When my brother in law told me KrispyKreme was going to come out with a donut flavored milkshake I didn't believe him.  I guess he was right after all.  I can't wait to try one for myself.

I know this is a little bit of a stretch but you've got to see these videos of preacher Robert Tilton and his ordeal with flatulence.  Too funny!

Preacher Video 1
Preacher Video 2

Yesterday I took the time to review some of the sites Shellen posted as well as some of the 36 bloggers who were invited to be part of the press at the Democratic Natl. Convention.  Today Wired did a great writeup on lessons learned and how bloggers are actually doing and what makes their thoughts and insights interesting.  It's a great read.

I think it's interesting that MSNBC, Knight Ridder, Associated Press, CNN all have professional bloggers covering the event and have put some serious dough into the architecture that powers it and the marketing to let everyone know about it.  We're entering another one of those great times in the internet where what was once free and done by novices is becoming mainstream and powered by corporate America.

Blog On!

In an interesting excerpt from MIT today, the Democratic National Committee is allowing 36 bloggers to "officially" cover the convention.  The only question the democrats have is whether or not these bloggers will be able to become real journalists.  That's such bs, bloggers aren't journalists.  Bloggers are opinionated folk that cover specific genres and know their selected genre well.  Now don't get me wrong, one of my favorite bloggers is covering the convention as well but I'm not sure he's going to give it the slant the old Donkeys are looking for.  Actually, the more I think about it, maybe it's a great idea.  I mean, you're going to have folks that may not know the first thing about politics commenting on stuff like Kerry's tie and how his hair looks like a fiberglass mold and how when they were watching him speak they couldn't help but think about the flash video by jimjam showing him and George W. singing and dancing together.

MSN released it's personalized news search service in the United States today.  Chris Sherman points out the details about the MSN newsbot and what makes it unique.

"What sets NewsBot apart are the history and personalization features designed to help you easily find news relevant to your own interests. As you read stories, the site tracks the topics that you're interested in, suggesting similar stories in related areas."

Privacy advocates should be okay with this feature since Chris mentions
"The site captures no personal data other than the stories you've read.  Recommendations for similar stories are made based on stories that other NewsBot users have read.  A great comparison is much like what Amazon does today, said Justin Osmer, product manager for MSN Search, citing Amazon's 'Customers who bought this book also bought' feature."

I like the fact that I'm able to aggregate the data from 4,800 news sources but I don't want to log into yet another website

While chatting with one of my ex-coworkers from Oracle he reminded me of something I told him about 5 years ago.  He was asking me about accounting software and said QuickBooks looks like a pain to learn.  I told him the setup is the hard part but there are many accountants that will set it up for you and the maintenance is a breeze.  He says, "it's like you told me before, I'm from the 80's and don't like computers".  I about died laughing and couldn't believe how rude that sounded, but then as usual I started thinking.

It's amazing how the graduating high school classes of the 80's were just on the edge of the personal computing revolution but how now they are leading the charge forward into more and more digital ventures.  The 90's was when the personal computing revolution really went into full swing and was when I was able to switch from a gaming pioneer Amiga 500 to a real machine.

There's a good article on clickZ about using AdWords as a research tool.  For those who are new to search engine marketing and want to get started but don't know where or how to use what is available it's good reading.

Here are a couple excerpts from the article.

"Over 100,000 people have tried AdWords, and that number is rising very quickly. In fact, demand is starting to overrun keyword supply. That's leading to prices too high for some marketers.  After initiating an AdWords campaign, you'll soon receive feedback on the popularity of the search terms, or keywords, you selected. You know almost immediately which words are most popular and entered most frequently Google's search box.  In addition to the number of searches on your words and the CTR, you can tie data from a Web-related event on your site to the ad data to get an even better measurement on what keywords work best for you."

In a post on search engine lowdown today Andy Beal points to an article written by another leading pundit in the sem industry, Mike Grehan.  Mike Grehan just published an article pointing out some serious issues with SEMPO.  I encourage all interested in the objective, unbiased representation of search engine marketing as a credible industry to read this post.