So I am leaving today to go to Europe and attend the Future of Web Apps conference in London. I will be traveling around Europe for the next 10 days. I will try to blog occasionally while I’m there, but postings will be sporadic. I will be back on a regular schedule after returning.

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published an interesting article covering the growth in online advertising spending by political campaigns. According to the article, online advertising is expected to hit $80 million for the 2008 Presidential campaign, this is a whopping 275 percent increase over 2004. Many of the ads are displaying on blogs that don’t speak favorably of the candidates. The article states:

Generally speaking, buying ads on blogs doesn’t provide candidates with a guarantee of positive coverage. Many bloggers gleefully post scathing critiques of candidates that run alongside their ads. And accepting an ad by no means indicates a blogger supports a candidate.

I think that the candidates are slowly becoming more open to web based advertising, and it’s a good thing. Additionally, blogs are probably the best investment by the candidates because it gives people the opportunity to have direct interaction with the candidates. Well maybe not the candidates, but people that are hired by the candidates, and that’s what counts right? Imagine if a candidate actually wrote one of the blog entries them self, that would be pretty profound. Have any examples of candidates that do this?

I typically stick to tech stuff on my blog but I couldn’t pass this up. This is my sister’s Valentine’s Day gift to her boyfriend. The Hebrew means “I love you, my potato”. This is a pretty creative gift. Good one Megan!

Just as Jason Calacanis asked for the other day, apparently Gmail has decided to offer a pay service. A reasonable price seems to be $25 for 6.25 gigabytes of space, since that’s what Google is currently charging for their Picasa hosting service. This isn’t a bad idea, but it would be nice if they added some sort of Gmail file/attachment management utility as I previously mentioned. At least this is a first step in the right direction.

This article is for those people managing their site’s analytics with Urchin. Yesterday I spent hours trying to figure out why I couldn’t view sessions and page views after I had installed Urchin’s UTM analytics on a client’s site. The only thing that was displaying was hits. The reason ended up being that the utm.gif file was not located in the website’s document root. If you are having troubles with Urchin UTM then check out the Urchin troubleshooting page.

An interesting article in the Wall Street Journal this morning discussed Google’s loss of a suit filed against them by a Belgian newspaper. While the Belgian newspaper has won a large settlement (€3.45 million and counting), this is a dumb move by a newspaper company. As traditional newspaper companies face declining revenue, they will need to begin to shift their focus to their web based offerings. Both the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have successfully embraced the web. If you check out Techmeme on a daily basis, you are just about guaranteed to see a New York Times or Wall Street Journal article on the page. Why? These companies have realized that by posting buzz worthy news on their sites, bloggers will discuss and link to them. In turn both their reader base and ad revenue increase substantially. I guess the moral of the story is that old media is much slower to adapt to the new media landscape. That’s good news for us bloggers because we’re the ones filling the void.

Yesterday Yahoo announced the launch of their Site Explorer. This is a similar service to Google’s Webmaster Tools and Technorati’s built in search features. The strange thing about Google’s webmaster tools is that it only shows four incoming links to my site, while Technorati and Yahoo shows hundreds of incoming links. Not sure what’s up with Google’s new tool but they definitely have some updates that need to be made. Either way, check out the new Site Explorer, it is a pretty useful tool.

After yesterday’s Wall Street Journal article about “The Wizards of Buzz”, there has been a lot of buzz in the blogosphere surrounding the impact of social bookmarking sites. One site, User/Submitter tries to game the system by paying diggers to digg articles that are submitted by paying users. I have a feeling that this site will receive similar feedback to Payperpost prior to their forced disclosure rules. I wonder how many diggers have already decided that they are willing to game the system, and how many pay. Either way, this system can’t be allowed to continue much longer without forced disclosure, in the form of an appended title or description when digging. A third but less likely alternative is for Digg to add on a check box when digging that asks whether or not this is a sponsored posting. If User/Submitter becomes an accepted practice (which I seriously doubt it will be), what is stopping Digg from becoming a sponsored posting broker? Sites like Techmeme already successfully do this, why not Digg?

After reading “That’s Not How You Do It Obama” I decided to check out Barack Obama’s new social network. I think that Fred (the author of A VC) makes a good point that the site shouldn’t be experiencing server overload, but aside from that I think the site is pretty good. If Obama is trying to enable a grassroots movement then this is surely one way to do it. Give those that need it, a single source for managing the movement. While I also agree with Fred that most of the people that are going to blog about Obama already have blogs, I don’t think that it is necessary to integrate the other blogs into Obama’s website. I think setting up the site was a great move by Obama’s team. While the highly tech savvy individuals may not be as impressed by the site features, I think that the non- to mid-tech savvy individuals will be. I’ll be interested to see if any of the other candidates begin to provide similar services. Additionally it will be interesting to see if the grassroots methods will be able to successfully overcome the old-school campaign tactics of the other candidates.

A couple days ago my friend Jesse Thomas discussed a pretty cool new service called Peel. Peel enables users to subscribe to MP3 blogs from the comfort of their desktop. Peel seamlessly integrates with your Itunes player. Unfortunately the service is only available for Mac users, but hopefully they release a PC version soon. This service is very similar to the web-based one I wrote about earlier this week called “Radio.Blog.Club”. I have yet to check out Peel since I spend most of my day on a PC, but when I get a chance I will definitely check it out on my Mac. Thanks for the heads up Jesse!

There’s been a fair amount of buzz in the blogosphere recently about the new social network, Flixster. Much of the buzz is a result of the company closing a new round of venture capital. As Read Write Web pointed out yesterday, Flixster provides users with movies, actors, photos, news, reviews, ratings, previews, quizzes, showtimes, and social networking.

The main competitor to Flixster is IMDB. Will Flixster be able to attract this crowd? I’m not sure but since yesterday Flixster has added over 100,000 users to it’s already large (over 9 million users) user base. The only thing that I see as an added benefit of Flixster over IMDB is the ability for users to create much more customized profiles than IMDB. Unfortunately for Flixster, I seriously doubt that will be enough to convert the dedicated IMDB community.

Yesterday, Hitwise released some interesting statistics about the impact of Superbowl commercials on web traffic. The results were pretty interesting. Some sites showed a significant increase including Budweiser, Budlight, and infoUSA. Showing the most significant increase was Snickers; a result of their controversial commercial with two men kissing.

The Hitwise article poses an interesting question, “What kind of traffic increase would be expected from $2.6 million in online advertising?” My guess is there would be a huge impact (at least a million unique visitors to your site). Additionally those users would be targeted users, not a broad based audience. Conversely, for large companies it’s probably best to use a diverse set of marketing channels. Check out LeeAnn Prescott’s article.