In some ways, the Web makes a marketer's job easier. Like when consumers are enticed to create commercials and other marketing messages for them. With Web 2.0, as the "second coming" of the Internet has come to be dubbed, consumers do all the work. And marketers, with all their control issues, are learning how to let them. It's called engagement--and increasingly, this activity means that consumers create part of a marketing campaign. "Without having complete chaos, is there a way to have controlled chaos?" asks Rishad Tobaccowala, chief executive of Denuo, a new media unit of Publicis Groupe. What happens …

eBay is bringing its auction format to the ad world by connecting buyers and sellers of TV advertising in an online exchange. The auctioneer is currently testing the new service, called the E-Media Exchange, with leading marketers, agencies and cable networks, including Lexus, Wal-Mart, Intel, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft. These companies are set to spend around $50 million combined to purchase ads on the exchange, which is supplied and managed by eBay. Few details about the logistics of the new program have been supplied, indicating that it still needs to be worked out. Adweek reports that a steering committee will meet …

Viacom announced this week that it was purchasing Y2M, a youth-media publisher of 450 online college newspapers, to extend its considerable influence over the youth market. Business Weeksays the deal shows how Viacom's approach differs from its rivals when reaching young people online. Many speculated that Viacom would go after News Corp.'s MySpace by acquiring a rival social network like Facebook. But the price of such social networks rose considerably after the runaway success of MySpace. In March, Facebook's founders hoped to sell the site to Viacom for $2 billion, more than twice what Rupert Murdoch and company paid for …

Interest in social bookmarking, a by-product of the social networking/user-generated content boom, came to a boil as Yahoo acquired Del.icio.us, a site that enables users to see and use their contacts' bookmarks. Eight months later, Del.icio.us is still the best and most popular social bookmarking site, but recent comScore numbers show that usage has declined. In fact, TechCrunch says it's "tanked completely." In April, usage peaked at 455,000 unique visitors and 4 million page views. By June, that number had dropped to 350,000 uniques and 1 million page views. That's a 22 percent drop in unique users and a massive …

Rejected TV pilots are turning up on the Web, and creators hope they can drum up enough viral interest to persuade TV execs to take another look. "The Adventures of Big Handsome Guy and His Little Friend" is the latest pilot reject to find its way to the Net. Passed on by Fox for the fall schedule, "Handsome" has already popped up on at least three different viral video sites. It's the second known program left over from the 2005-2006 season to mysteriously emerge on the Web. Leaking these shows is, of course, illegal--and 20th-Century Fox Television has vowed to …

Departing Washington Post technology writer Leslie Walker reviews her reporting of Internet business over the last eight years and comes across an interesting folder labeled "big bad bets." Essentially, it's about tech startups with loopy ideas that attracted crazy amounts of VC cash back in the heady mid-to-late Nineties. Anybody remember Beenz and Flooz, the guys who tried to create Internet "currency"? Or CueCat, the cat-shaped bar code scanner that wanted to bring magazine readers from print ads to Web commercials (err, not here). What about iWon.com? The sweepstakes Web site that planned to give $10 million away to people …

Apple Computer Corp. has been strangely silent since the passage of a new law in France that could force it to open its iTunes music software to competition. However, when similar cases were launched in Scandinavia, the iPod maker responded. The company claimed it was not illegal for Apple to only allow its copy-protected software to play on its media players--at least in Norway. In a letter to Norway's Ombudsman arbitrator, the computer giant rejected claims by consumer protection advocates that Apple should face fines and a possible closure if found guilty of violating Norway's strict consumer-protection laws. It said …

Here's pressure: You get six minutes to impress a room full of venture capitalists. If successful, you could get the funding to become the next Sergey Brin and realize your dream of building your own company. Or you could walk away as an absolute nobody. Welcome to the AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford University, birthplace of Google--the perfect backdrop for an event in which 50 nervous small-time entrepreneurs try to woo a room full of skeptical VCs in the amount of time it takes to order a burger from McDonald's. Make no mistake: for those company founders hanging on by the …

Napster, the quixotic illegal file-sharing-cum-legitimate online music subscription service, continues to baffle. The company, once repudiated for letting people swap songs for free, has forged ahead in that direction. Napster hopes a free ad-supported service will help it compete with Apple's iTunes. Well--it's not totally free. Users get to play each song five times before they have to buy. As a result of the shift, Napster's subscriber base fell 7 percent to 512,000, which includes 4,000 university-paid subscriptions. Frustrated CEO Chris Gorog says Napster expected some subscriber churn due to the new free site, but going forward, the company has …

Together, Google, RealNetworks and browser maker Mozilla Corp. are ensuring that consumers have options other than Microsoft when it comes to basic software applications. The three companies today have extended a deal that will see Google's Toolbar software and Mozilla's Firefox Web browser promoted across Real's multimedia products. This certainly isn't the first pact Google has signed with a major computer or software company to compete with Microsoft. The Mountain View, Calif. search outfit recently set deals with PC maker Dell and Flash software maker Adobe Systems. The Google Toolbar and Firefox Web browser are alternatives to Microsoft's Internet Explorer, …