Saw UFC 50 in person on Friday night. Some quick observations, and then the e-marketing slant. With the octagon in the middle of the arena, and two giant screens on either end, I don't think there was a bad seat to be had. And, in some ways, seats higher up, might have had a better angle than floor seats, without the chain link fence in the way. Only event I've ever been to where the lines for the mens room were far longer than the women's. Some e-marketing thoughts on their website:

• There's a lot going on. I'd try to simplify some of the pages, and make the "join now" newsletter much more prominent to find.
• I'd go through the site and update all of the FAQ's, and make sure they had the latest information. If UFC 50 was the most recent, some questions shouldn't mention UFC 44 as the most recent.
• Learn UFC. I'd have a few video clips of fights, or dramatic moments, and some pictures of the different moves.
• In the news section, I'd get rid of the strange characters in the press release on the fight.

Not related to e-marketing at all, but check out Drew wandering around South America.

Travel lately, so fewer postings. For some reason, this image seems like a sign of the times. Watching the pop-up blocker roll over to 4000 probably is this generations equivalent of the odometer turning over.

Really interesting article on costs of pay-per-click advertising. More analysis later, but the decline at the end of the month, as marketers run out of money is fascinating. And an example of the challenges of advertising in a channel without fixed costs.

Interesting rant about Faux Blogs. Sort of viral marketing gone awry.

So, I've been playing with IceRocket.com some more. That's the Mark Cuban backed search engine. They have the typical app that lets you watch searches that other people are making. They also have a Blog search engine that seems to work pretty well. Looks like a feed of sites with RSS feeds, is my guess. One pet peeve on search engines, couldn't they make the numbers at the bottom of the screen bigger, so you don't have to squint to try and hit the number 3 to move to the 3rd page of results?

I've been testing out Snap.com Interesting search model. Initial reactions:
It takes longer than it should for the first set of results to pop-up. Maybe five beats vs. one for Google. It does let you refine, and the results change instantaneously, which is a nice feature, and probably does outweigh the initial wait.
You can sort results by popularity, web popularity, and satisfaction (# of pages viewed on a site).
Popularity is judged on the number of snap.com users who have clicked through to a site. Neat idea, but in a lot of categories, they need more users surfing through. That will come with time.
Web popularity is flawed at the moment, as it goes by the base of the URL, so anything with Yahoo or Amazon will rank high in it. Stories on running are the most popular in web ranking solely because they were on the cnnsi.com site vs. actually being useful.
I do think the "transparent company" idea is brillant. Showing searches, revenue, metrics is really going to make advertisers comfortable working with them. May not do much for profit margins, but I think that's really going to have some traction, vs. black box models that are out there.

The Jennings report. Neat links to things happening in the space.

Jeremy has some pretty thorough links to interesting Web 2.0 conversations.

Feedster has a neat link to everyone blogging the web 2.0 conference. I'm looking forward to taking a thorough look at Snap.com the new search engine. They've already changed their deep linking policy due to blogger outrage, so they're taking the right steps to get off the ground.

Interesting article on what Google AdSense prices tell us about interest in bidding on nations keywords.