METRICS

TiVo says it will accommodate advertisers looking for more of its data on who watched what sort of programming – including advertising – by doubling the amount of households whose set-top boxes are included in the sample audience. Selling ratings data is seen by TiVo as being a big source of additional revenue.

PRNewswire will begin offering metrics around where and how the press releases companies issue through it are picked up online. That includes blog posts and more. PRN will then help companies who have a press release that doesn’t get wide pick-up figure out how to make the release rank higher among search results.

MEDIA

180 newspapers across the country have agreed to co-brand their online real-estate sections with Zillow.com. The papers are apparently looking to offload more of the heavy lifting and figured adding Zillow’s search and other functionality was a good place to start.

SOCIAL NETWORKING

Blog publisher/ad network Glam Media has launched Tinker, a new tool that aggregates Twitter conversations based on keywords and putting them into a single stream people can customize or simply follow.

Andrew Goodman asks the provocative question: Is Guy Kawasaki ruining Twitter? Well worth reading.

Facebook and Adobe have partnered to bring Flash to the developer platform for Facebook apps. Cause the world needs more Flash.

I’m whole-heartedly with Stephen Baker, who says he has no interest in functionality like a “vote up/down” button being added to Twitter, saying it’s just going to cause more problems than it solves.

Twitter says it’s going to do as good a job as it can in disclosing paid relationships, something that’s important to note as it enters into more of just those sort of relationships.

I’m guessing no, the average Facebook users doesn’t quite understand what they’re sharing when they log in to others sites with Facebook Connect. But I’m also guessing they wouldn’t care all that much if they did because it’s so convenient and online users have shown they’re increasingly fine with their data being used for better ad targeting.

ADVERTISING

Google is shuttering their AdSense for Video units, their program that allowed site publishers to post YouTube videos containing ads, at the end of April. This doesn’t effect the placement of video ads through AdSense, though, so don’t worry.

As part of their deal to post short-form video on YouTube, ABC/Disney will also be able to sell in-stream ads on those videos.

Advertisers and TV networks are beginning to take a less adversarial stance toward DVRs and the audience that uses them. Granted, that means a rise in product placement, ads that take over the bottom third of the screen for 30 seconds and other such tactics, but at least they’ve started adapting to the new reality rather than flailing against it.

A study commissioned by a print publisher and distributor of television programming says that print and TV ads have higher ROI than online advertising. Shocker.

The lead in this story about how cable companies are looking into more web-based functionality and viewing is buried. The real meat of the piece is that cable companies want more interactivity through set-top boxes because it means there’s potential for more interactive commercials to be distributed.

Broadcast networks saw online advertising revenue top $1 billion in 2008, a 36% increase over 2007.

ONLINE VIDEO

Hulu is growing in terms of visitors and overall audience but the advertising dollars aren’t growing at the same clip. It’s falling prey, unfortunately, to still being seen as “experimental” by buyers as well as the fact that the high-quality online video market is expanding on an almost daily basis.

YouTube is making a play for more of that professionally-produced – and therefore safe for brand advertisers – content by redesigning in such a way to clearly give that sort of content its own section, away from all the user-generated stuff. It’s clearly a response to Hulu and other sites and might wind up being a turning point in what kind of video gets posted to the site.

PUBLIC RELATIONS

Hmmm. A new survey says clients aren’t doing all that great in communicating goals and other important information to their agencies.

Jeremiah Owyang wonders what would happen if PR agencies started representing user communities instead of brands. This is kind of ridiculous since it fails to ask the questions of 1) What would these communities need an agency for, 2) Who’s the lead contact with the agency, 3) What can the agency do that the communities can’t, 4) Who’s going to pay the agency and about 17 others that I don’t have the time to go into.