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AOL’s ad network, Platform-A, is going on tour. The 5-city event begins in New York City on November 17th at the American Museum of Natural History. The next stop will be Atlanta on November 20.

The tour will break for the holidays before hitting Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco in 2009.

“AOL has one of the largest, most diverse and most engaged audiences on the Web, and combined with Platform-A’s industry-leading technologies, we can offer advertisers a unique combination of scale, integrated branding, and advanced targeting capabilities to enable them to deliver their branding messages in an effective, engaging and highly efficient way,” said Platform-A President Lynda Clarizio. “At a time when companies make sure that every penny spent on advertising counts, AOL delivers quality content and engaged consumers and Platform-A connects marketers to this audience to drive superior results.”

Related Reading:
AOL’s Platform-A Collaborates with T-mobile for 2 Day, Billion Impression Ad Blitz
AOL’s Platform-A Unveils Plans for Self-Service Ad Marketplace Exchange
AOL’s Platform-A Launches iPhone Advertising Solution

AOL’s Platform-A has collaborated with T-mobile for a two day ad blitz. The campaign will have the mobile carrier buying 1 billion impressions over the two day time frame, which is expected to reach 81.5 million consumers. Platform-A currently reaches 90% of the U.S. internet audience.

What will be advertised? The new Android-powered G1, of course!

“The T-Mobile G1 offers a rich, accessible mobile Web experience for the masses, so we want to drive that message to the broadest range of U.S. consumers possible,” said Brett Dennis, director, branded entertainment and media management, T-Mobile USA. “The groundbreaking experience of the T-Mobile G1 is really what motivated us to pursue this exceptional online advertising program.”

Clearly, both AOL and T-mobile are gunning for the upcoming holiday season:

“The innovation behind the T-Mobile Billion Block clearly demonstrates the value marketers place on the combination of reach, impact and innovation that only Platform-A can offer,” said Lynda Clarizio, President of Platform-A. “It also spotlights the role online media will play in the upcoming buying season, with strategic marketers like T-Mobile relying on the near-universal reach of Platform-A to connect with United States consumers in an effective, efficient and engaging way.”

I’m sure I don’t have to remind you that election day is next Tuesday. Whether you’re observing or you’re breaking out the campaign gear for some hardcore get out the vote effors this weekend, here are some tools to help you keep up with the news and your efforts:

Google Earth

You can download a KML file that lets you search results from past elections, since 1980. The data is broken down and can show you how different regions of the country voted - even by county. I used to work as a political consultant, and let me tell you - this kind of data is heavily relied on. It’s a bit of a late release for campaigns, who already have this data. But it’s great for political junkies.

Google News

Trying to remember what a candidate said on an issue? Just type their name into Google News. If Google has indexed a quote by that person, it will appear on top of the search results in the one box.

Google Mobile

Want to know your precinct location? The Google Mobile team has created a special tool just for that purpose. Go to m.google.com/elections on your mobile phone, type in your address and you’ll be directed to your precinct.

The tool did not point me to early voting locations, which in my state are not the same as Election Day precinct locations.

As cool as that is, always verify with your local elections office. Google even helps you do that. They have a box where you enter your state’s abbreviation, and it will pull up relevant links to voting information.

Yahoo Elections Hub and Political Dashboard

Yahoo makes the most of its successful portal platforms with its Elections Hub and Political Dashboard. The dashboard is a super slick map showing the latest poll results. Hopefully they update it with real time results on election night. I can totally see myself keeping the dashboard open while watching results come in on the tv.

Microsoft Live Search xRank

xRank, Live Search’s buzz tool, has a politician section. It’s no surprise that the Rep and Dem presidential and vice presidential candidates take the top 4 spots today. The rest of the top 20 is filled with senate and gubernatorial races, with Hillary Clinton and George Bush thrown in for good measure.

MSN Election Live Q&A

Q&A is Live Search’s answer product, and over at the MSN Election Guide, you can find the Election Live Q&A. It’s pretty straightforward. You can ask and answer questions about the election in real time.

AOL Elections Toolbar

AOL has a toolbar for IE and Firefox that can keep you up to date with election news. If you like to surf the net while watching TV - this could be an ideal toolbar for you come Tuesday night.

Well, hopefully that’s enough to keep you busy and up to date.

Got any tools to share? Leave your suggestions in the comments.

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Bill Tancer, the General Manager of Research at Hitwise and one of the keynote speakers at Search Engine Strategies Chicago, will be interviewed by Matt McGowan, Global VP of Marketing at Incisive Media, during an SES Webcast on Friday, Nov. 7, 2008, at 1:00 p.m. EDT / 10:00 a.m. PDT. The title of Bill’s presentation is: “We Are What We Search.”

At a time when search engines are rapidly replacing the yellow pages (and news search engines are routinely scooping daily newspapers), Bill has access to a wealth of consumer information about Internet user behavior that was never available before. Bill is well known in the search industry for mining the latest Hitwise data, which is a sample of over 10 million Internet users U.S. and 25 million worldwide, to glean insights on the sites we collectively visit, what we search for and what that tells us about ourselves.

I spoke with Bill yesterday and he shared this news nugget with me: “I’m going to talk primarily about what search term data can tell us about the economy and consumer sentiment. I’ll also spend some time on finding insights on the effect of an economic downturn on search. You might expect that with recent contractions in online retail that search traffic to that category would be declining….Our data (while showing a recent small drop-off) indicates that search traffic to retail is up over the previous year….”

Bill’s webcast will cover other news-breaking search trends, implications for online advertisers, and he will give Webcast participants opportunities to ask him their most burning search trend questions! Oh, and Bill will give away 10 copies of his latest book, “Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why It Matters,” to the best questions fielded during the SES Webcast.

comScore released a study today that found 14.5 million people in the U.K. visited at least one blog in August, representing 41% of the total U.K. Internet audience.

“Blogs have become part of the essential fabric of the Internet today,” Herve Le Jouan, Managing Director of comScore Europe said in a press release. “They live and breathe in real-time, helping quench media consumers’ thirst for the most up-to-date breaking news, information, and analysis. It should not, therefore, be particularly surprising that they’re increasingly displacing traditional media usage and carving out an ever-increasing slice of the online advertising pie,” he added.

Two of the most popular blogs in the U.K. are gadget blogs: Engadget.com, which ranked as the top individual blog in August with 243,000 visitors, and Gizmodo.com, which ranked third with 223,000 visitors. UnrealityTV.co.uk (225,000 visitors), Kotaku.com (210,000 visitors), and Metafilter.com (207,000 visitors) rounded out the top five.

According to the comScore Segment Metrix H/M/L service, which looks at online activity by heavy, medium and light users of the Internet, heavy blog users were 142% more likely than the average Internet user to visit a site in the “humour” category, a testament perhaps to the sharp wit often associated with blogging. They are also likely to be tech savvy, which can be seen by their skew in visiting technology news categories.

I’ve met a couple of “heavy” blog users in the U.K. — who weigh 38 stone between them.

Seriously, blogs are big in old Blighty. If you check out the agenda for SES London 2009, which has already been posted, you’ll see there will be a session on Feb. 18, 2009, on “SEO Through Blogs and Feeds.” And, who — you may ask — is responsible for that?

Search Engine Strategies London 2009 is organized and hosted by world-renowned search authority Mike Grehan. As you can see below, I interviewed Mike back at SES London 2008. And you can detect some of that “humour” and tech savvy that comScore just reported, although there is no way that Mike weighs more than 14 stone. But, of course, I’m just guessing.

Mike Grehan, Acronym, on SES London 2008

Social search engine Scour is now faster. Not only that, there’s a whole host of new things that have been added.

Such as:

• Search speed improved by 80%—For example, a search for “shoes” is averaging .123 seconds with the newly overhauled speed.
• New layout—Limited the top sponsored results and added more listings per page to help users find what they’re searching for quicker and without clutter.
• New search filter—Double click on any word in the results to add or remove the word to your search.
• Open results in new tab—More tabs available for easy navigation.
• Site search from results—Now users can conduct a site search using their current query on any site in the results page.
• Better comment view—Users can better organize comments left by other Scour members
• Enhanced points box—Users can get a detailed snapshot of their total points breakdown with a simple click without leaving the page they are on.

What do you think about the updates? Let us know in the comments.

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Is It Time for Social Search?
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Google Translate has released a few updates to help you translate, or not, your pages for your site visitors.

First up is a widget that you can place on your site to offer visitors translation via Google Translate. It’s very Google branded, so that may deter some, but here’s what it looks like:

Secondly, there are code snippets available if you do NOT want Google to be able to translate your page or certain parts of a page.

class=notranslate is available for any html element. Here’s an example:

For an entire page, use meta tags like this:

Available languages include:

Arabic
• Bulgarian
• Catalan
• Chinese
• Croatian
• Czech
• Danish
• Dutch
• English
• Filipino
• Finnish
• French
• German
• Greek
• Hebrew
• Hindi
• Indonesian
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Latvian
• Lithuanian
• Norwegian
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Romanian
• Russian
• Serbian
• Slovak
• Slovenian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Ukrainian
• Vietnamese

Related Reading:
Google Translate Adds 11 Languages
Google Translate Goes Live with Human Translators
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When it comes to conducting a local search, where do people begin their searches? This is the topic of a recent survey conducted by TMP Directional Marketing. They found that search engines top the list of sources used first in local search. Here’s the breakdown:

• Search Engines (31%)
• Print Yellow Pages or White Pages (30%)
• Internet Yellow Pages Sites (19%)
• Local Search Sites (11%)

People searching for local businesses online has increased from 26% in 2007 to 30% in 2008.

90 percent of those surveyed find Yellow Pages directories a valuable source for business information, however, Yellow Pages usage experienced a 3 percent decline from 2007 to 2008.

20% of shoppers with standard cell phones have conduct a local search on their mobile device, while 60% of shoppers with Wi-Fi enabled phones have conducted local mobile searches.

What do you think of this data? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

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Getting to Know Local SEO
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Ok, this is isn’t search related, but it’s too much fun not to cover. Gmail has released another Labs feature. This one is called Mail Goggles and it’s intended to help you avoid sending those late night or weekend emails that you’ll regret later.

When the feature is enabled, you have to answer simple math problems before an email will send during those most vulnerable emails-I-will-later-regret times.

Of course, if you’re having a perfectly sane moment but math isn’t your strong suit, you’ll need to break out your trusty calculator (or enter that math problem into Google search).

But at least now there’s technology that has your back in those weak moments.

Related Reading:
Google Responds to Gmail Privacy Concerns
Gmail and Search/E-Mail Integration