In the AD-age, when online advertising is growing by leaps and bounds, the search for the perfect ad network is still a delusion. In a recent survey by McKinsey Quarterly about online marketing (requires free registration to read), a large number of companies (major part of which are Fortune 500 companies) do plan to invest even heavily (if not doing already) in online advertisements. And not surprisingly, companies are in the search of new and unexplored methodologies / ways for online advertisements. The bottom line is, companies are ready to shell out money, but on newer medias

Undoubtedly, the report also carries a lot of stress on blogs, and how companies are looking at consumer generated content for marketing and advertisement. Cashing on these opportunities, are 2 of the major players who are doing exceptionally well in the text link ads business (apart from paid writing ads), notably Text-link-ads.com and Linkworth.com

Going by the bloggers’ choice, it seems that it is a much better option to use text-link based advertisement media rather than sponsored blogging, since quality advertisers with brand names and lot of investment in ads, prefer link-ads over sponsored blogging. And on the question of why - simply a lot of technical and functional reasons, and the impact on their business. No doubt, companies prefer to have a sponsored group on facebook, spending more than $30000 per quarter for the same, rather than have Mark Zuckerberg write a blog entry for them (which I doubt will be any less than $30000 !! :p ).

There might be some in the crowd who would still prefer reviews, going by the fact that there are some blogs which make more than even $1000 for one small little piece of writing that goes on their blog (a.k.a review article), but then again, they are the exceptional ones. When we talk about blogging, we mean everybody - the general lot, cause that’s the target for companies who are willing to spend millions of dollars on text link ads or some other forms of creative buys. What the average blogger needs is to have a simple method of monetizing his blog, and what the companies need is a creative way of advertisement.

In the next few articles, we will go deeper into the web and the advertising world, and try and find out the next big upcoming ideas on creativity.

The search engine war has not yet started. Probably it will never start, cause probably Google will never loose to anybody in the near future.

But just try and think, as to how many times have you tried to search for a better/relevant story/article on Digg rather than Google. Isn’t this strange that unconsciously, we are moving towards the Digg results rather than the Google search results. Alternatively, to say that when Mahalo started the “humar-powered-search-engine-space”, then they had a brilliant idea. But maybe the implementation was not that good. The users could not really absorb their concept.

But, on the other hand, consciously or unconsciously, Digg has entered the “human-powered-search-engine-space” and nobody is taking note of it. We are all pretty happy to use it to get the results, and move on.

I’m actually just feeling sorry for Mahalo people. Their implementation went all awry. Maybe next time someone will think of a better method to implement the idea. But, really, can something better be done in the “human-powered-search-engine-space”, better than how Digg has done it ?? Consciously or unconsciously ??!!

It was just for fun that I started to develop a facebook application, and slowly getting used to the Ruby wrapper for the facebook API. But then, suddenly, a few days earlier, a friend of mine told me to try out OpenSocial. To be honest, before that day I had never given an iota of thought to try out OpenSocial, and was happily developing my app for Facebook.

Try and think of it. Have we really forgotten OpenSocial ?? Has Facebook really changed the face of web ?? Why aren’t enough developers building apps for MySpace or Orkut ?? Why only Facebook ?? Or why not facebook and opensocial both ??

A plethora of questions come in my mind when I start thinking about OpenSocial v/s Facebook. Can someone please help me on this.