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MarketingWonk, on agency snobbery towards adwords/adsense: “I’m getting negative vibes from the professional ad community, but mostly I think because syndicated text ads isn’t glamourous [sic] and it cuts out a lot of middle men and agencies.”

John Battelle wonders if you are compelled to stare at the Bruce Clay search engine landscape chart via Kottke. If you do, you will notice that its not quite what it appears. Consolidation means that there are only 8 companies involved (I’ve highlighted them in separate colors above) and the outbound link from Looksmart has now gone, leaving only 2 3rd party providers, Google and Yahoo.

Google AdSense: A better way to make ad revenue Hmm. Update, this is even more absurd: Perhaps the strapline should have read: “Google Adwords, Ads that work unless you are in advertising and are an expert in ads in which case adwords are far too subtle” or “Google Adwords, ads that don’t always work” or “Google Adwords, as not used by Google and not suitable for advertising execs or children under 5” For the sake of brand marketing instead of ‘marketing marketing solutions to marketing people’ – as they used to say in 1999, Google should eat its own dogfood and advertising people should feed from the same bowl.

orkut – terms of service: “By submitting, posting or displaying any Materials on or through the orkut.com service, you automatically grant to us a worldwide, non-exclusive, sublicenseable, transferable, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right to copy, distribute, create derivative works of, publicly perform and display such Materials.” OK- this is not unusual, even if aggressively worded, but considering that Orkut has a great deal more personal profiling than most social network tools, isn’t it about time that people started an identity system where people actually owned their own identity. Think how useful it is for Google to have your personal profile in order to target ads at you, particularly as they go after the $25billion yellow pages advertising market. People are giving valuable information away for free as part of a game.