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.

B2B content has always been a tough nut to crack when it comes to ad networking. By its very nature, trade publishing has a highly targeted and highly qualified audience that has often paid off handsomely in print. Your endemic advertisers realized incredible efficiencies by allying their brands and messaging with your content, and in many trade categories there were only one or two venues in which to reach that target. One veteran of the b2b biz told me recently that in the good old days of trade publishing, "all you had to do was roll out of bed in …

John Nardone, CEO of [x+1], describes himself as a "marketing geek" who became addicted to the "thrill of innovation." As part of the Internet in the early days, many of his projects were the first of their kind. According to Nardone, "I put the first video ad on the Internet, and the first ad online with sound."

One person who has strong views about the way ad networking environments are evolving is Rich Frankel, president of Rocket Fuel, the ad technology platform that combines multiple targeting approaches. Frankel was part of the team that built Yahoo's behavioral targeting network, so he has been around the block and seen the ad technology stack develop in recent years. For Frankel, the process of planning and executing online is perhaps too complicated for humans. He is a big believer in the role algorithms and automation will play in digital advertising's future.

Thank goodness for the economic downturn. Sounds crazy, right? But without tighter ad budgets, marketers might not have realized the importance of quantifying ad campaigns as quickly as they did. Perhaps that realization also fueled investments in companies with the technology to target marketing and advertising campaigns. In one example of how the recession has been kind to companies focused on behavioral targeting, AudienceScience earlier this week reported securing $20 million in venture capital funding.