Obama was on the minds of the U.S. in terms of search in 2008, according to Google. But the fastest-rising search term for Google’s global results in its Zeitgeist was Sarah Palin. That’s what’s listed in this year’s top search term recaps from Google, Yahoo, AOL, Ask.com, and Lycos. The election weighed heavily in several categories including fastest rising, overall searches, influential women, and top news stories.

The financial bailout ranked high on search, too. On Google people searched for “financial crisis,” “bailout,” and “mortgage crisis,” while Yahoo saw top economic terms such as “oil prices,” “gold prices,” and “Sallie Mae.” AOL visitors looked for financial terms “Wachovia,” “Washington Mutual,” “Merrill Lynch,” and “AIG,” among others. The top news stories on Lycos related to the economic collapse and bailout, though stories of the death of actor Heath Ledger, and the Eliot Spitzer scandal were also popular.

Digital ads just won’t suffice to save the struggling newspaper business. That’s been clear since early this fall, when the Newspaper Association of America reported its members’ second quarter revenues shrank for the first time in Q2, following weak Q1 growth. Those revenues declined again in Q3, shattering the pipe dream that rapid Web growth would support the publishers’ huge cost structures.

So perhaps it shouldn’t come as a shock that The New York Times — itself an NAA member — is also feeling a digital ad pinch. Long known for its culture of innovation, particularly at NYTimes.com, the company last week reported results for November, and were they ever bad. The dismal report includes a 21.8 percent overall revenue drop, led by spending declines in a bunch of major sectors and in all its divisions.

While grim, that big picture pain is less disheartening than this tidbit: Online ad revenues for the month contracted 4 percent compared with November 2007, owing to the continued flight of real estate and job classifieds advertising. The collapse of those two bedrocks of its ad model appear to have trumped all the company’s smart synchronized banners, its surround sessions and its 10th place ranking among the largest Web players (Nielsen Online). Even for the Grey Lady, it would appear based on these numbers that rapid adoption and innovation in new channels just aren’t enough to sustain a business mired in old ones.

A pioneer of Internet consulting and Web development for Republicans is no longer with us. Founder and CEO of New Media Communications, and a partner of Connell Donatelli, an affiliated Web consultancy, died Friday in a plane crash on his way to Ohio, according to Connell Donatelli’s Eric Frenchman. Apparently Connell was piloting the plane.

I never met Connell, though I’ve known his close colleagues Frenchman and Becki Donatelli for some time (both drove online ad strategy for the 2008 McCain campaign).

You can read more about Mike here.

120 cans of cat food per month.

There aren’t a lot of constants in life, but one of mine is that my two cats go through 120 cans of cat food every four weeks, come hell or high water.

That’s a lot of cat food to lug home, particularly in New York City, where we residents tend to be car-less. But recently a friend of a friend turned me on to Amazon’s subscribe-and-save feature. Voila! Now, each month like clockwork, those 120 cans magically appear on my doorstep. I get a 15 percent discount on the product, and there’s no shipping fee (the major pet retailers such as Petco offer subscriptions as well, but the shipping fees make their version of a subscription service prohibitively expensive).

In this, the most dismal era of consumer consumption in memory, why isn’t Amazon doing more to promote this indispensable service? And why don’t more online retailers follow suit?

Diapers. Over-the-counter medications. Grocery items. Personal care items. Snacks. Office supplies. Everyone’s got a product they can’t live without. Most consumers have products that require regularly scheduled replenishing, from blades for razors to filters for humidifiers.

Guaranteeing this level of service and savings doesn’t just make sense for consumers, but also for online merchants, who can bank on a lock on this portion of consumer spending. The trick is to make it economically worthwhile for buyers, with flexible options to change, cancel, accelerate or postpone orders (as Amazon does via a simple interface).

Guaranteed customer loyalty is nothing for retailers to sneeze at. If you’re selling online, what portion of those sales can you market as a subscription? And how will you promote that service? We all know the power of word of mouth marketing, but even mighty Amazon isn’t going out of its way to spread the word on its subscription services.

There’s some serious opportunity here for retailers to subscribe to customer loyalty by allowing their customers to subscribe to their services.

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