Two recent developments once again raise the debate about the degree to which individual privacy on the Internet is under attack by publishers, marketers and their predatory algorithms -- or what is now known generally as "Big Brother." First, there's the recent settlement of lawsuits brought against Facebook for its disastrous service called Beacon. The other news -- from boston.com, the online home of The Boston Globe -- describes recent student research at MIT. Students in a class on ethics and the law undertook a project to see if sexual orientation of an individual could be determined by examining "friending" …

I'm the first to be critical of Google and I stand by my earlier statements that they make it too hard to do business with them, but they do still have some great products. A few of which I think are on the spot and deserve applause. Fast Flip, Google Books, and the Library Project are all fantastic initiatives with strong mobile components that are well-timed to broad consumer adoption of smart phones.

Something's been bothering me for the last few years. In that time, I've probably spoken at two to three dozen industry events: trade shows, summits, conferences and workshops. In fact, this week, I'm at one such event - a user summit. Throughout that entire time, I've felt that there's a fundamental disconnect at these events. And this week, I think I've finally put my finger on it: the wrong people are attending.

I'm not sure why, but the phrase "real-time search" has somehow largely become associated with the phrase "Twitter search." While much of the conversation around real-time search centers conceptually on Twitter search and other engine algorithms that remix their data, the fact is that the Google crawl and many other viable contributors are critical to getting a fresh and relevant answer in real-time, though they are often lost in the discussion. Make no mistake about it, crawler-based real-time search and status-update search are both important to the successful development of a state-of-the-art robust and relevant real-time search engine.

Within moments of shouting "You lie" at President Barack Obama during his speech last week to a joint session of Congress regarding healthcare reform efforts, Rep. Joe Wilson, Republican of South Carolina, became the latest hot topic on the Internet. Almost instantly, the relatively obscure Congressman became the top search on Google, Yahoo Search and Bing. His even less-well-known political opponent, Democrat Rob Miller, an Iraq war veteran who is running for Wilson's seat in the 2010 election, got his own online impact:

One of the things that makes paid search a challenge is the degree to which minor changes in any given campaign element can add up to significant differences in the health of a given campaign. For example, positional changes (say, moving from #3 to #1 on a SERP) create enormous, sometimes exponential differences in click volume. Subtle changes in ad copy, keyword (positive and negative) selection, match type settings, landing page design, and call to action language can create large improvements (or declines) in campaign profitability. This is why obtaining optimum campaign performance requires search marketers to practice a regime …

There's a new frontier opening in the display advertising landscape, in which small and medium-sized businesses can execute effectively and deliver results that are, if not as effective, at least as compelling as those generated through search. And given the interplay between display advertising and search activity, these businesses should be able to use this new opportunity to better scale their already effective search campaigns.

Some time ago, I wrote a column saying the fallout of the economic crisis would be a rapid evolution in marketing practices, speeding the transition from the old way of doing things to a much more dominant role for digital. In that transition, search would play a bigger role than ever. In the past few months, I'm seeing exactly that come to pass. People are serious about search, from the bottom right up to the top corner office. This isn't playtime in the sandbox anymore; we're suddenly moving front and center.

In my last column I laid out 10 lessons I learned about marketing from Google. The response from the Search Insider community was, to borrow a phrase from Gaylord Focker in "Meet the Parents," strong-to-very-strong. I received some great feedback and all sorts of suggestions for other golden Google rules. Today, I'll continue the thread around marketing lessons learned from Google

The degree to which SEO efforts can succeed directly correlates to the quality, power and impact of any given Web site. Now, I love our small and growing business clients -- love them. But I must confess to one overriding concern that grows with each new Web site I encounter: Too many business owners have built sites that are to some degree unprepared to conduct business on the Web.