A lot of people know Claria Corp. as a leading practitioner of online behavioral marketing, but apparently the company is also a pretty good at judging consumer behavior offline. In fact, the Claria folks actually knew American TV viewers would choose Fantasia Barrino over Diana DeGarmo to become Fox's latest "American Idol."

San Francisco-The Ad:Tech show here may have wound down yesterday, but it's not over by a long stretch.

San Francisco--Tchotchke watch. The Ad:Tech show floor is littered with them--tchotchkes. They're back, and better than ever. My personal favorite: A handheld, portable mini fan from BlowSearch. This battery-powered baby works beautifully and sports a string so you can wear it around your neck. A good thing for those dank, humid summer days in New York.

San Francisco-The city by the bay is often dubbed "fog city," but there was nothing foggy about the energy here at the Ad:Tech show, except maybe the brains of show attendees who had plenty of parties to choose from last night. There were at least four cocktail receptions and three larger parties-and those are only the ones I knew about ... The crowds were fairly raucous but the daytime energy was fairly serious and that's a good thing. The days of irrational exuberance here in San Francisco are gone for good, we hope.

SAN FRANCISCO - Ad:Tech attendees here woke up to some good news. Online ad revenue has set a new record, as first quarter sales hit $2.3 billion, jumping 38.9 percent over the same period in 2003, according to today's Internet Advertising Revenue Report issued by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

If we needed any more evidence that blogging has arrived, then we have it today: It has arrived at The Gates of Redmond, Wash.

When will the Web begin to take dollars from broadcast media? That's the $64 million question fluttering around the margins of this week's broadcast network upfronts. The splashy, self-congratulatory celebrations have dominated the week's advertising and marketing news.

Yahoo! has released an email standard to prevent spammers from embedding unwanted messages in legitimate email addresses. Yahoo! has had the proposed standard, called DomainKeys, for a while, but it's now hoping to drive widespread acceptance. If that happens, it could help legitimate email marketers separate themselves from spam.

A doctoral candidate at Harvard is creating a furor for WhenU, and by extension, the adware business. Or, is it merely a tempest in a teapot?

All I wanted was a buddy icon. Instead, I got caught in a seemingly endless loop of chaos and pop-up windows.