Art museums have got this look-but-don't-touch policy, which is understandable - they can't just let the patrons manhandle the masterpieces. But it can make art appreciation a rather formal, distant and even intimidating exercise. WhileNew York's Museum of Modern Art midtown location was rebuilt in the early 2000s, reopening in 2004, the museum's Web site has just recently undergone its first redesign in five years.

Dean Donaldson has a point to make. And he is not shy about it. As Digital Experience Strategist at Eyeblaster, Donaldson is the man behind Eyeblaster's new measurement, Dwell Time. As is well established, everyone hates measuring by the click. People are almost tired of hating the click. The hatred runs deep and it's old. How old? "Blame Netscape," says Donaldson.

Australian beer brand Skinny Blonde isn't exactly known for its subtlety. When it first hit shelves last March, Skinny Blonde gained a reputation as the world's first nsfw brew: Thanks to "revolutionary ink technology" on the bottle's label, the voluptuous bikini-clad woman in the brand's illustrated logo loses her top as the beer gets colder. And this summer, the brand's quietly-launched new Web site (skinnyblonde.com.au/sixpack) took the titillating concept a step further.

As Kontera, a PPC in-text ad delivery leader, refines its semantic delivery engine, publishers get paid more for having fewer words underlined on the page. How can it be? Kontera's fewer links, delivered semantically, are outperforming the other in-text models these days. Perhaps more important, the fewer links result in a less disruptive (read: annoying) reader experience.

Television is the last thing broadcasters should have on their minds. They have one last chance to play their strong suite -- their local connections -- in a digital marketplace exploding far beyond the small screen before losing consumers and advertisers to a spectrum of unlikely competitors from Google and Craigslist to Zillow and Twitter. There is a new generation of hyperlocal Web sites to contend with that TV stations could not have fathomed a few years ago: from the review site Yelp, to neighborhood site Outside.In to the house-to-house focus of EveryBlock.

Few statements about the power of social media could have been more impactful than the one made by the State Dept. to Twitter. The microblogging service was asked by U.S. government officials not to go down for maintenance as it had planned, because people protesting in Iran were relying on tweets to inform the outside world. Overnight, all of the arguments and silly rants about how Twitter was a vehicle for navel gazing and mundane reports, a cocktail party where everyone was shouting and nobody was listening, seemed to fall away. Evan Williams and Biz Stone could harldy have asked …

In the nascent field of mobile-phone marketing, most of the early experiments have come from consumer marketers like Pepsi and Visa. But software giant Microsoft recently proved that mobile phones, iPhones and BlackBerrys can bring tremendous payoff in business-to-business campaigns, with exponentially higher engagement rates than online alone.

You know the saying about assumptions -- they make an ... This is especially true in online advertising, where marketers and publishers have relied on the idea that the final ad a consumer sees before clicking the buy button is the most important marketing message of all.

The promise of online video - and the pay-offThe promise of online video ad revenue has proven elusive for all but the largest Web publishers. Smaller to midsize sites have had little patience with video providers as they've struggled with bandwidth, expensive setup and storage, unimpressive roi and insufficient marketing efforts that failed to gain traction and critical mass.Today, costs of bandwidth and storage have fallen to the extent that video is an expected part of the user experience. With more eyeballs come more advertisers, and pre/post-roll video ads, rich media overlays, product placements, and branded viral video applications are …

Resist commoditizing your inventoryAt the IAB conference in February, some speakers took direct aim at companies that - in part - provide the "science" behind display advertising. Multiple speakers argued that, in our industry, too much attention is paid to science at the expense of creativity, or the "art," of advertising. I agree that our industry has made creativitya sacrificial lamb to metrics, which many equate to profit. But, there is more to this story.I consider myself an inventory expert. I can say with a great deal of confidence that interactive inventory supply is outstripping demand 10-to-1. This in …