This summer has been a busy one for new developments in social media and online marketing.  The past 2 weeks, we have been devoting Mondays to reporting on recent announcements and today is no different.

Cuil (Pronounced Cool) announced that they are bringing a competitive search engine to rival Google.  The distinction for Cuil is that they are former Google employees who claim to have built an even better mousetrap with more pages indexed and a more secure search environment.  They plan to offer advertising in the future as well.

Google is said to be close to buying Digg. The Google empire has been acquiring complementary pieces at a rapid rate. Besides Digg, Google announced Knol a Wikipedia type entry and Lively a Second Life competitor. Add those to the partnership with Yahoo on search.

MySpace will begin selling music and concert tickets from its site. MySpace had already become a large music sharing network and this is a natural extension for the social network site. Amazon will handle the fulfillment for the new service.

Facebook will take advantage of its connection to Microsoft by incorporating Live Search on its network. This development has ramifications for your SEO efforts. You may not want to ignore MSN anymore as Facebook continues to grow in important demographics.

Speaking of SEO, Adobe announced that Flash and rich media applications will now be indexed by Google and others. There is a flurry of questions as to the ramifications. No one is sure what weight will be given and techniques for SEO within Flash have yet to evolve. One thing seems to be agreed upon, if you gained an advantage in rank because of a competitor’s flash rich site - that may be coming to an end.

A recent study by Borrell Associates, a Williamsburg, Va.-based market research firm, uncovered three major trends:

• Spending on online display ads (web page banners, pop-ups, etc.) have been flat the past two years and are expected to top out at $12.6 billion in 2008, then decline more than 50 percent by 2012.
• Paid search advertising will peak at $16.9 billion by 2009 and start declining.
• Online promotions generated about $8 billion in 2007. This category will nearly triple by 2013 to $22.8 billion, exceeding all other online advertising categories, including paid search, banners, email and online audio/video advertising.