If you're like me, you probably had a heck of a busy week with business and industry events including Ad:Tech and the MITX Awards show. On the weekends I try and pick up the slack in my personal life.

Now that the gnashing of teeth in New York over the election results seems to have quieted a bit, I thought I'd take a look back at one element of the recent presidential election.

If any of you read the trades, were in attendance at Ad:Tech in New York, or read anything about Ad:Tech this week, you came across this piece of news: total online ad spend for 2004 is shaping up to be some $9.4 billion.

I read with interest an article on the results of a study released last week by Yahoo!. The study looked at 1,200 Internet users who read their newspaper offline at least three times a week, comparing their shopping habits.

Has anyone else noticed that the iPod is now the gift of choice and the biggest incentive on the Internet?

Good morning. Well, we are still abuzz with plenty to do.

My colleague Ross Fadner reported Thursday from the Kelsey conference at the Hyatt in Jersey City (home of a great view of Lower Manhattan) that while decision makers at almost two-thirds of small- and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) believe the Internet is a significant advertising medium, a mere one out of seven local advertisers have made media buys in the last year in interactive.

A couple of weeks ago I downloaded the beta version of Google's new tool. Have you guys seen it?

I write this article on Sunday without the knowledge of who will have won the election.

Bob is the type of guy most people would like to strangle if you ever met him face to face. Every few days, Bob lets loose with an automated submission script that spams my blog with ads for anything from casino games to debt consolidation services to mail-order pharmaceuticals. He usually does this on Sunday, when I'm more apt to be watching football with my brother-in-law than paying attention to my blog. Every Monday morning, I run another script to get rid of Bob's spam and ban his IP address.