People are exposed to a variety of types of ads on a daily basis from television ads to online ads and more than half (55%) of Americans say they find current advertising to be interesting while 41 percent say it is not interesting, according to a new survey by Harris Interactive.

Younger adults and those with higher incomes are more likely to consider ads interesting. Sixty-six percent of adults aged 18-34 and 60 percent of adults aged 35-44 think ads are interesting as do 62 percent of Americans with a household income of $75,000 or more.

The opposite is true of adults 55 and older with 52 percent saying that current advertising is not interesting and 46 percent of those aged 45-54 and those who have a household income between $35,000 and $74, 999.

When buying products and/or services, over half of Americans (54%) say advertisements they had seen or heard were not influential when then made their last large purchase, with one-quarter (25%) saying they were not at all influential. One-third (35%) of Americans say the ads they saw or heard were influential.

The TypePad profiles feature helps bloggers manage their profiles and keep them up to date.

The Six Apart Blog explains. “If you connect with your Twitter account we’ll automatically fill in your status. Leave a comment on a TypePad enabled site and we’ll pull that in too. Update your profile picture and it will automatically change on every comment you’ve already made across TypePad enabled sites.”

“TypePad profiles make it easy to connect with other commenters and conversations across blogs for readers and bloggers alike. And don’t worry; we didn’t forget the feeds, Microformats or OpenID either.”

TypePad’s new comment feature in beta integrates with the new profiles. The new comment service has an improved new interface and helpful features like threading, easy pagination, OpenID sign in, email notifications of replies and the ability to reply via email.

The new features are combined into the TypePad Connect beta. The new profiles and comments are available to any blogger or Web site outside of TypePad. Through TypePad Connect bloggers have the ability to track, moderate and respond to comments across multiple sites and blogs from a single dashboard.

Bloggers will be able to integrate comments and profiles from Movable Type, Blogger, WordPress and Tumblr.

The most common threats to blogs are comment spam that may contain links to a Web site with malicious code and SQL injection attacks that exploits a vulnerability in the blogging platform that allows a hacker to inject malicious code in the blog, that can be used to put malware on a reader’s computer.

“From the blog user’s perspective, the usual rules apply: never click on a link in a blog if you don’t know or trust its source (in the same way you wouldn’t in an email); make sure your security is up to date (network protection should prevent company employees clicking on a blacklisted link but there is no alternative to keeping your system’s software up to date); and always keep your wits about you – common sense,” said Simon Heron, Internet Security Analyst, for Network Box.

Heron recommends using a Captcha, a free tool that checks to see if the person posting a comment is human and blocks automated comment spam.

He also recommends Aksimet another free tool that protects blogs from comment and trackback spam. It works by submitting all blog comments to a central service that analyses the comments and blocks or allows as appropriate.

Another free service is Spambam, a WordPress plug-in that blocks comment spam.

You can see more of the guide for secure blogging here.

The HuffingtonPost.com led among a group of stand-alone political blogs and news sites with 4.5 million visitors in September, up 472 percent compared to a year ago, while Politico.com attracted 2.4 million visitors (up 344%) and DrudgeReport.com saw 2.1 million visitors (up70%).

“With each new election cycle, the Internet is playing a more significant role in shaping the stories of the day that are so crucial in formulating public opinion on issues and candidates,” said Andrew Lipsman, senior analyst at comScore.

“That most mainstream news outlets now have their own political blogs is a testament to their increasing reach and influence. However, several independent blogs unaffiliated with larger media outlets paved the way in this space and are really beginning to enter the mainstream public consciousness with this current election cycle.”

September was the single biggest month on record for both the HuffingtonPost.com and Politico.com since their launches.

A number of sites focused on political polling also did well. RealClearPoltics.com, which tracks composites of polls by state, attracted 1.1 million visitors in September, up 489 percent over a year a go. Two other polling sites, Pollster.com with 194,000 visitors and FiveThirtyEight.com with 169,000 visitors, also saw notable traffic in September.

The leading conservative blog, FreeRepublic.com, saw marginal declines compared to a year ago, though it sill attracted nearly 1 million visitors in September. Other conservative blogs, such as Newsbusters.org (up 547% to 732,000 visitors), WorldNetDaily.com (up 55% to 636,000 visitors) and MichelleMalkin.com (up 140% to 247,000 visitors) saw solid gains.

Looking at the demographic profiles of the top three sites, HuffingtonPost.com, Politico.com and DrudgeReport.com, revealed that visitors to these sites tended to be older, wealthier, and more likely to be male than the average U.S. Internet user.

Of the three sites, Politico.com skewed the oldest with 23 percent of its visitors age 55 and older, while DrudgeReport.com skewed wealthiest, with 40 percent of its visitors earning at least $100,000 a year, and the highest concentration of males at 57 percent. HuffingtonPost.com, the site with the largest audience, was the most similar of the three when compared to the overall Internet audience.

Visitors to the Google Blog Search page can now navigate through the following categories, politics, US, world, business, technology, video games, science, entertainment, movies, television and sports.

The new homepage is very similar to Google News in the way the content is displayed.

On the Official Google Blog the company explains its new blog search. “We’re now showing categories on the left side of the website and organizing the blog posts within those categories into clusters, which are groupings of posts about the same story or event.”

“Grouping them in clusters lets you see the best posts on a story or get a variety of perspectives. When you look within a cluster, you’ll find a collection of the most interesting and recent posts on the topic, along with a timeline graph that shows you how the story is gaining momentum in the blogosphere.”

Google says its new blog search feature is only available in English but that it plans to add new features and support for more languages in the coming months.

Google says it lists any blog that publishes a site feed in any format and automatically pings an updating service (such as Google Blog Search Pinging Service). Bloggers can also manually submit a blog for inclusion. The company says it periodically crawls and refreshes manually -added blogs but resubmitting ensures it will index the latest posts.

Hopefully you’ve heard about RSS Hugger before and if you haven’t let me briefly explain it’s purpose. Putting it simply the site can be used as your feed reader as well as for including your own blog. You can then distribute these feeds with others, somewhat like social bookmarking for blogs.

Here is a quote from RSS Hugger:

The Idea – rssHugger is a unique website that aims to bring bloggers and readers together. rssHugger aims to provide blog owners with a unique easy-to-use way to promote their blogs by sending them traffic, building backlinks for search engine optimization, as well as attracting new rss subscribers if the content is interesting to the reader. rssHugger aims to help visitors be able to easily find blogs that write about subjects they are interested in. These subjects include: internet marketing, making money online, charity, sports, gambling, and many more. If the visitors find a blog that they had not previously heard about, they can easily add it to their RSS readers or bookmark it.

Not so long ago a $20 registration fee was necessary for sign up, however recently the service has been made free, Under the condition that you make a short blog post about them on your site, which explains the reason behind this post.

• Readers enjoy lists because they get straight to the point, they’re an easy read.
• Lists can provide large amounts of information in a small number of words.
• Lists are easy to write. They do not require any complex compilation of writing.
• Lists do not take long to write, for the same reason as above.
• It is easy to add items to a list
• Social Bookmarking websites, notably Digg absolutely worship lists, they can provide an orgasm of traffic.
• It is not difficult to make a list that has not been made already.
• People love referring other people to lists.