The popular social network site, Facebook, has reached the 100 million users mark. Facebook creator, Mark Zuckerberg, announced the news last Tuesday on his own Facebook page. Facebook is now officially the biggest social network site in the world with MySpace as a close second. More importantly, Facebook is still growing fast while the MySpace user-base has remained more or less stable in recent months. With an estimated value of $15 billion (!), Facebook is living proof that social media are becoming more and more mainstream. Professional social media optimization is fast becoming a conditio sine qua non in the marketing mix of every company that wants to profit from the ever growing online market.

Interesting movie about a widget-based Internet-on-the-TV platform that’s currently being developed by Yahoo and Intel. Watch it to learn more details.

Google has launched a new widget for your iGoogle page which keeps you up-to-speed with the current Olympic games. The summer games widget is a highly effective tool to keep track on all Olympic events in a matter of minutes. Check it out!

In Word Visualization on Search Marketing Blogs, Lee Odden uses a cool ‘tag cloud generator’, called Wordle, to describe what the (American) search blogs are actually talking about. Because Across The Web was shamelessly neglected in Odden’s research (:-), we performed the same test and came up with the following stylish result.

Following accusations and even law suits concerning the quality of it’s content ads, Google announces some major updates on the Google Content Network. The new enhancements are the result of Google’s integration with Double Click. Hopefully they will make the content network more efficient and reliable and will provide a better user-experience for anyone who visits a site which has AdSense ads on it.

These are the new features which will be launched on the Google Content Network in the following weeks and months.

* Frequency Capping: Enables advertisers to control the number of times a user sees an ad. Users will have a better experience on Google content network sites because they will no longer see the same ad over and over again.

* Frequency Reporting: Provides insight into the number of people who have seen an ad campaign, and how many times, on average, people are seeing these ads.

* Improved Ads Quality: Brings performance improvements within the Google content network.

* View-Through Conversions: Enables advertisers to gain insights on how many users visited their sites after seeing an ad. This helps advertisers determine the best places to advertise so users will see more relevant ads.

Looks promising. Hopefully these enhancements will be rolled out soon so that we can experience them first hand and find out what they mean for our search marketing campaigns?

Source: The Official Google Blog

In June, Google Trends, underwent quite a few updates such as actual numeric results and the ability to download them to a spreadsheet. Today, Google launches a completely new version of Google trends, called Google Insights for search. New features include related keywords and the ability the narrow your ‘insight’-search to a specific sector, all very useful for search marketeers who want to optimize their AdWords campaigns and/or expand to other markets.

Google explains:

Today, we’re launching Google Insights for Search, a new product designed with the advertiser in mind. It provides more flexibility and functionality for advertisers and marketers to understand search behavior, and adds some cool new features like a world heat map to graphically display search volume and regional interest.

Like Google Trends, you can just type in a search term to see search volume patterns over time, as well as the top related and rising searches. You’ll also have the ability to compare search volume trends across multiple search terms, categories (commonly referred to as verticals), geographic regions, or specific time ranges.

Source: Inside Adwords