Mindtweets

Ad Networks and Analytics:

• DogTime Media — a network devoted to pet owners and the $43.5 billion annual pet market — has blossomed to 350 publishers and 349 pet bloggers: 13.7 million unique visitors in March. That's 43% growth from January 2009's 9.6 million.
• AdJuggler now offers on-demand pricing with no contracts. The firm claims this "pay as you go" structure has never before been implemented for online ad serving.
• Spring Partners launched Springpad in beta — a publishers channel that connects newspaper publications to online readers by helping them erect niche hosted by Springpad.
• BlueTie launched Adventive this week. It helps publishers deliver online ads that "feel" like features, stimulating engagement. See Slideshare presentation.
• Publishers Clearing House launched an ad network composed of its own web properties. In total it draws about five million monthly uniques and 90 million page views. It also launched a b2b site: pchonlinenetwork.com.

Biz Buzz:

• Google Labs launched a new feature called News Timeline, which "organizes information chronologically by presenting results from Google News and other data sources on a zoomable, graphical timeline." Users can drag the timeline through days, weeks, months, years or decades to explore a given query.
• At the IAB Digital Video conference this week, Publicis execs shared thoughts on the Pool — an ad model designed in tandem with online video providers. No specifics were given, but the killer app is expected to launch in 2010 — and blow pre-roll out of the water.

Campaigns of Note:

• Voila: the final culmination of Google's YouTube Symphony Orchestra effort. The orchestra, which features 90 musicians culled from all over the world, includes a Spanish guitarist, a Dutch harpist and a Lithuanian birbyne player.

Overseas:

• TNS Media Intelligence's Adex reports that in February 2009, online display ads drew 16.2% of all ad spend in France, up 1.7% from '08 — making online display advertising third in terms of ad spend. The first two were TV and press, which took 61% of ad budgets.

Publishing:

• The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has released fresh digital video advertising guidelines.

Search:

• Healthline is incorporating semantic search tools into its website.
• Search Engine Journal published a cheat sheet for Yahoo and Google Search.

Social Networks:

• The University of Wisconsin-Madison's Neural Interface Technology Research & Optimization Lab is experimenting with using mere thoughts to send "tweets," or Twitter messages. Results are disturbingly encouraging.
• Twitter launched sign in with Twitter, which lets users connect their accounts to third-party services — much like Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect.