As diehard readers of Signal know, I tend to ignore the latest Apple product announcement, figuring you all have heard enough (and it hasn’t even happened…yet). But what I have noticed is a lot of Google in the news recently, reminding us all of how large the company looms in all things Internet. To the links:

Google Places vs Facebook Places: It’s Search vs. Social (TNW) It’s worth reading this comparison to stay up to speed on the two giant’s “Places” plays.

Companies Google Has Acquired (Volcanic) Fun graphic.

Online publishers: growing the display advertising pie (Google Blog) “We believe that the new technology we’re developing to make display advertising work better will help to grow the display advertising pie for all publishers, by orders of magnitude.” Well my, that’s something. It’s already in the billions, Google. My, my, my.

Facebook’s Latest Patent Targets Search Behaviors (Mashable) Did I not tell you yesterday of Facebook’s search plans? The patent is for “ranking search results based on the frequency of clicks on the search results by members of a social network who are within a predetermined degree of separation.”

Cover Story (Boston Globe) Who knew, the first book was not the Bible, but…a grammar pamphlet? Lessons from the last massive shift in media, applied to today.

With Content Marketing, You Get What You Pay For (MarketingProfs) The headline pretty much says it all. Content marketing is all the rage right now, and for good reason. It’s not about content, per se, it’s about who makes the content, and for whom, under what premise. In other words,publishing.

Amazon’s cloud platform still the largest, but others are closing the gap (ORR) Interesting to see growth of cloud services (a Point of Control) through lens of job postings.

Pitfalls that could derail your branded apps (iMedia) Solid if pedestrian advice.

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The FM program of the day is taking a day or so off.

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