Mind Reading on the internet, stupid research, useless forecasts and Halloween!  Masha Geller recounts the week on the web.

I thought I’d seen it all, but I was wrong. Those of us who’ve been in this business for a while have accepted the fact that the internet can do just about everything, but this is over the top. Chris Murch, an Entrepreneur out of San Diego, California, this week launched a website that claims to read your mind. The site is ad-supported, which is why I even mention it, and claims to be 97.3 percent accurate for those who log on and answer a few short questions. It’s called www.InternetMindReader.com and it’s exactly the same as one of those silly emails all of us have received at one point or another. The kind that ask us to think of a number (but don’t tell it to the computer), multiply it by another number, assign a letter to the resulting number, think of a country that starts with that letter, think of an animal that starts with the last letter of the country and a fruit that starts with the last letter of the animal. Click a button, and voila -- the site is supposed to tell you the country, the animal and the fruit you were thinking of.

Under the guise of research, I went to the site and found that my mind must be partially unreadable, which is not news to anybody who knows me, because the site only guessed the country correctly, but that’s neither here nor there. I did get served a text link for something that would allow me to never wax my car again (I live in Manhattan and haven’t driven in years). The thing that puzzled me was that Mr. Murch is also the Founder and Owner of wsRadio.com, which is an internet talk radio network that produces shows like "eBay Radio" for eBay Inc., and "Entrepreneur Radio" for Entrepreneur Magazine. I guess web radio doesn’t pay enough and must be supplemented with pre-1995 silliness.

On the other hand, Infinity Broadcasting has announced plans for something a whole lot more grown-up. They will serve as the exclusive provider of streamed and on-demand audio broadcasts of select keynotes and panels of Advertising Week 2005. The content will be available for real time listening or download at www.infinitybroadcasting.com beginning on Monday, September 26.

This should be especially useful to everyone who can’t decide which of the zillion conferences to attend that week. Just for the record, iMedia had its Brand Summit dates set before everybody else.

The latest addition to the schedule of Advertising Week festivities is the WOMMA conference, keynoted by Seth Godin and held in association with OMMA (are you keeping track of this?), which was announced this week. For those of you masochists who need to be reminded that advertising is not as effective as word-of-mouth, I strongly recommend you check out WOMMA’s new blog, where everyone is talking about which came first, the ad or the buzz that surrounds it.

Another thing to look forward to during Advertising Week is the latest Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) Accountability of Audience Measurement forum. Results from a survey of attendants at the first Accountability of Audience Measurement forum were recently released. The results showed that, according to the 507 attendees, the methods of audience measurement for TV, radio, print media, and the internet, aren’t, well, up to snuff. They also said that online audience measurement is incompatible with other media, making apples-to-apples comparisons difficult. Huge surprise there!

Speaking of surprises, there was quite a bit of it surrounding the latest release from Nielsen this week, which says that online ad spending soared 12.6 percent in the first half of 2005. That’s compared to only 5.7 percent in overall ad spending, and considerably lower than nearly all previous projections by other online forecasters.

Those are numbers I can live with, but from now on, I’m going to stop paying any attention to forecasters. According to JupiterResearch, online advertising will more than double to $19 billion in the next five years, as I reported last week. That’s the same Jupiter that five years ago predicted that online ad spending would hit $16.5 billion a year by 2005, which hasn’t happened. Now they’re saying the $16.5 billion mark will be reached in 2008. Is there anybody out there who actually finds this stuff useful, or do forecasters just like writing big numbers down on paper? Maybe they should partner with that MindReader guy! At least that way they’d be right at least one out of every three forecasts.

Be that as it may, Yahoo! seems to have fixed all their paid search system problems, and Yahoo! will be addressing the concerns of those advertisers who were unable to change their bids over the last two weeks on a case-by-case basis.

I hope none of those advertisers were hoping to take advantage of the early rush of people to buy Halloween costumes online. Hitwise reports that internet searches for “halloween costumes” increased 196 percent for the week ending August 27, 2005 versus three weeks prior. In 2004, Internet searches for “halloween costumes” began increasing in August and peaked at levels thirteen times normal during the week ending October 9, 2004 -- nearly three weeks before Halloween. In contrast, searches for “halloween,” a term not necessarily shopping-related, began increasing several weeks later and peaked the week ending October 30, 2004, just before Halloween.

If you’re ready to start shopping for your costume, here are the top five:

Between internet mind reading, stupid research, feeble forecasts and Halloween, it was a good week on the web, wouldn’t you say? Have a wonderful holiday weekend and we’ll see you back here on Tuesday, ready to get back to real work!

iMedia editor-at-large Masha Geller is the founder of interactive marketing and corporate communications consultancy Geller Public Relations in New York. She has been covering the interactive advertising industry since 1999 as the former editor in chief of MediaPost.com, and is a widely-published thought leader in the interactive arena.