As Facebook controversies and the ongoing legislative and regulatory debates over privacy move the issue of personal data control onto the front pages of newspapers and Web sites, consumers are engaging with the issue in a new way. In the past I have done periodic passes of the opt-out processes in place at the major content and ad network providers, but it seems appropriate this time to approach the process from a typical consumer perspective. How would a concerned user try to get a toehold on the data collection problem and attempt to opt out of something -- anything -- …

Bad quality data can give the advertising industry a bad name. Good quality audience data segments can make the difference when it comes to successful ad targeting campaigns. AudienceScience on Wednesday will launch two programs designed to give advertisers confidence in the quality of data and audience segments they use.

Lotame will soon have the ability to scan content across the Web as people create it, and associate content creators with the emotions they express about brands, activities, and other topics. The company is deepening its relationship with OpenAmplify, with whom it's been affiliated for about a year, to make it possible to target ad messages based on that information.

Since online advertising began, it seems there's always been some kind of scheme afoot to "pay" users for the time they spend with ads. Anyone remember AllAdvantage? In the late '90s there were efforts to give people credits for every banner they watched. You can imagine the ways in which that plan was gamed.

Semantic data has become the key to precise targeting. That's a good thing for Peer39, which specializes in this service. The company on Wednesday announced a partnership with sell-side platform AdMeld that will enable the latter's clients -- the likes of Answers.com, AccuWeather, Discovery Communications, FOX News, Hearst Television, and IAC -- to analyze ad impressions against semantic data sets on the fly.

As a way of touting the success of the iPhone's content economy, Apple is fond of rolling out regular updates about the massive number of applications in its growing App Store. Having 200,000 downloadable programs is supposed to be a sign of progress. With all of that clutter being merchandised through the small spout of a phone interface, getting an app noticed in this busy system has become difficult and costly. The same is true now for the Android marketplace, with tens of thousands of apps. No digital platform is more in need of behavioral analytics that can drive personalized …

Akamai launched an Online Shopping Data Visualization tool Wednesday to help marketers identify retail purchase trends. Mike Afergan, head of Akamai's Advertising Decision Solutions group, says the tool helps marketers target ads to consumers in conjunction with another Akamai tool, Shopographics, which offers online advertisers a way to find target markets by using shopping data to define audience segments.

Publishers complain "content farms" deliver mediocre content that is so well optimized for search, it crowds out the quality. Why don't they utilize their own archived online content to feed the search economy?

Making sure the correct ad serves up at the perfect time across ad networks has never been easy, but doing so across real-time bid (RTB) platforms in milliseconds, as well as non-RTB environments, gets even trickier. But [x+1] CEO John Nardone says the company has figured out a way to make it work.

Did you ever sit a friend down in front of your or your client's Web site and just watch how they interact with it? From mouse movements to the way they scroll, to the pauses between actions, every move you make on a Web page should tell publishers something about the effectiveness of their intended message. But what if it could be done on the cheap and on-the-fly, and tied to a dashboard that let you aggregate and filter a large number of interactions so you could visually view what they do? This is what fascinated me about ClickTale, an …