The local mobile social media market seems to be exploding this season, with tons of new applications that are designed to bring you the power of the crowd at any place or time. Each of these mobile nets work a little differently, to connect friends in the immediate vicinity to one another or just to trade reviews of nearby locations.

Monster.com is testing a service that will serve ads to job seekers targeted to fill the missing educational holes shown in user profiles and resumes, as measured against the job ads users click on. If a job seeker is looking for sales jobs, but might not have the required MBA, Monster could serve a related ad to the job candidate from the University of Phoenix promoting classes or degrees, for example.

Somewhere beneath the marketing radar, millions of users are online every day registering their desires on the massively popular peer-to-peer networks. Despite worries about content piracy, P2P technologies like Bittorrent and Gnutella have become enormously powerful channels for content swapping among the most connected and media hungry users. There are tastes and behaviors exposed here that marketers ignore at their own peril

Behavioral targeting is one of those terms execs just want to stay away from because it's often defined as a creepy technology that follows people around the Internet. But how will marketers understand and learn about the technology if no one wants to talk about it? I suppose you can hash out the details behind closed doors, so it takes another 10 years before the technology catches on.

When I go to Amazon.com -- oh, about five times a week (yes, I am that addicted) -- the site's famously effective recommendation engine has ample opportunity to monitor my browsing habits. The result is a personalized experience that is almost eerie in its ability to anticipate the items I would like to buy. But how do other retailers who see an online visitor once, or perhaps just once a season, create a similarly intimate experience? You crowd-source it. But in the process, if you look carefully enough at the range of interactions people make with retailer sites, you will …

TARGUSinfo on Tuesday reported a partnership with ad network AdMeld designed to better target consumers with ads across the Internet. Broadening the definition of "behavioral targeting" might draw a straight line from BT to "dynamically optimized ad tags," but TARGUSinfo insists it doesn't offer BT in the traditional sense of the words.

Who really owns the privacy relationship with users? Increasingly, most players in the ad technology game are recognizing how much of the debate over personal profiling and tracking is going to come down to sheer communication skills.

It's been nearly eight months since Google announced a behavioral targeting service, which it calls "interest-based" ad targeting. It gathers information about consumers that traverse Web sites across the search engine's massive AdSense network of independent sites. Google left it up to the individual sites whether or not to participate, but stipulates to do so, publishers must provide new disclosure in their privacy policy and a link to Google's privacy policy. Estimates by Jim Brock, founder of PrivacyChoice, and a former Yahoo senior vice president, suggest about 25% of AdSense sites serve targeted ads.