As soon as I saw the above package of Energizer batteries while casually shopping today, I knew I had to buy it.

Why? It’s not because I suddenly remembered I was out of batteries (it turned out that I had plenty at home). It’s because it contained a free wind-up Energizer Bunny!

Behold the power of the kitschy freebie. I never would have bought those batteries if there wasn’t the toy surprise inside.

I guess this is part of the revitalization of the Bunny by Energizer parent company Gillette. No better way to do that than with a toy — especially in this instance, when the ad icon is itself a toy.

Come to think of it, I guess it’d have been more appropriate if this wind-up bunny actually ran on the very batteries it’s pitching.

A couple of months after playing with one, I finally bought my own 20Q today.

Mine’s red, not blue like the one pictured here. I’d rather have blue, or better yet green; but you take what’s available.

I think I’ll take it to work tomorrow and have some fun with it.

I actually managed to outsmart the little twerp on the very first try today. I was thinking “Google”; it got as close as guessing “email” and “cyberspace”. Still pretty impressive, but it wasn’t able to nail it. Considering my earlier experience with 20Q, I was actually surprised that it didn’t read my mind.

Advertising Week 2005 kicks off in less than two weeks. To whet your whistle, you can vote for your favorite classic/popular ad mascots and catchphrases.

Unfortunately, it looks like Yahoo!’s messed up the links to the voting pages. Never fear, the correct URLs are here and here.

No surprise the Keebler Elves and Jolly Green Giant are on the icon ballot. But no Terry Tate, Office Linebacker? At least let me write him in!

Two comic strips that ran today: “Pearls Before Swine” on top, “Non Sequitur” on bottom.

Same day, same exact joke about criminal birds being denied bail because they’re “flight risks”. (Good joke, actually.)

Looks like Stephan Pastis and Wiley Miller are drinking the same Kool-Aid.

Long-rumored, Google Blog Search is out in the wild. (Or as wild as beta can be.)

Something tells me Technorati had better get its kinks worked out, and quick. Putting a brave face on is fine, but as long as those “Sorry” timeouts keep cropping up, competing with Google both technically and financially (i.e., attracting advertising dollars) doesn’t seem particularly realistic.

In the past, speculation has been that any Google foray into blog-only search would result in the segregation of blogs from the rest of the searchable Web. No sign of that, and I’m not sure how realistic that is. People generally prefer more results, as long as they’re relevant enough (not that I buy Google’s hype in that area).

I can see putting an option in the Advanced Search settings to run a search that excludes blogs. It wouldn’t be a perfect filter, but it’d be fairly easy for Google to identify likely blogs: By common domain names (blogspot.com, livejournal.com, etc.) , and by blogging software (not that hard, since WordPress, Blogger, Movabletype and a handful of others dominate the blog market). That would take out some 90 percent of all blogs, now and in the future.

As someone who gets beaucoup traffic thanks to Google results, I’ll be curious to see what effect this has, down the road.