Google killed Twitter today. With the launch of Google Buzz they ruthlessly attacked Twitter’s weaknesses and quietly set the scene for subsequent creeping infiltration into Microsoft’s stronghold in the enterprise market. Buzz is a big deal.

Despite the gloom hanging over the holiday shopping season, affiliates can boost sales by giving consumers what they crave: value.

Last year, Kim Berry gave her husband Dennis a miter saw and a massage chair pad. He gave her a high-end juicer, a DNA test for their mixed-breed dog and jewelry. There were also plenty of smaller gifts under the tree, and they spent $1,200 on gifts for their parents, a grandmother, brothers, sisters, nieces and nephews.

Whether the worst is behind us or yet to come, we know for a fact that people’s spending habits have changed and won’t be changing back for some time. Everyone is watching their wallet and pinching pennies – making every dollar count. So what does that mean for us as marketers?

We still have products and services that people want and need, we just need to make sure our website visitors understand why they still want what we’re offering – tight pockets or not.

Everybody’s favorite media professor says we’re getting bored with new media. And that’s a good thing, especially if you want consumers to click on your ad.

It’s been about 15 years since the browser Mosaic unlocked the World Wide Web for millions of people. But most of them – most of us – still stumble around cyberspace wide-eyed, knowing we’re in the middle of something very cool, but not quite sure what it is or how to make the most of it.

In the mid-to-late '90s, none of the search engines wanted to be mere search engines, because searchers quickly left their sites. Instead, they largely ignored search to create portals - those sticky sites they hoped would show more advertising to each visitor by catering to all of their information needs.

All of the predictions that 2007 would be the year of online video came true in spades - it rapidly gained in popularity as a medium last year and its momentum continues today.

The long-lasting Hollywood writers' strike possibly hastened the migration of people to pass their time visiting online video sites due to the lack of television programming. It's not just old episodes of "Grey's Anatomy" they are watching online, but all sorts of content.

Has this ever happened to you?

It's late evening and your weekly newsletter, which would normally be queued for delivery on your autoresponder and blog by this time, is still nothing more than the vast white expanse of a blank Word document. Not only haven't you written a word, you also don't have the first clue what to write about, or which product you should try to sell.

Although you are usually passionate about your topic - organic vegetable gardening - you begin to wonder what the heck you were thinking when you chose to build a site around a seasonal niche.

Japan's had it hard. After nearly a decade of stock market doldrums and an economy on the brink of disaster - just as the rest of Asia struggled too - Japan bounced back. Growth happened. Its economy is still a tad slow, but there are many industries looking way up. Online marketing is one of them.

Mancini says she thought the Internet was the wave of the future and wanted a way to connect and be part of it. She waited to get on the Internet until after her younger daughter's third birthday because she had the feeling that once she got on it she would never get off. And she was right.

Although she knew she wanted to sell something online, she had no idea what. She says she just had a feeling that "the Internet was going to be the place to be."

I degraded myself as a content publisher twice last week. In both cases, after reviewing my Google Alerts and picking the day's hot news item, I wrote a blog entry that included a quote, a few inane comments about the topic and a link back to the original post.

It's a technique commonly used by bloggers to drive traffic to their sites through backlinks. Indeed, some bloggers use this pseudo-journalistic technique to play follow-the-leader every day, while others re-post scraped blog content exclusively - without added commentary.