of the biggest yawners yet and another indication of a jittery stock market. As to the source.... In 14 years I've yet to see data from comscore that I'm not skeptical of the numbers and the way the data is gathered and possibly skewed by the polled audience or source/process.

My first inclination if I were a MSFT stock holder would be to sell confident that some time in the next year Mr. Softy will be 20% cheaper. The combination of Yahoo! and M$ search technology is not likely because they look to be on different platforms/OS. It is more likely you'll see one or the other rolled out on both sites to start with and then a new one developed for integration into a single site.

I have read quite a few articles making predictions about the SEM industry for 2008. There has been a lot of discussion about the Google purchase of DoubleClick as you will see by my predictions below I'm not a big believer that Google can do any better than anyone that has preceded it in the display advertising biz.