The top of the site features a listing of popular terms, grouped into a general ‘popular now’ category, and then divided by People Places, and Products. You’re also free to search for whatever term you’d like using the box in the upper right hand corner of the screen.

The resulting site could prove useful, but it’s a little cluttered, with a scrolling list of constantly updated Tweets on the left side and your standard Bing search results on the right. This would be fine, were it not for the large ‘trending topics’ section and ’sharing’ sections in the header which should probably be tucked along the side. My biggest gripe, though, is that the Bing search results are in a frame — I’d much rather just have the whole page dedicated to the results, even if I had to sacrifice the nice blue border.

This isn’t Bing’s first attempt to fuse its results with Tweets — the site began rolling out integrated results from Twitter earlier this month, but it is only using results from especially prolific and popular Tweeters, which diminishes the feature’s value. Microsoft has previously worked with Federated Media on the launch of ExecTweets, a Twitter aggregator that displays tweets from top business executives.

One side note: Microsoft actually released BingTweets around an hour ago, but it went down almost immediately afterward, and performance is still very spotty. BingTweets will still certainly be a hit in the Twittersphere, but there’s no better way to kill your virality.

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We’ve had our very vocal dustups with Federated Media over the years, but the fact is that we owe FM a lot, and I’m somewhat sad to announce today that our relationship with them is coming to an end (see Federated’s announcement here). We’ll no longer be working with them on ad sales. We’ve long sold many of our ads directly, and as of now we’ll be taking control of 100% of TechCrunch network ad inventory.

In some ways this is a rite of passage for our still-young blog network. TechCrunch is starting to grow up. We now have six full-time writers on TechCrunch, and our total writing staff across our network is 20 bloggers strong. The TechCrunch Network now reaches more than 5.5 million unique visitors per month and 15 million page views (TechCrunch proper is more than 3 million uniques and 10 million page views / month.) In short, we’re finally getting big enough to matter directly to advertisers and agencies.

I’m personally excited about our new direction. Heather Harde, our CEO, has deep experience in sales and has acquired advertising technology companies in her previous job at News Corp. She’s got a lot of ideas on where online advertising is going. And as our CrunchCam shows, she can get an ad unit on just about anything.

One of the things we’re going to pilot with our expanded go-to-market sales strategy is a self-serve platform hosted by isocket. As the largest independent media property covering technology, TechCrunch is in the fortunate position to have a lot of advertising prospects reach out to us with interest in running on our network. Offering a self-serve platform will enable us to sell smaller units of TechCrunch inventory to be more timely and affordable to marketers and start-ups. For example, we used to sell month-long sponsorships exclusively, and now have weekly, and in some cases, daily buyout opportunities. Inventory on all TechCrunch properties is available, including CrunchGear, MobileCrunch, TechCrunchIT, CrunchBase, TechCrunchEurope, TechCrunchFrance and TechCrunchJapan.

The isocket service is brand new. One of the things that makes working at TechCrunch so much fun is discovering new start-ups and getting to test them out first. TechCrunch is the first pilot client for isocket, a new, yet-to-be-funded startup by John Ramey and Zak Hassanein. The isocket self-serve ad platform sits on top of OpenAds, our ad-serving partner, and will help us offer more transparent and flexible pricing options to advertisers. We’re launching with a modest set of variables, all time-based buyout by the day, week or month. In the coming weeks, we’ll add the ability to purchase CPM-based advertising. We’ll also be launching new targeting channels. For example, marketers who want to reach a mobile audience, can focus a package that includes MobileCrunch, as well as the relevant pages of CrunchGear and TechCrunch and on matching company profiles on CrunchBase.

One of the practices that we will discontinue, at least for the short time, is running ad inventory from multiple third-party networks. Since we haven’t been selling all our own inventory, we need time to get a clean read of the demand for premium advertising on our network. Google AdSense will provide backfill for remnant impressions for the immediate future.

We’d like to acknowledge Federated Media for the contributing role they’ve played to help TechCrunch get to where it is today. Notwithstanding our differences of opinion about the role of conversational marketing, we part friends. Unlike others, we’re not leaving to move to competitive selling networks, we’re just leaving to chart our own course. John, Neil and Chas have contributed to the TechCrunch business in important ways over the last three years. Federated’s commitment to represent aspiring authors is still an important role in the publishing ecosystem.

As part of our kick-off, we’re offering a 20% discount on all advertising purchased directly online through isocket during the month of May (discounted inventory based on availability through 12/31/09.) Our traditional rates resume June 1, so please use this opportunity to test us out and save.

Of course, we welcome advertisers to contact us directly to purchase advertising on either a sponsorship or CPM basis. Please email heather [at] techcrunch [dot] com or visit techcrunch.com/advertise.

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We’ve stuck with Federated Media through the years, despite our love/hate relationship with them.

But as advertising dollars become harder to come by, staying with Federated becomes more costly. The biggest issue is that as a market leader among tech blogs, we end up subsidizing others. An example – an advertiser comes to us with, say, a $100,000 spend. They are referred through to Federated, who if they make the sale gets a 40% cut. That cut is fine. But what Federated then does is spread that $100k around to many different blogs. In the end we may only see a small fraction of it spent on TechCrunch. This works in our favor as well when leads come in from other blogs. But given how much higher profile we are than many of the other blogs in the Federated network, a disproportionate share of leads comes in through us.

In effect, we’re subsidizing our competition. As ad dollars become more scarce, the effect of that subsidy is more pronounced.

These and other reasons led Digg, GigaOm and others to leave the Federated Media network. Are we next? That’s Heather’s call. But we’ll be sure to let Federated Media know what we’re thinking via a blog post, the same way they delivered their news today.

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