Jack Neff at Advertising Age posted a great article today about Ted McConnell, general manager of interactive marketing and innovation at Procter & Gamble, and his statements about social networks as an advertising platform.

Quoted as saying “I really don’t want to buy any more banner ads on Facebook,” McConnell also comments on the so-called “user-generated” content inventory, and how most of the content on social networks is not easy to monetize.

Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch published an estimate on the current slowdown in advertising revenue generated by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL. The sequential growth rate was 12.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2007, down to 2.8 percent in the first quarter of 2008, 1.1 percent in the second quarter and down to an estimated 0.6 percent in the third quarter.

Even without this analysis, it’s pretty clear that the online advertising industry as a whole has definitely decreased in recent quarters. Google however, is the winner over Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL clearly demonstrating the effectiveness of their Adwords network.

Yahoo! recently confirmed it would cut it workforce by “at least” 10 percent of its global workforce. At the recent Web 2.0 Summit, CEO Jerry Yang talks to John Battelle about the failed Microsoft merger, and the future of Yahoo!

Battelle opens his interview with “so Jerry, besides Yahoo!… how’s things going?” As Yahoo’s stock has dropped this week to $10 a share, a spate of rumors swirled inside and outside the company about the fate of Yang, and just how low the companies’ stock price can fall.

President-elect Barack Obama made his first official video address today on YouTube. Obama will continue to record these videos and post them weekly, with the goal of making the White House and the political process more transparent.

While it has been reported that a “White House” YouTube channel will be launched soon after taking office, these YouTube videos are currently being posted to Obama’s site Change.gov.

Erick Schonfeld over at TechCrunch wrote an excellent post on YouTube and online video today. He points out that many of the current video start-ups are struggling to find a viable business model.

Considering the current financial climate, future aquistions look bleak: “The only startups that will be bought are those with “demonstrable” revenues or those that have attracted desirable audience niches that the bigger companies lack.”

PaidContent.org and the Silicon Alley Insider both commented today on the New York Times revolving credit agreements due in May 2009. The company has only $46 million of cash on hand while advertising revenues are contracting.

Inside it’s 10-Q: “Based on these discussions, we expect that we will be able to manage our debt and credit obligations as they mature.” However, the NYT hasn’t provided any details on exactly how it will manage this credit crunch.

The Advertising Age published an article about the future of print today. It correctly points out how publishing business models are changing rapidly as companies announce layoffs.

As Time Inc. Chairman-CEO Ann Moore said in a speech last week, “If you’re sitting on your five-year plan, you’re delusional.”

Google announced it will be ending it’s advertising agreement with Yahoo today. Yahoo was exploring “the option of using Google to provide ads on its websites (and its publisher partners’ sites) in the U.S. and Canada.”

What this will mean for Yahoo in the long run is hard to tell at this point. We might see Microsoft come back with another merger deal, or some sort of search partnership. Microsoft it seems, still maintains that some sort of deal makes sense.

ReadWriteWeb reports that the Mozilla’s Firefox web-brower has finally reached a twenty percent share of the browser market. Firefox has continued to prove itself as both standards compliant and safe.

Mozilla also released news of their new “private browsing” features. Firefox’s new feature attempts to make sure that your web browsing activities don’t leave any trace on your own computer.

Mike Arrington posted about Glam Media’s new extended payment period today at TechCrunch. It seems that Glam is extending it’s terms from 60 or 90 to 120 days.

According to Glam Media: “to better prepare for the current financial situation, Glam anticipates a significant slow down in collection payments from advertisers. Therefore we will need to align the expected timing of payments from advertisers with the payments we make to our publishers.”