Winners get a blue ribbon; losers get the blues. According to color theorists, blue is seen as trustworthy, dependable and committed. It's likely to be a man's favorite color, but women like it, too. It's the Tom Hanks of colors, true-blue and reliable. You couldn't go wrong with Big Blue. Stately institutions including Tiffany, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Chevron and AT&T made it part of their identities to reassure consumers that they'd always be there for them.

Publishing can be a bloody business. A passage in the recently released doorstop from Taschen Books, A History of Advertising, tells the story of how Leo Burnett brought a little extra gore into art directors' lives. In 1940 the company won the account of The American Meat Institute. After the win (its first with a million-dollar budget), three of the agency's staffers drove coast-to-coast in the Leo Burnett truck to determine the best way to get their countrymen to gnash their incisors.

It is, of course, the color of blood. The color of the heart, of passion, conviction, and above all, action. But red is also the color of lunacy - the end of reason. The color of arrest, the STOP sign, as well as the color of anger, embarrassment, infatuation, sin, joy, celebration, rank (the velvet rope) and royalty (the red carpet).

When it comes to art - painting, writing, advertising - everything starts with a white page. The work is to vanquish the white, but to do so in a way that's never been done before. There are as many ways to get rid of the white as there are novels, paintings and banner ads on Earth. Some do it better than others.

The Humane Society of the United States found itself stymied. Despite years of letter-writing campaigns, political lobbying, and raising consumer awareness with the most graphic, vivid and just plain adorable images known to conservationists, it couldn't save Canada's baby seals. So in 2005, Wayne Pacelle, president of the 10.5 million-member group, found himself invoking the activist version of thermonuclear warfare: the boycott.

It's been a year in which some of the things we don't usually speak about publicly (or at least, not in polite company) began to be talked about at last. Movements toward political correctness, which swamped the media and public discourse for much of the past decade, met with a backlash, and seem to be giving way to a sort of new openness. Political seasons tend to bring these things to fore.

It was 1974. My dad told me he had a surprise for me in the driveway. I ran as fast I could. Our baby blue VW bug was now wrapped entirely entirely in an ad for Camel cigarettes. "Just a way to bring in a few extra bucks," he said.

Yahoo has thrown open its mobile widget development platform. Yahoo Blueprint has been around for nearly a year as a tool for making widgets for the Yahoo Go mobile application. In September, the company updated the app to let developers build standalone widgets for Java, Windows and Symbian devices. (It's hinted that it's talking to Apple about enabling the iPhone.)

It's okay to show men getting hit in the groin, just don't mention the fact that women urinate. That was the message loud and clear from network censors when New York-based agency Amalgamated first tried to air its "pee ship" spot for Clearblue Easy Digital Pregnancy Test.

In June, defense attorney Lawrence G. Walters walked into a Pensacola courtroom to defend Clinton McCowen, a Florida resident and owner of an adult Web site specializing in "facial content." While it may seem obscene to try to protect a porn site operator from obscenity charges, Walters argues that McCowen is merely supplying the community with something it demands. The defense team used Google Trends, which analyzes Google queries to compute how many searches have been done for specific terms, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time, and generates a graph illustrating the results.