Well, according to the Fighting Splog blog, not particularly well: In the last month, the number of splogs has increased 50 percent.

What’s a splog? It’s a spam blog, a blog created to game Google, which does delete splogs. The bad news is that splogs continue to be created faster than Google can delete them, which junks up the Internet for everyone.

The state of splogs right now sorta feels like a game of Missile Command when it gets to the point where the missiles (splogs) are coming so fast and furious, you can’t possibly protect all the cities (Google search result integrity).

Takeaway for marketers: Splogs suck. If you’re engaging in this type of “marketing,” shame on you.

John C. Dvorak is the crankiest of the Cranky Geeks. Even so, he usually has a pretty smart finger on the pulse of the tech world. This PC Magazine column about Bubble 2.0 is worth reading.

Takeaway for marketers: There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors out there. Still.

Today is the 81st birthday of Stan Freberg, who has probably had as much of an impact on American advertising as anyone. He won 21 Clio Awards as he created some of the greatest commercials of the late-’50s and early-’60s.

You can run a search for Freberg on YouTube. A lot of his commercials have been pulled for copyright violations, but you’ll still find a few here and there. Meanwhile, here’s a 1989 interview with Freberg, here’s a 1991 interview, here’s a 1999 interview and here’s a classic Butter-Nut Coffee “subliminal advertising” spot, posted on iFilm.

If that’s not enough Freberg for you, trundle on over to Amazon and check out Tip of the Freberg and Stan Freberg Presents The United States of America.

Takeaway for marketers: A little humor goes a long way.

The next season of 24 will be notable for more than casting a woman as President: As the Washington Post reports, “the seventh season of ’24’ will take steps to reduce and offset the carbon emissions from the show’s production, with the goal of having the season finale be entirely carbon-neutral.”

Takeaway for marketers: Thinking about a celebrity spokesman for your brand? Maybe that celebrity spokesman should be Mother Earth.

Gerry McGovern raises an important question over here on the Giraffe Forum: Can a Web site be both attractive and functional? The title of the post, “The best Web sites are ugly,” suggests the answer is no.

It all begs a discussion that’s been going on for years, and that’s worth having for anyone managing the development or redesign of a site.

Designers, of course, tend to favor aesthetics over usability. But there has to be a middle ground between Salvador Dali and Jakob Nielsen. The missing element? Usability testing. But that takes time, costs money and runs the risk of delivering results that are at odds with pretty design.

In many companies, the executives controlling the dollars that pay for the design or redesign don’t understand that ugly can be pretty. They’re comfortable with print, where pretty goes a lot farther because functionality doesn’t have to be considered, and apply those sensibilities to the Web. But online it’s functionality and utilitarianism, not pretty, that rule the day. Plus, there’s an element of human nature here: If I’m writing a six-figure check to have a site designed, I sure as hell want to think it looks good.

Meanwhile, there are the levels of approval that need to happen in most companies to launch a Web site. As the saying goes, “a camel is a horse designed by committee.” So it is with Web sites (or anything else of a creative nature, for that matter). The bane of copywriters forever has been that everyone knows how to write, so everyone thinks they write well, though so few do. The same thing is happening with Web sites: Everyone uses the Web, so everyone thinks they know what a great Web design needs to be. But the only everyone who counts is every one of your customers.

Designing or redesigning a Web site is a long gauntlet to run, and it’s getting longer all the time. Which probably explains McGovern’s observation that “Web design is falling into the trap of caring more about how a page looks than how it reads.”

But let’s go beyond how it reads: Let’s also focus on how it functions.

Takeaway for marketers: McGovern is absolutely correct when he writes, “there are three things a great Web design must be: useful, useful and useful.” Put aside your personal tastes and make sure it’s useful in the way your customers want it to be.