As I was going through my news this morning, I discovered that the global information powerhouse I used to work for, Experian, has acquired yet another data-rich internet company, Hitwise.

Don Robert, Chief Executive Officer of Experian, commented:

We have been successfully repositioning our Marketing Solutions business to meet our clients’ needs as they continue to switch more of their advertising spend online. Hitwise, which is a rapidly growing, successful business, brings new, unique data to Experian and complements the existing data, tools and expertise that we already offer to clients in other areas such as research services and email distribution.

If you look in my top nav, you will see that I just added a new menu item: Blizzogroll.

Prior to my recent redesign, I featured a regular blogroll in the sidebar, which was displayed sitewide. I dropped it with this new design, so I decided to create a new page that featured all of the industry related blogs that I read on a regular basis.

Hey peeps! I submitted a last-minute entry into the Marketing Pilgrim Scholarship Contest.

The five finalists will be the authors of the five entries that receive the most traffic over the course of four weeks from the time their entries are published. Then those five entries will be voted upon by a panel of judges made up of top industry experts. The finalist with the most votes wins!

Hey! It’s Friday!!! Go ahead, take a break… you deserve it!

Virtual Breakroom

I just happened to find this fun little site randomly. It looks like a viral effort put out by Kelly Services. Unfortunately, for them, it doesn’t look like they did a good job with the viral part! Yahoo’s Site Explorer tells us that are only 86 inlinks. The Internet Archive shows the first cache on January 25, 2006.

I run one AdSense ad at the bottom of the sidebar and another one in the footer on this site. Today, for the first time, I noticed a little X at the top right corner of these ads:

Video ad:

(Click on image for full size)

Flash ad:

(Click on image for full size)

If you click on the little X, the ads will disappear!

No more video ad: