by Vera H-C Chan File this under the Halloween Tricks or Treats: Once again , three politicians made the top 10 most searched personalities this month. Considering all the campaign spending and debating and "Saturday Night Live"-ing they had to do, they deserve it. Ponder the month in which the Dow proved manic-depressive and baseball pitted underdog against underdog. Debates, Infomercials,

by Mike Krumboltz Can you see it? There, on the horizon. It's the finish line to this bloody election. Before it becomes nothing but a very long, drawn-out memory, let's take a look back at the campaign's surprising stars. Folks who, for a variety of reasons, for better or worse, became household names. Joe the Plumber Who he is: Just a plumber from Ohio, thank you very much. Why you know him: John McCain mentioned him a few dozen times in the third debate. Get a room, guys.

TechCrunch today has no treatsand no joy, no, not even Almond Joyfor Facebook in reporting about its projected financial woes . For a company once valued at $15 billion , things are looking grim as the cash supplies may dwindle long before Facebook is ready or willing to go to IPO. There's no denying that Facebook continues to enjoy incredible popularity worldwidebut that could be part of the problem. Facebook's worldwide growth has been strong over the last year,

by Vera H-C Chan Nevada holds five electoral cards, Colorado plays out nine. Presidential candidates John McCain (R) and Barack Obama (D) hone in on those 14, as November 4 draws ever nearer. The Buzz Log daily countown has already counted the search activity from states Montana and New Hampshire and New Mexico and Virginia . Here is day three in our look at what intel the battleground states are seeking in their presidential pick.

Lewis Black once opined that Halloween in New York is redundant. Having seen a man in a one piece kilt strolling down 52nd street in April I'm inclined to agree so just consider this Flickr set to be Reprise Media's New York office in their natural, organic state. Happy Halloween everyone, and remember the only thing scarier than a ghost is people who don't vote!

This morning the 8th social media breakfast meeting (started by Rick Mahn ) was held at the Deluxe HQ here in the Twin Cities.? In a very short time this meeting of a few social media enthusiasts at a coffee house has grown to over 125 people hosted by the likes of? Best Buy and PartnerUp, a company acquired by Deluxe. The main speaker at this morning's event was David Meerman Scott , popular author of several books including,

Linkedin , a professional networking social site has just announced the introduction applications that enable you to collaborate on projects, get key insights, and present your work to the world's largest professional network.Currently they have not opened the platform up to all developers but rather evaluate the requests to develop for the linkedin platform.

by Jennifer Laycock Anyone with a brick and mortar presence who has tried to calculate the true ROI of organic and paid search knows how hard it can be to tie an offline sale with online research. We know shoppers end up conducting multiple searches and visiting multiple sites before they end up buying and that they usually end up buying offline and yet we fail to tie our marketing efforts together with any type of consistency.

by Scott Buresh Even with the cookie-type behavioral advertising technology, there was a way for users to prevent these ads from targeting them. They could set their machines not to accept any cookies at all by setting their browser security setting to high. This solved the privacy issue, although many websites would (intentionally or not) render improperly with this setting on. In recent news on the behavioral advertising technology front,

One of the new features in the Microsoft adCenter Fall Upgrade is that the EditorialStatus element of the Ad and Keyword data objects now gets populated with the specific object's editorial status. Previously those elements were not used. The EditorialStatus element is read-only, and its value is assigned by adCenter based on the result of the editorial review of the ad or keyword.