If only the U.S. government was an ad-supported business... That may be a dangerous - and somewhat ridiculous - thing to say, but Nielsen//NetRatings says that more than one-third of all Internet users visited a government site last month.

The biggest story of the day is, of course, Yahoo! Platinum. The more interesting story, at least in my humble opinion, is SF Interactive’s launch of the Ad Cube.

If you’re curious about what your employees did last week, chances are they’ve either balanced their online checkbooks or spent some time at Dilbert.com. At least that’s what Nielsen//NetRatings is reporting today.

Every time a research-related press release crosses my path I feel like a statistic. That’s probably because I am one, especially when it comes to the way I surf the web. Long gone are the days when I would let the web take me wherever it wanted. Now I either type a URL directly into the browser, or “Google it.” Turns out, most of the world does the same thing, and “Googling it” is increasing in popularity.

Today, AOL announced an initiative to offer a pop-up blocker to its subscribers (ironic as it is, considering AOL itself pioneered the pop-up concept in the early days.) The odd thing is, while pop-up advertising has grown in the past year, they still just make up a small percentage of ad impressions served.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has formed another committee. Actually, the official name of the group is “Associate Member Board,” and its purpose is to help the IAB better represent the interactive advertising industry by paying more attention to “companies whose business supports the sale of interactive advertising and marketing.”

A study recently conducted by Survey.com on behalf of Forbes.com and GartnerG2 confirms yet again that the web is a great place to reach C-level executives (Chief Executive titles—CEO, CFO, CIO; plus Owner/Partner). Based on 11,000 respondents, not only is the Internet a huge part of their work lives, they’re best reached early in the morning and actually click on ads, too.

Don’t know about you, but my Friday would not be complete without some Nielsen//NetRatings weekly traffic stats. This week, however, probably due to the DoubleClick and the AAAA conferences, the researchers didn’t get to counting visitors and instead released a much more interesting report, which examined the "touchpoints" that connect consumers with brands.

As hundreds of traditional media folks get together this week at the AAAA Media Conference in New Orleans, the subject of clutter will undoubtedly come up in quite a few discussions, as it has in all years past. Clutter is a huge problem for all media, has been for years, and online is no exception.

At yesterday’s DoubleClick Insight conference in New York, a panel of experts unveiled the results of a cross-media study, which yet again proved that increasing the Internet’s share of media dollars is a good idea for traditional brands.