A Russian astrologer has sued NASA claiming that the Deep Impact probe that crashed into comet Tempel 1 on July 4 “ruins the natural balance of forces in the universe.” She’s seeking damages as the result of her “moral sufferings.”

If you can stand a bit of moral sufffering of your own, take a look at this movie and consider: This impact occurred 133 million miles from Earth, involved the collision of a dishwasher-sized probe with a 3.7-mile-wide comet hurtling through space at 23,000 miles per hour — and you can watch it all on your personal computer, a piece of technology that makes all the computers involved in the Apollo 11 mission seem like hand calculators by comparison.

Yeah, Live 8 was a notable moment for the idea of a connected global community … but this literally puts the power of the Internet into cosmic perspective.

On the heels of Live 8, album sales soared — sales of Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” were up 1,343%.

A Google AdWords campaign I’m managing for one of my clients includes ads for the 1967 Bob Dylan documentary, “Don’t Look Back.” When news broke last week of Dylan’s deal with Starbucks to release “Bob Dylan: Live at the Gaslight 1962,” the number of clicks generated by these ads rose about tenfold.

What events in the news and trends in the culture affect the public’s perception of your product?

Takeaway for marketers: Advertising doesn’t happen in a vacuum, particularly online. Maximize your results by being aware of what’s happening in the culture, and be prepared to fine-tune your message or your placement plan.

If you’re going to be spending any time online today, this is a good place to start.

Enjoy the holiday.

I checked out the Live 8 site. Thought I might buy a T-shirt or something, but the commerce portion of the site was down and told me to come back in a half hour. So I clicked around. Decided to check the global concert schedule, then for the heck of it took a look at the metatags for the page. Check it out:

meta name=”keywords” content=”Live 8 concerts, live 8, the long walk to justice, live 8 show, live8 charity concert, make poverty history, live aid concerts, live aid tickets, london, paris, berlin, rome, philidelphia”

Let’s be honest: In the Sesame Street game of “one of these things is not like the others” Philly isn’t quite in the class of London, Paris, Rome, and Berlin.

Fine.

But jeez, people — at least spell it correctly, willya?

You may have heard that Google is facing a click fraud lawsuit. If you want all the details, this post on Search Engine Lowdown provides a link to a PDF copy of the class action complaint.

What’s click fraud? Here’s Google’s definition: “any method used to artificially and/or maliciously generate clicks or page impressions.”

How big an issue is click fraud? It depends on who you ask. On the one hand, Google downplays click fraud as “not a significant problem.” On the other hand, the company’s CFO says that click fraud “threatens our business model.” The most common figure cited among independent estimates is 20 percent. The chief executive of Click Defense, the company that filed the suit, says they’ve detected click fraud rates as high as 38 percent.

This is an issue that affects not just advertisers, of course, but also publishers. Here’s an article from WebProNews written from that perspective.

I believe the typical AdWords advertiser, paying 40 or 50 or 60 cents a click, doesn’t have to worry about click fraud. Where the action is happening is most likely in the keyword penthouse: pharmaceutical and financial keywords, for example, that bid to the higher end of the $0.05 – $100 bidding range allowed by Google.

Takeaway for marketers: Relax. Unless there’s a skeleton in Google’s closet the size of Andre the Giant, there’s no need to worry. Yet.