According to the investment bank AdMedia Partners, mergers and acquisitions of online advertising and marketing firms are expected to increase substantially in 2007.

First Page Fitness has non-formal fitness marketing relationships with several marketing firms, as do most successful search marketing companies these days. Typically, it is a one-way street: Old-school marketing firm has clients screaming for SEO / SEM but no employees knowledgeable enough in the area, and must pass the work on to a search engine marketer.

One option is that they spend six figures hiring a competent search marketer to bring in-house - which is difficult to do when they know little about what constitutes a “competent” search marketer, and most search marketers are entrepreneurial by nature, thus resiting in-house appointments.

The most common scenario over the last couple of years has involved traditional marketing firms outsourcing the SEO / SEM work, usually for paying slightly less than the contract is worth to them, but sometimes only breaking even or taking a loss for the sake of keeping their client happy.

AdMedia Partners is predicting a shift in 2007 from larger marketing firms hiring an in-house SEO/SEM, or outsourcing the work, to actually merging with our buying out the SEO / SEM firm. I would have to agree with their prediction, as I have seen this happen already with two other SEO companies in Colorado.

Any thoughts on what this means to the search marketing industry?

I cam across a breakdancing bodybuilder video on YouTube today and remembered the guy I saw pop-locking (doing the robot) at the first bodybuilding show I ever went to. “How many robot bodybuilders are out there”, I thought to myself. It is such a strange sight, I thought I’d put a little group of videos together for you.

So here it is. My tribute to the bodybuilders doing the robot dance; Those brave few who aren’t afraid to be ridiculed, who don’t care how silly it is to bring back a dance from the mid-80s, who can get up in front of thousands of people in their Speedos and… get their robot on:

The first robot bodybuilder we have is the one and only King Kamali doing his Terminator impersonation at the 2004 Australian Grand Prix:

Next we have Heiko Dorfer, the big scary Arian:


This is Melvin Anthony PopLocking at the Mr. Olympia competition in 2006:


Now Vince Taylor’s Bodybuilding Robot:

And this one is my favorite. It’s actually pretty good, although kind of disturbing at times. Here’s Alexander Vishnevskiy doing his one-of-a-kind version of the bodybuilder breakdancing robot:

Despite the many exploits and the small addition to server load time, I was willing to keep the My Blog Log widget on my page simply because it formed a bit of a community around the blog where other readers could meet other readers, and made it easy for me to put a face next to what would normally be letters and numbers in a log file.

But My Blog Log went and pissed off the wrong guy - Shoemoney - and now their reputation is going down the drain with the Boycott My Blog Log Train. Hey, that’s a rather catchy rhyme.

Update: Bootlick over at the Digg page for Shoemoney’s post had a good point:

I’m not 100% sure (most of this script stuff was over my head) but on my MyBlogLog Pro stats page it logs all of my ad clicks and displays it for me. Maybe this is why they are collecting Adsense and YPN click stats?
http://www.netbusinessblog.com/pics/mybloglog_ads.gif

So there may be a reason for your click data to be sent to My Blog Log, but I am still convinced that they (as in Yahoo) are collecting too much data. Then again, that’s probably nothing compared to the kind of data being collected by Google, and I’m not banning the Sitemaps program yet. *feeling a little hypocritical*

So here is the train as it stands:
Shoemoney > Marketing Pilgrim > Wolf Howl > First Page Fitness > You?

I may have missed a few stops in between, but hey I can’t read every blog in the universe.

WHY BOYCOTT MY BLOG LOG?
Read this post and you’ll see. I don’t care if you have Adsense or YPN ads on your site or now, that’s some pretty underhanded spyware Yahoo has installed on all of these blogs now.

How can something be new and ancient at the same time? Well, you know how us Westerners are. We hear about some acient practice from the orient and suddenly it becomes all the rage. Yoga and Tai Chi are two good examples. Well, the most recent “ancient Chinese secret” to make its way across both sides of the pond is called Qi Gong, pronounced “Chi Gong” and sometimes written all in one word: Qigong.

Qi Gong translates to “breath work” with Qi meaning breath or gas in Mandarin Chinese, and usually associated with the energy produced by breathing that keeps us alive. Gong means work or technique. Qigong is then “breath work” or the art of managing the breath to achieve and maintain good health, and especially in the martial arts.

I can’t really explain Qi Gong in a single blog entry, but the video below does a pretty good job of it:

Here are some good Qi Gong products from Gaiam, if you’re interested in learning more about the practice.

A new study from the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge claims that you don’t need to diet AND exercise to lose weight.

Dr. Leanne Redman of the research center says “For weight loss to occur, an individual needs to maintain a difference between the number of calories they consume everyday and the number of calories they burn through metabolism and physical activity”.

And we say - Duhhhhh! How much are these people getting paid to conduct these studies? It comes down to simple thermodynamics, and can be explained to a five-year-old like this:

Burn more calories than you consume and you will lose weight.
Consume more calories than you burn and you will gain weight.
Consumer the same amount of calories that you burn and you will stay the same weight.

Nevermind the difference between fat, protein and carbohydrates or that fat has more calories than protein and carbohydrates. Nevermind all of that. What this totally asinine study does not tell you is that diet without exercise is going to take off the pounds, BUT

You will put them right back on when you’re finished dieting because you have not done anything to speed up your metabolism, such as gaining muscle or improving cardiovascular health. Furthermore, dieting can actually SLOW DOWN your metabolism (through a feedback mechanism that tells your body to use less calories so it doesn’t starve while you are dieting) which is what causes silly fad dieters to gain more fat on the rebound than they had in the first place before their diet.

Here is what happens in the media today:

College professor wants to get his/her name in the paper and conducts a completely pointless study for the purpose of publishing controversial findings.
Press release is sent to news papers.
Editors see an opportunity for an attention grabbing headline like :No Need to Diet and Exercise to Lose Weight” which the headline of this article in MSN News via Reuters.
Consumers read the article without thinking about it too hard and are either given false expectations, bunk information, or nothing at all.

And the sun sets, another day goes by, people are still getting fatter and dying of heart attacks, people are still too lazy to exercise and want a magic pill, and I’m still getting pissed off at the whole damn circus.