Last week I spoke with Mark Bole from BigMouthMedia, about the recent merger of LBi and Obtineo (BigMouthMedia's holding company) and â?¬40m more capital . I wanted to get a bit more detail about what the deal means for search marketers and get a sense of whether this was a strategic or reactive response to changes in the market. Click to read the rest of this post.

On Monday, I went to the South by Southwest panel - How Does an Advertising Pro Adapt to New Communication Techniques? I had been looking forward to this session. One of the presenters, Damon Brewster, had written an interesting blog post about why he feels the SXSW conference is important for advertisers, in a way comparable to the advertising industry extravaganza in Cannes, http://www.boardsmag.com/community/blogs/input/index.php?p=844 .

Sit back, relax, and digest this thing. Click to read the rest of this post.

We recently announced the launch of orkut video chat, an easy way for you and your friends to keep in touch, virtually face-to-face, directly from your orkut pages. To enjoy this feature, all you need is a webcam and a small plugin - free at www.google.com/chat/video . Take a look at this video to see how it works: Remember that to be able to chat or video chat, first you have to validate your e-mail address on orkut. To learn more, visit this help center page . Also,

Anywhere there is controversy you will find many marketers who will opine and try to shine the lights on themselves about how wonderful they are and how much they help everyone else and how everyone should link to them in the controversy. But when the attention dies down it turns out few marketers hold true to their promises and stick with their principals. It is usually the unsung heroes that make a difference, not as a cheesy marketing strategy,

Twitter should soon become more ubiquitous across the Web. Today, the company's cofounders announced something called @anywhere that should help integrate the Twitter experience into standard sites, and a number of impressive organizations have agreed to take part in the initial rollout. Evan Williams essentially handled the SXSW side of things this afternoon, discussing @anywhere during his keynote address. You can read our liveblogged coverage of that talk here .

No, it's not Twitter's new advertising platform. Click to read the rest of this post.

by Mike Krumboltz Perhaps this announcement should have waited until April 20, but there was no holding back the news. Harold and Kumar are coming back for a third big screen adventure. A buzzy blog from IGN explains that actor John Cho (aka "Harold") told Collider that "the film is moving forward and the plan is to shoot this June." The film is currently titled "A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas," and, yes, Neil Patrick Harris is expected to sign on.

Although the "thud" wasn't verified until this afternoon, it seems that an online giant fell a couple of days ago. According to new data from Hitwise, Facebook managed to beat Google in terms of visits between March 7th and March 13th, becoming the most visited website in the U.S. for the week. The graph visible below makes the changeup pretty clear (blame the sloppy enlarged bit on us, not Hitwise). What's more,

You could see this coming a mile away. Click to read the rest of this post.