Tapedtogether is an experiment in crowdsourcing and online content curation resulting in a Summer Playlist for 2010 featuring an eclectic mix of artists from Frank Sinatra to DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince, all put together on a website inspired by the iconic artwork of Saul Bass.

Similar to NBCs Olympic coverage, CNN brings you the World Cup Twitter tracker an easy way to stay up to date with the buzz about the games.

David Perez sold his soul for 1 week to Twitter. He wanted to go to the Advertising Festival in Cannes and Leo Burnett agreed to send him, the only condition was he had to partake in a social media experiment where he did everything his Twitter followers commanded him to. What would you get him to do? He’s already tattooed the ‘fail whale’ on his arm!

It’s summer and the weather is nice! Now is not the time to be eating in front of your work computer, get involved and take back your lunch while the sun is still shining!

Google’s mass roll out of personalised search is having a dramatic affect on both keyword positions and overall website traffic. Google recently announced they would provide more data in the Top Search Queries, making it a lot easier to track fluctuations in organic search positions.

The tool will now provide impressions and click through rates for those keywords driving organic traffic to a website. It will allow users to track how their keyword positions change on a weekly basis and what effect this is having on organic traffic to their website.

The new data highlights the importance of page title and meta description in driving free clicks to a website. Looking to the best performing PPC ad groups is a great way to optimize a websites organic listings.

Ireland’s Digital Media Future by Minister Eamon Ryan. from Cybercom on Vimeo.

In October 1994, 15 Years ago this month, the web saw its first display banner go live! The campaign was placed on HotWired.com and featured a 468×60 banner with the line of copy ‘Have you ever clicked your mouse here? You will!’. Six of the magazine’s clients took part in the first campaign: MCA (telecom), Volvo (auto), Club Mes (travel), AT&T (telecom), Zima (softdrink) and 1-800-Collect (telecom). The site, which no longer exists, was part of Wired magazine and was the first commercial web magazine to attract online advertising.

It was the beginning of an industry that has grown to become a €16 billion worldwide industry today. The world of online advertising was different back then, there were no adservers or ad networks as we know them today. The advancements within the industry over the past 15 years; from rich media capabilities, conversion tracking, to DIY online advertising on Google have been nothing short of phenomenal. This first campaign is said to have delivered an astounding CTR of 78%! Maybe we should go back to basics

Source: Adage

One of Facebook’s most senior users, Ivy Bean, who’s a fantastic 103 years young, has said that although she has over 4,800 ‘friends’ on the site, she’s gotten bored with it. So where is Ivy spending her online time now? Twitter of course!

A report from the Sun quoted Ivy as saying, ““I’m enjoying Twitter and having my photo taken — and I’m looking forward to Deal Or No Deal.”

Today on the MSN home page, you can record and upload your very own ‘Jive Brow’, then view after approval in a gallery within the banner. This creative features really simple instructions and there’s even a ‘Jive Brow’ tutorial!

Congratulations to all the agencies involved – Hyper Happen (creative), PHD (media), Flashtalking (adserving) and the publisher MSN.

You can see the ad on MSN today (Friday 27th February) or view alone here.

The digital strategy employed by Barack Obama in his election startegy has been a hot topic for months, but something that a lot of people probably haven’t considered is who walked away with the bank?

It’s reported that Barack Obama’s presidential campaign spent over $16 million on online advertising, with Google coming up as the biggest winner, earning an estimated $7.5 million, or 45% of the total digital spend. This was spread across Google’s AdSense and AdWord platforms. After Google, Yahoo! was the second highest earner with an estimated $1.5 million followed shortly after by Microsoft and AOL. Next in line it was ad networks that earned the majority of the remaining spend. In a clever and calculated move, Obama utilised geographic, behavioural, and demographic targeted CPC advertising, in combination with local media sites, to gain votes and contributions.

The most notable ‘new tool’ in Obama’s election campaign was Social Media. On Facebook alone, the team spent $643,000 on ads to drive users to Obama’s profile. Other Social Media sites were utilised but it was Facebook who dominated by far. Another ‘new tool’ for an election campaign was in-game advertising, with a spend of $94,000 on Microsoft’s Massive ad network.

We think it’s safe to say that the world has realised the power that Social Media now has, and the important position it will hold throughout 2009.

All financial information was found through the Federal Election Commission reports.

This is an old business adage that could be making a comeback. While business networking has always been important, the demise of lunches and the demands on time means that networking opportunities are less prevalent. However, Linkedin.com could become an important link in the networking chain.

With 24m members globally, 6m in Europe and a claimed 100,000 in Ireland – it’s clear that Linkedin.com is becoming more popular. A comScore analysis for August suggests there’s 24,000 active users of linkedin in Ireland. An interesting development is the launch of an advertising platform on their network.

There’s two options – a display option for larger advertisers (£5,000 plus) and the DIY option to accommodate smaller budgets. CPMs are higher than most social network sites but considerably lower than business sites, suggesting it could be a very cost effective add-on to for B2B campaigns.

To review their advertising options, click here.

RTE.ie has just published its latest ABCe site trafffic data. The site was audited in May (previous audit month was October ’07) and the highlights from the report are as follows:

• Unique users increased by 31% to  2.1m
• Page Views increased by 10% to 43m
• Audio / Video Streams 2.3m – 100% growth from October
• Average streams per day = 74,000
• Ireland accounts for 50% of Traffic, USA 17%, UK 14%, ROW 19%

The full PDF is available on www.RTE.ie or here.

ABC News reported this weekend that in just over six weeks, Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight has managed to become only the second film in Hollywood box office history to break the US$500 million mark. The first, Titanic, did so by remaining in cinemas for nearly 3 months and accumulating a long dribble of final income. Insider, Dan Fellman, head of distribution at Warner Bros., has said, “he expects ‘The Dark Knight’ to finish at about $530 million, though it could reach $550 million if business persists as strongly as it has.”

Part of the film’s huge success is attributed to the leading edge viral marketing efforts of 42 Entertainment, the agency that revealed the first image of the Joker, left clues to ringing cakes, ran the online campaign for Harvey Dent and drove the scavenger hunt to get to go see the third trailer.

To find out more about the depths which 42 Entertainment went to for their viral campaign, check out this interview with 42 Entertainment’s CEO Susan Bonds and CCO Alex Lieu.