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You might be surprised to learn that Google’s pay-per-click advertising revenue is not growing as much as expected these last two years. The growth last year was flat and dropped 7% in December. Brand For Power is doing a seminar series with marketing experts on branding for your business.I’ll be one of the speakers and there will be many others who worked with online branding for companies such as Apple, PizzaHut and Staples. They’re free and you can get the link at http://www.freelinereport.com

Digg has released a new firefox extension that will allow you to see the current number of Diggs for every web page you visit. You can also see the last ten comments and the first sentence of the description. It will also show any previous stories submitted to Digg from that same domain.

Adobe is trying to bridge the gap between your online and offline data with Adobe Air. The idea is to no longer have data available only online by making a copy on your local hard drive.

Cake Financial has released a Facebook application that lets you view authentic stock portfolios of your friends.

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Google’s releasing a new product called Knol, which will be a direct competitor with Wikipedia as a free, online encyclopedia. The only difference is that Knol will be user-centric, rather than community centric, and will have a spotlight on authors that contribute.

Currently, Wikipedia has a leg up with a lot of articles and a solid user base. But Google is Google, so it shouldn’t take them long to make Knol the talk of the town.

Cool, mostly. First, the folks at Google created the “Supplemental Results,” but said the pages that got trapped there weren’t penalized, though that’s what it was, as a practical matter.

Then, they removed the label. Now, they’re removing the difference and will be searching both indices for all search queries.

Read about it straight from Google engineer, Yonatan Zunger.

In the early 1900’s, big companies often had a Vice President of Electricity. (Really.) Getting power was a big deal, and someone senior needed to be in charge of it. As electricity became easily available through the grid, these positions disappeared.

Fast forward 100 years, and one of Google’s biggest challenges is . . . electricity.

Now, Google is getting into the power business. Focusing on renewable energy, they want to produce a gigawatt of electricity (enough to power a big city), for less than the cost of power from coal, within a “years, not decades” according to co-founder Larry Page.