This week, Google has announced two major deals. Beating out Yahoo, Google will gain access to the nearly 100 million users of MySpace, providing web search and sponsored search links for the social networking site.

The deal extends over three years and nine months and grants Google exclusive rights to provide search and ads not only to MySpace but also other Fox Interactive Media properties. The deal will begin in the fourth quarter, with Google guaranteeing at least $900 million to FIM over three years.

At the same time, they’ve announced a deal with MTV parent Viacom to offer video clips from popular shows on websites in Google's AdSense online advertising network, reports USA Today . The result will be a first-of-its-kind syndication network of 4-5-minute ad-supported clips of TV shows on the web; but, for now, the deal consists of a test, starting late August, open only to select AdSense publishers. Ad revenue will be shared among MTV, Google and the website publishers.

These announcements come as Viacom is considering a bid for social networking site Bebo ; Viacom failed to defeat News Corp. in the race for MySpace last year, writes the Financial Times. So as you can Google is in the best position to reach the biggest media groups and by the way go more and more in media distribution.

Also Google and XM Radio have announced that they are about to introduce and make available commercial advertising inventory on XM’s non-music channels to Google’s extensive advertising base through its dMarc media network (www.dmarc.net). As part of the deal, Google advertisers will now have a simple, automated way to reach XM’s millions of subscribers nationwide and XM will have access to Google’s large and small advertisers to offer relevant, targeted messages to their subscribers

After months without posting, I talk about beer!!! (that's not what i've been doing)

According to a report in the The Wall Street Journal, Foster, is planning to shift its ad spending from television to the Internet.

The company has bought ads on Heavy, a site popular with young adult males, according to a Heavy representative. The ad campaign launches Aug. 16, when Heavy debuts a program called “Massive Mating Game.” Foster’s will also create humorous video commercials that it will post on other sites.

The move is a smart one, with Internet video appealing to the same demographic group that Foster’s is targetting.

It's a general trend in the beer universe, read this interesting article on the BIG AD for Carlton Draught

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Sell your handmade creation on www.etsy.com Have a look to this selling platform for the interesting objects and for the website/navigation itself. Like any other platform you can search by category, sellers...but also by colors, geolocalization and what they call the time machine. The user experience is incredibly convincing... Its just the beta version for now, I'll be curious to see what other innovative tools they are about to implement.

Skype is announcing that calls from Skype to a landline or mobile phone in the U.S. or Canada are now free, through the end of the year.

The Skype user must be in the U.S. or Canada at the time of the call (it doesn’t matter where your Skype account is set up), and the outbound call must be to a U.S. or Canadian POTS or mobile phone. Skype calls to U.S. numbers are currently priced at $0.02 per minute.

There are lots of other ways to make free calls in the U.S., but none that have no set monthly fee (Vonage has plans at $15/$25 per month, for example). This won’t help people overseas who are using Skype calling into the U.S., but it’s great to see calling fees disappear, one step at a time.

Google Trends launched today. It’s another analysis tool (and a good one), that allows you to see how often specific search terms are being entered into the Google search engine.

Up to five terms can be compared. And you can also view queries that contain either or two terms, using a vertical bar “|”. More advanced queries can be done as well - see the FAQs for details. Google also puts markers next to major news events that are about that search query, helping to explain surges. Data can be sorted by time, language, geographic location, etc.

I guess it would be quite interesting if, besides reporting on search terms popularity, Google Trends also reported web sites traffic like Alexa does. Google certainly has the resources and the info feed to do so. Their toolbar must be much more popular than Alexa’s own (remember, the data for that kind of analysis comes from the toolbars). Their rankings could be even more accurate than Alexa’s.

Napster is free again. Not in the same way it was free before, when it was a free file-sharing site that ran afoul of the RIAA, but it no longer requires everyone to pay to listen to music. Instead the songs will be ad-supported. A 15-second ad will run before you start listening to songs and more ads will pop up occasionally in between the music while it's playing. You can listen to the same song up to five times for free (with ads) before you're asked to either pay $.99 for it or pop for the subscription fee. Napster will integrate ads where it deems appropriate, such as by genre. It may even have advertisers create their own playlists.

As part of its effort to make RSS-feed ad-buying as simple as possible for marketers, FeedBurner has created a self-service tool that allows ad-buyers and planners to easily make their messages and campaigns available for feed insertion. The new service allows for self-directed media purchasing that bypasses needing to talk to one of those pesky human beings. Final veto over whether an ad is placed in a publisher's feed still lies with that publisher, but FeedBurner makes it pretty easy to find a publisher and tailor an ad so it fits nicely. In the post on their blog, the FeedBurner team hints at this being just one more step toward a full suite of products and functionality that will be unveiled in three or four months.

Pheedo is about to announce the launch of "Ads for Feeds," a new service that will make it easy for website publishers to insert and track the ads into their feeds. Ads for Feeds will provide a bit of code that publishers can copy and paste into their blogging platform template, with the basic version providing some basic stats and a more expensive version giving up more data. This is Pheedo's big push to grab the publsher market in the emerging RSS advertising space, according to president Bill Flitter.

Here is one of TBWA disruption case studies. It's pretty awesome, actually - i recommend reading it on the site. They changed the entire culture of the pedigree company, top down, starting by getting rid of the SVP of marketing, because she didn't like dogs. Pedigree

A really interesting viral campaign from Nokia: www.pjotro.com

Have a browse, it worses it...particularly Pjotro's life.

The New York Times has the scoop has the scoop this morning on GE’s One Second Theater,the new campaign from BBDO that’s a 21st-century take on the old General Electric Theater TV series from the ’50s and ’60s. The idea, basically, is that GE will place 1-second ads on TV networks, encouraging viewers with DVRs to pause the commercials and move through them frame by frame.

For those interested in examining trends and marketing buzz, Trendio.com has launched as a stock market for buzz-words: words that appear in the news are quoted in real time based on their presence in 3000 news sources. The goal is to provide a picture of what the media are talking about, which topics are in and which are out. There's also a game that allows users to manage a portfolio of words as if they were stocks. Users can buy and sell words and try to gain virtual dollars based on their feeling on which topics will get the most coverage, and rise the most in the coming hours, days or weeks. If trends and buzz words are you thing, then, I guess, so is Trendio.

The answer to this limerick used to be "a newspaper." Today it's the Blackberry.

Columbia Pictures is offering a free game for Blackberries to promote “RV,” the Robin Williams comedy that debuts April 28, according to BlackBerry Cool. The promotion is tied to the content. Williams’ character, Bob Munro, obsesses about staying connected to work. As I have discussed before, this is just the beginning of Blackberry marketing.

Never fake a blog touting your brand.

That seems like an obvious rule to me, but in the light of recent attempts at faking blogs, it’s worth clearly articulating. I’m not talking about “blogs” clearly associated with a (usually humorous) online marketing push. Rather, it’s those clunky, ad copy interpretations of typical blog style masquerading as an enthusiastic consumer’s heartfelt ramblings that are the problem here. Invariably, when a fraudulent blog (frog) is exposed, it generates a heated backlash and negative press. Of course, that is exactly the opposite of its intended, brand-furthering purpose. Worse still, it deepens bloggers’ already deep mistrust of marketing.

One icon : the mytic Chuck Taylor All Star shoe

One Modjo: 24 sec, to express yourself showing the shoe or not!

Wanna say something, go to www.conversegallery.com