I say let them battle it out, because the real advertising value, measurement and trackability is in RSS feeds. The recent article RSS Ad Response Tops E-Mail in InternetNews.com shows how RSS advertising is more targeted and more effective than e-mail advertising, and e-mail blows away banner advertising based on impressions.

It makes sense since RSS is a consumer controlled subscription-based information channel. The future of RSS advertising is tremendous. Through our own Castlock RSS platform we are successfully testing advertising scenarios that offer highly targeted text and image advertising based on RSS feed content. So we are not just sending out the same advertisement through the feed, but have a cadre of ads ready to be distributed based on the content of the feed. So imagine if CNN could tell Toyota, that they run its ads only in content tagged with a specific set of keywords. Now you're talking targeted advertising.

So go ahead and battle it out over page views, and leave RSS to the professionals who know the value of targeted, highly converting RSS advertising. We'll see you all at the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Laurie Petersen of MediaPost has a nice recap on her blog post - looking at WPP Group, Google and Microsoft all making huge multi-million/billion dollar acquisitions.

Microsoft's purchase of aQuantive is most interesting to us, as Avenue A comes with that package. This is in our mind is a great strategy, as Avenue A|Razorfish provides the expertise to clients seeking to use the actual medium.

What's next? Google's recent universal search announcement, I believe the next logical step is to take a look at how companies are going to implement search visibility strategies leveraging their own sites and taking control of and managing thier ow digital assets. The push is to become their own content publishers and feed the searc engines with new and relevant content. Right now, one sees companies leveraging social media (YouTub, MySpace, Flickr) to increase online search visibility.

The true breakthrough is to implement a RSS media casting strategy on their own site for their own content. So right now you have very large companies with websites that have no RSS feeds coming off them at all. With Google indexing RSS feeds, this is a tremendous waste of an opportunity. When compaines are looking at social media, word of mouth strategies it's all about leveraging other services. The focus now needs to turn internal where they can have a single system to manage and syndicate their own audio, video and text content.

So, this might answer a lot of questions we get about why Room 214 a search marketing, social media agency, also has its own CastLock (now Post Zinger) product. What we are doing is providing not only the marketing strategy, but the distribution and RSS management strategy for a client's content.

4:25 - TidBit Factoid of the number of IE6 v IE7 users recognized through analytics

6:07 - No one can remember what Microsoft's Pay Per Click is called.

6:45 - Yahoo!'s Panama PPC program transition horrors and the crap sandwiches they handed to Ben.

7:50 - Yahoo!'s exclusive ad deal with Comcast.

10:00 - What to do to get sales in two weeks - buy your way in with Yahoo! Search Submit Pro program.

12:29 - SEO as part of the web design process

14:14 - Digg's DVD Encryption Code train wreck.

17:27 - CastLock blows the doors off NBC's little RSS buy. but the price will be much higher than $150K.

Possibly cooler: the video title, description, thumbnail images, comments, and number of views tracked in YouTube will automatically be pulled and displayed within a client's domain. Always keeping an SEO focus, the client maintains the ability to add keyword tagging to each entry - and of course, all RSS feed stats are available for meaningful reporting. Fun stuff.