How Much is McCain Paying to Advertise on This Blog? Will it Be Easy to Block Such Ads?

I had to chuckle this morning when I revisited a year-old post about Lara Logan (it’s been receiving traffic lately in the aftermath of her appearance last week on The Daily Show) and found this John McCain for President Google image ad at the bottom of the page:

why is john mccain advertising on my blog

SearchEngineWatch points to a couple interviews in which Google Ad execs predict that both candidates Obama and McCain will depend heavily on Adwords bidding wars and that the Clinton campaign was inconsistent with it’s usage of Google’s Adsense and Adwords platforms.

According to Adsense’s cost-estimate tool, the keyword Obama costs an estimated $0.88 – $1.23 per click (CPC). So, essentially the party who wishes to advertise on a website contextually relevant to the keyword “Obama” would have to outbid other potential advertisers. “Barack Obama” scored similarly on estimated CPC, but the estimated CPC for “McCain” is $1.23 – $1.85 — signficantly higher, implying that someone is driving up the bidding to advertise on websites/blogs featuring the word “mccain.” It comes as little surprise to find Barack Obama ads at the bottom of my posts that feature McCain. Yet, in the instance of the Lara Logan post, I’m betting that the McCain ad was picking up the “Iraq” keyword and advertising on that (Obama-related posts appear to be plastered with pro-Obama Google ads).

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Sonoma County Wine Tasting – June 2008

The below map is a sketch of some or all of the vineyards we’ll visit on this lovely afternoon. From the Hilton north of Santa Rosa, to Silver Oak (and possibly Meeker) and points Geyserville / Dry Creek, including Ferrari Cerrano, Bella, Mauritson, and Mazzocco. Followed by lunch in Healdsburg, then a scenic drive to Ledson in Kenwood, with possible stops at Mayo Family and finally Roshambo before a roadside nap and then drive to drop off the rentacar at SFO in time for an 8:15 flight.

Anything I ABSOLUTELY MUST hit along this route that I’ve left out? DO let me know with a text message (323.679.4945) or follow the adventure here. Photos and tasting notes to follow.


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Twitter vs Friendfeed vs Plurk

Inspired by this Google Trends chart of Twitter v. Friendfeed posted by Ole Begemann I threw the new, horizontally dynamic visual timeline updating comment threading microblogging platform Plurk into the mix.

I tried Plurk a couple weeks back for a day. Returned on the following two days and have not returned since. There are way too many of these types of services and they don’t dynamically reflect and refract as they should. Same reason I latched onto FriendFeed as opposed to the — possibly more attractive and fun to use — SocialThing. But what IS interesting is that — according to Google Trends’ calculations, Plurk.. in only a few weeks… has set a higher trend base/level than Friendfeed — whether this is because friendfeed is widely accessed via third party apps such as Facebook, Twhirl, and AlertThingy, I’m not sure. But what is interesting is that it appears to be quite sticky and in Brazil and Taiwan is already out-“trending” Friendfeed.

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