• Speaking of reports, in its Global Search Advertising Spend Analysis for Q3 2011, independent search marketing agency Covario noticed an impressive rebound in paid search spend during the third quarter, up 26% quarter over quarter and 24% over the same period last year. Study author and Adotas contributor Craig Macdonald, Covario senior vice president and chief marketing officer, attributed the rebound to strong back-to-school spending and increased investment in the Asia-Pacific region.

• Underdog Media announced that Jeff Hirsch is its new chief executive officer. Most recently Hirsch served as president of AudienceScience, but before that co-founded Fastclick and had multiple executive roles at ValueClick.

• Exchange operator adBrite has added Rick Cotton as its chief revenue officer. A 20-year veteran of digital sales, Cotton was last seen holding down the senior vice president role at Monster.com while simultaneously serving as general manager of the FastWeb.com division. Before his Monster stint, Cotton served as general sales manager for CBS radio.

• Former Gracenote President and CEO Craig Palmer will take the CEO’s chair at collaborative content network Wikia. Palmer has named Jennifer Betka senior vice president of marketing. Betka boasts experience developing brand and audience at AOL, Time Warner, Veoh, SIRIUS XM and The Los Angeles Times.

• Guess who’s got two G in its name and still accounts for 65% to 66% of all searches (depending on who is counting)? comScore has search “rivals” (in the loosest meaning of the term) Yahoo! at 15.5% and Bing at 14.7% for September 2011, while Experian Hitwise puts them at 15.2% and 12.8%, respectively.

• The legacy online portal world is a total soap opera: while Yahoo! cofounder and former CEO Jerry Yang is trying to raise the cash to take that company private, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong is apparently pushing AOL stockholders on selling the company to Yahoo!.

• Virtual goods inventivizer Ifeelgoods has teamed up with Universal Pictures to promote caper comedy “Tower Heist” with a scavenger hunt for 1 million Facebook Credits. Facebook users receive Credits for discovering “Heist” buttons around the network and are incentivized for sharing the game on Facebook or inviting friends to play.

• Social media dashboard HootSuite has acquired location-based marketing tool Geotoko. According to HootSuite’s blog, “The Geotoko technology reports on geo-based social media interactions like key influencers, customer sentiment, and demographic patterns to help businesses draw conclusions about audience behavior, as well as help brands reward customers for checking-in via Foursquare and Facebook Places.”

• Digital video advertiser Brightroll has expanded into Germany, naming former FOX Networks executive Patrick Edlefsen as head of the just-opened Hamburg office.

• Thanks to a new partnership, eBay will integrate Facebook’s Open Graph protocol into the X.commerce, Magento and GSI e-commerce platforms, allowing merchants to incorporate not just “Like” buttons, but also the new “Want” and “Own” buttons introduced with Open Graph tags.

Leading the opposition is eBay, which has quite a stake in the legislation as it serves as a transaction platform for thousands of small businesses and affiliates. Brian Bieron, senior director of federal government relations and global public policy, had some none-too-kind words about the bill, calling it “outdated.”

eBay has a coalition of industry groups backing it up, and sent us statements from a whole lotta people that disapprove of the bill.

American Homeowners Grassroots Alliance (AHGA) President Bruce Hahn:

“The Main Street Fairness Act takes us in the wrong direction. The AHGA believes that Congress should ban the collection of state and local Internet sales taxes rather than expand the collection of sales taxes on Internet purchases.”

Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) President & CEO Ed Black:

“Penalizing businesses for utilizing technology and innovation is not fairness, but merely a shortsighted targeting of new revenue models, while protecting existing business models at the expense of consumers and growth.”

The Electronic Retailing Association (ERA) President and CEO Julie Coons:

“New and misguided remote tax schemes will represent a dramatic blow to electronic retailers struggling to survive in these harsh economic times. New regulatory burdens and draconian cost increases would significantly damage both the marketplace and the consumers who rely on it.”

The Information Technology Industry Council (ITI) released the following statement:

“Forcing online retailers to take on the same costs and tax burdens as national retailers is unrealistic and will unbalance the playing field between the ‘brick and mortar’ businesses and the smaller online retailers on the Internet. Congress has an opportunity to pursue a pro-growth, pro-jobs agenda, but the Main Street Fairness Act will set America back at a time when we can’t afford to lose momentum.”

National Taxpayers Union (NTU) Executive Vice President Pete Sepp:

“Giving governments even more sweeping powers to tax won’t restore any part of the private sector to health, especially the small businesses Americans are counting on to lead a resurgence in job and income growth.”

NetChoice Executive Director Steve DelBianco:

“Congress often says that small businesses are the backbone of the economic recovery, but these new collection costs will break the backs of many small online businesses. This legislation fails to define safe harbors for small businesses, virtually guaranteeing that small and medium retailers will receive little help in complying with thousands of state and local tax jurisdictions.”

TechNet President and CEO Rey Ramsey:

“The Main Street Fairness Act bills will make it more complicated, expensive and onerous to conduct business on the Internet. During these difficult economic times, the last thing we need are additional burdens on this growing economic sector.”

Care to share your opinion below?

Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL), Tim Johnson (D-SD) and Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI) cosponsored the bill in the Sentate while Reps. John Conyers (D-MI), Peter Welch (D-VT) and Heath Schuler (D-NC) did the same in the House.

“In 2012, states across the country, including Illinois, are expected to lose as much as $24 billion in uncollected state and local taxes on Internet and catalogue sales,” Durbin commented in a statement. “From 2005 to 2010 the state of Illinois estimated it lost $153 million each year. The Main Street Fairness Act doesn’t ask anyone to pay a single penny more in taxes. Instead, it would help governors and mayors collect taxes that are already owed.”

Amazon, which is fighting California legislation and shut down its 10,000 or so affiliates in protest, has commented before they believe the sales tax framework should be built on a federal level. Last week at the company’s second-quarter earnings call, CFO Thomas J. Szkutak said, “We support a federal simplified approach, as we have for more than 10 years.”

Paul Misener, Amazon vice president for global public policy, wrote a letter to Durbin giving Amazon’s support, suggesting that the Supreme Court views Congress as the “appropriate forum to resolve the issue.”

eBay’s Brian Bieron, senior director of federal government relations and global public policy, didn’t mince words: ”A collection of state tax commissioners have again been able to get an outdated Internet sales tax bill introduced in Congress, but we are confident that it will be rejected because it would harm small Internet retailers…. Forcing small businesses to take on the same costs and tax burdens as national retail businesses is unrealistic, unfair and will unbalance the playing field between giant retailers and small business retailers on the Internet,”

eBay instead has put its support behind House Resolution 95 by Reps. Dan Lungren (R-CA) and Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), which allows Congress to deny states the right to impose “unfair tax collecting requirements on small online businesses.”

As smartphone proliferation ramps up, eBay is expecting even more m-commerce business — hence why yesterday its PayPal unit acquired Zong, which is not the villain of a forgotten Bruce Lee movie but a mobile payment system that allows purchasers to send payments right to their mobile phone bills. At $240 million, the price tag was only a fraction of the $2.4 billion eBay paid for e-commerce platform GSI Commerce at the end of March.

You see, in March the French government passed these rather ridiculous data storage requirements for online video, email, social and ecommerce companies to keep customer private data — names, physical addresses, phone numbers and even passwords — for a year. That’s not the bad part — French police and other government agencies could petition for this information.

The 26 members of the French Association of Internet Community Services (ASIC) — including Facebook, Google, Microsoft and eBay among others — agreed this was pretty bogus and used the association to file a complaint with the State Council. Buoying ASIC’s case is the fact that the French Government passed these regulations without the E.U.’s blessing.

This case makes me think about the online targeting brouhaha — are you really scared about advertisers tracking your online activities? They just want to sell you stuff. I’m more wary of government agencies stalking me online — one day they might decide they don’t like what I’m looking at.

Banner advertising will be more customized, enabling advertisers to insert category-specific content into impressions and allow customers to view products without clicking off the page. In addition, Triad will host sponsored landing pages to spotlight seasonally related merchandise and integrate merchandising with eBay listings.

“The eBay community of users is going to see relevant and engaging content from the brands they love most, and brand advertisers are going to be able to connect in new ways with customers and prospective customers on eBay, the world’s largest online marketplace,” said Triad CEO Greg Murtagh.

I probably wasn’t the only one who made my first purchase through a mobile device this season (I’m sure many fellow air travelers to snow-logged NYC took advantage of their smartphones to make alternate arrangements). In fact, eBay’s recently released numbers on m-commerce sales are simply astounding — 134% year-over-year growth from Nov. 25 to Dec. 25 for the U.S. alone, resulting in $100 million in gross merchandise value (GMV). Globally, the increase was even more impressive: 166% year over year to $230 million in GMV.

eBay apps for various devices have been downloaded 30 million times, with its iPhone app alone accounting for 13 million. The most popular sales categories in the U.S. were quite interesting — Cars & Trucks topped the list, followed by Clothing & Accessories, Auto Parts, Sporting Goods and Cell Phones & Accessories.

Buying a bus ticket on my mobile seemed pretty straightforward, but a car? Wow… Also, there’s something really meta about buying a mobile device while using a mobile device.

They had it for a moment when Facebook launched its Chinese-language version in June 2008, but a long period of flipping on and off the switch started three days later with the Tibetan riots in western China. The service was completely shut off during the ethinic riots in Xingjiang.

Leave it to CEO Mark Zuckerberg to cross the Great Wall and deal with the government Nixon-style to bring Facebook’s unique digital sharing style to back more than a billion potential users (but can he control his salivating over all that data?).

Reportedly Zuck has been taking Mandarin lessons and studying Chinese history in preparation for a voyage to the mainland with fiance Priscilla Chan and Zuck in December to meet her relatives — however, the trip may be waylaid by the recent round of North Korean chest-thumping.

(On a side note, Zuck already views himself in the mold of Steve Jobs, but will marrying a girl named Priscilla give him delusions of Elvis? No one wants to see you shake your hips, Zuck, but a sneer would fit your demeanor well.)

Media in the East and West alike believe that a social visit is merely cover for negotiating turning the Facebook faucet back on in the PRC. On China Daily, Jules Quartly proposes Zuck “surely has a public relations team that is, as we speak, negotiating high-level talks with Chinese leaders to give him access to a billion plus extra characters.”

But considering all the good times Google has had in the Far East, dealing with the Chinese government sounds about as fun as a neverending root canal. On TechRice, Alvin Graylin, founder and CEO of Chinese mobile search provider mInfo, suggests success in China has a great deal to do with cultural and physical presence within the country. The scars of turn-of-the-20th century imperialism are still highly visible on the national psyche.

“Facebook is a global company with one-size fits all mentality, and China is a place where localization and local culture/norms matter a lot,” Graylin writes. “There is just no way for them to operate a global platform to target local user needs and compete effectively with home grown providers.”

However, Facebook has witnessed mammoth growth in People’s Republic of China arch-rival Taiwan — which has a democratic government, for what that’s worth these days — and Hong Kong — which kind of exists in a separate world from the mainland — over the last few years. Facebook even recently overtook Friendster (still a big thing in Asia-Pacific) in popularity in Indonesia.

(By the way, those rumors about Tawian being removed from the alphabetical dropdown menu of member countries for Facebook support problems are false. The PRC would like to erase the island country from the face of the earth, so would such an exercise by Facebook really impress any Party official?)

Quartly adds that Zuck has “already tweaked the channels a bit by saying in recent interviews that countries have different values and Facebook respects this, such as banning content about Nazis in Germany and pictures of Muhammad in Pakistan. He says China is ‘extremely complex’and he will humbly come here to listen and learn.”

Mainland China has two main rivals for the social network crown. Tencent, which started as a blogging platform, but it evolved Facebook-like features through its Qzone offering and recent addition Pengyou.

Then there’s Oak Pacific Interactive’s RenRen, which is pretty much a counterfeit version of Facebook, something akin to a knockoff purse available on Canal Street. RenRen is reportedly scoping out an IPO in 2011 with an estimated value of $1 billion.

So there is money to be made, especially for third-party developers who would greatly benefit from Facebook’s 70/30 revenue sharing plan. TechRice’s Kai Lukoff notes that many third-party developers are shut out of certain networks or only get a small cut of ad revenue. Not surprising for a copycat, RenRen tends to build in-house versions of popular third-party applications.

Although Facebook offers allure from a business standpoint, American social media and commerce companies simply haven’t been successful in China. The most notorious case is eBay, which was destroyed in the market by upstart Taobao (owned by Alibaba).

Responding to a query (or Quora) about American digital operations’ hard times, China media guru Kaiser Kuo explained:

“Local competitors are not much younger (i.e., the American companies don’t exactly have decades of experience to draw on!), they’re as well-funded (VC money sloshes around the China tech scene like BP oil on the Gulf Coast), and they’re used to squeezing money out of relatively poor and notoriously parsimonious consumers. They’re lean, scrappy, and hungry.”

So Zuck has his work cut out for him, but more than a billion users and astonishing amounts of potential revenue will make it worth the effort. He might have other problems, however: as this illustration shows, Chinese artists clearly think he’s part alien. If his eyes were really that far apart, he’d have amazing peripheral vision.

The paid search solution is being offered with a 15-day trial and $200 in credit. A retailer can easily set up a new advertising or expand an existing to one through Clickable’s reach, including mobile advertising through Google AdWords. A dedicated specialist oversees every merchant account and assists in conversion tracking setup, account benchmarking, goal-setting, keyword review, custom reporting, recommendations and more. Clickable also offers analytics for tracking performance along the conversion funnel, from keywords to final sale.

Clickable also powers the SEM tool for American Express OPEN, a division of the financial services company that enables Internet services for small businesses.

After launching last year to test increased ad placement opportunities, eBay is suspending the program on August 4 because the company is “confident that consistently displaying the most relevant items highest in the search results is in the best interest of buyers, sellers and the eBay marketplace overall,” the company said on its blog.

If you were really in love with the program, you’ll have to head to Europe or Australia, where the program will still be open to sellers. Apparently Aussies and Europeans don’t hold relevant search results in as high regard…