Once upon a time the Web was all about directory structures, blink tags and a highly memorable flame graphic. Web design evolved relatively swiftly, but great Web copy lagged far behind. The Web remained over-designed and underwritten well into 2004. Looking back on online marketing it's possible - and very sad - that Subservient Chicken may be the most iconic online execution thus far. Not exactly "Where's the Beef?" or "Bartles & Jaymes."

If Jack Myers' predictions, shared by Wenda Harris Millard during her keynote at the IAB annual meeting in late February, are true, then we are staring at a major industry contraction.

"Congratulations! Your parents just joined Facebook. Your life is officially over." Such is the greeting visitors receive upon entering the blog "Oh Crap. My Parents Joined Facebook," which -- as the name implies -- chronicles the well-intentioned but oft-hilarious wall posts, quiz results, group memberships and status updates of an older generation of social network converts.

Andy Monfried is perfectly aware that the name of his company is often unintentionally mangled when people say it aloud. "They mispronounce it 99.9 percent of the time," Monfried says. "It's pronounced low-tah-me. It's a combination of locate, target and message." The name certainly generates more conversation than that of Monfried's previous company, Advertising.com, where he served as CEO.

Who will be the YouTube of the bubbling eBook revolution? Online document-sharing service Scribd.com is making a case with 50 million users each month, coupled with recent deals with major publishing houses, including Random House and Simon & Schuster, to offer some of their books free of charge on the site. Sure, Google and Amazon have offered free books online for years, but Scribd stands out because it builds Web features into its service so other blogs and sites can embed books and documents, too.

DVD screeners are so last year. This year Emmy voters will be able to watch at least one network's contenders in a new way - on the ever-popular iPhone. Showtime is launching an iPhone application in April for voting members of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences to check out eligible shows like Weeds, Dexter and United States of Tara (which has a considerably smaller chance of taking home any gold statuettes than the former two, but it's on the app nonetheless) on their iPhone or iPod Touch.

Tape decks have gone the way of the in-dash eight-track, but the enduring appeal of the carefully composed, old-school mixtape made Muxtape a huge Web hit early in 2008. Then the founder ran out of money to defend against licensing lawsuits.

"Hyper-distribution" was the catchword of 2008. Get your content out there, publishers were told, we'll monetize it later. It worked ... sort of. According to content tracking service Attributor, up to 5.3 times more people see a publisher's content away from its originating site. Thousands of blogs and aggregators simply reuse full copies of a publisher's articles on their own sites, and most of them are monetizing that content via three ad networks: DoubleClick, Google AdSense and Yahoo, Attributor also found.

Four years ago, the Grain Foods Foundation was created by milling and baking companies to counter the low-carb movement by providing information about the benefits of eating bread. Now, the foundation, which includes companies such as Sara Lee, is turning its attention to feeding the needy, even as it continues to promote bread through a multimedia campaign called the Bread Art Project.

Online gaming and grunge. Who would have linked them back in the early 1990s? But they have come together, via pearljamtengame.com.