by Claudine Zap He may be down, but don't count this ousted Illinois governor out. Blago's back. Not as governor, but Rod Blagojevich has launched a website: GovernorRod.com. As his publicist put it , "Rod Blagojevich needed his own website. "It was time." Good point. After all, he's already put in radio and TV appearances, acted in a comedy about the corruption allegations against him, and impersonated Elvis . Really, having a site online seems long overdue.

Microsoft Advertising will be taking part in "The Big Ad Gig," a contest where eight contestants will compete for a job at a top ad agency. Here's the latest from the wires: The Big Ad Gig , ( www.thebigadgig.com ) a first ever event will be held at The New York Times Building at 10:00 a.m. on Thursday, September 24th in conjunction with Advertising Week 09. The premise of the event takes a page from the American Idol format; A panel of Creative Directors,

We always have great deals on Bing Shopping for you, and now, for a limited time, we are making them even better! Starting today, youll be able to find cashback rewards as high as 50% from select merchants for this back to school shopping season. Think of this as a Bing stimulus package! With all of these increased savings, Bing cashback gets you even more cashback than before! Now is a great time to buy that laptop and MP3 player you have always wanted or your bags,

Google continues to ramp up Google Maps marketing and education to lure more users to its Web services. Today, the company aggregated the information Web site and blog owners need to add a Google map to their Web sites. The new Google Maps Get Maps Web page tells novice map makers how to do anything from plotting locations to embedding driving directions, and provides more advanced custom mapping options for programmers.

Constable Scott Mills has served as a police officer with the Toronto Police Service in Canada since 2002. His current role is Community Youth Officer for the Toronto Crime Stoppers program , where he works to build healthy relationships between young people, community members and the police department. We've asked Scott to share his experiences using Facebook to fight crime by connecting with the community.

Hi all, I'm Heinz Waelchli, director of product marketing. I wanted to quickly clarify a couple things around the conversation taking place on blogs and online sites over the past couple days. Our send money service, which we updated back in mid-June, gives people an easy way to send money to .

Probably the most important step in getting your site found in a search engine is the one in which the search engine crawls it. There are things that can be done and things that can be avoided to make this process as painless as possible for the search engine, which will in turn, make it as painless as possible for the webmaster. Since Google dominates the search market share by such a large market share,

Just in time for the back-to-school days shopping gigs of U.S. households with student members in the family, Bing is offering double cash back when you search and shop through Bing Shopping.  Dubbed "double savings day", this promotional gig will pay users twice the amount of what they usually get when they do use Bing shopping search to purchase stuff online. This could go as high as 50% total cashback.

Oopsies! Did anybody see this coming? I mean Facebook and Friendfeed joining forces. The official announcement from both Facebook and Friendfeed is out. Facebook agrees to acquire Friendfeed and Friendfeed accepts Facebook friend request and they live happily ever after. But how about the loyal Friendfeed users? Will they live happily ever after as well? There were no details on the financial aspects of the merger yet. Any idea how much Facebook bought Friendfeed?

Facebook has acquired FriendFeed , a social media aggregator. As Facebook has looked recently to improve and expand features like its live feed and search, this acquisition makes a lot of sense. FriendFeed makes it easy to share social media updates such as Tweets, blogs, and yes, Facebook updates all in one place. Facebook also enables updates, but through applications and APIs. In other words, it's just a heckuva lot easier on FriendFeed.