It's gold for search gurus and the Googles of the world. But the research also revealed broader trends, including that 74% of Irish people aged 18-34 now use the internet.

And they're using it for ever-greater periods of time each week. Males aged 18-24 spend an average of nine hours a week online - and some of that probably isn't even porn.

"The internet is now a dominant communications and entertainment channel for 1.7 million Irish consumers, and looks set to match TV and radio for reach by the end of the decade, " said Gerard O'Neill, Amarach CEO.

OBAMA WINNING MYSPACE PRIMARY It's never too early to ask for votes in American presidential politics, and smart observers will be eager to learn what sort of marketing $1bn in campaign contributions will buy in a Web2.0 world.

Hillary Clinton's campaign tried its hand at viral marketing last week, but Barack Obama was at last count well ahead in the MySpace friends primary.

This may sound faddish, but as a recruitment tool for volunteers helping to get out the vote in 10 months and then again in November 2008 it may prove critical. Will Irish politicians learn?

Readers may become convinced that Publius has abandoned our right-wing blogger roots (see below) and gone all Green but our fave use of da new tech so far this Irish election campaign is by Ciaran Cuffe TD, whose YouTubehosted postmodern tours of Blackrock Baths and direct appeals to voters have a haunting quality somewhere between the work of Jean-Luc Goddard and Ingmar Bergman. Or the 11890 guys (see above).

We can't decide.

LEINSTER RUGBY HUNT FOR NEW SPONSOR Bank of Scotland (Ireland) will end its sponsorship of Leinster rugby when its contract expires at the end of the current season.

Leinster is currently seeking a new sponsor.

Lloyds TSB is spoken for at the moment, however, as it last week signed up to become the �80m (Euro120m) anchor sponsor of the London 2012 Olympics.

The money can't come soon enough, however.

Olympic organisers clenched their teeth and revealed last week that the London games have already seen their cost estimates treble. Irish construction firms couldn't stop smiling.

"NOTHING PRINTABLE. . ."

. . . was the response via text we got from the new Public Relations Consultants Association chairman Tim Kinsella of MRPA Kinman, when he was asked if he had any words for Publius to mark his election. We missed you too, Tim.

DON'T MESS WITH THE BLOGGERS Bloggers are a fickle bunch, as Publius has long known.

Given that they also have perfect recall - thanks to the power of that interweb thingy, where one transient thought is no longer wrapping fish the next day but is preserved and searchable by Google for all eternity - it may be unwise to upset too many of them.

The Irish Times' Brian Boyd may be discovering that. Blogger Kevin Breathnach (disillusionedlefty. blogspot. c om) last week took Boyd to task for similarities between his Irish Times feature marking the death of French philosopher Jean "The [First] Iraq War Did Not Take Place" Baudrillard and a New York Times obit for Baudrillard published six days earlier.

It's too long to reproduce here but you can read it at the above web address.

We leave it to readers to decide for themselves whether the similarities - which are numerous - amount to anything more than coincidence.

What is unlikely to be a coincidence is that Boyd also wrote a November 2005 Irish Times article that condemned blogging as a phenomenon by and for right-wing extremists, Howard Dean's 2004 US presidential campaign notwithstanding.

In the blogosphere, everyone can hear you scream.

. . .AND WE'RE BACK Publius has been away for a while and is grateful to those of you who asked after us and happy to spite those who hoped we'd gone away for good. We promise to bring you, dear reader, the last full measure of all that stored-up bilious misanthropy.

TIPS, BRIBES & ABUSE all welcome once again to rdelevan@tribune. ie