I’ll make no bones about it: I hate those indiscriminate pop-up ads. Surfing around various news sites, I find myself seeking out the various extra windows that spawn left and right, clicking them away before they start loading bandwidth-eating graphics.

The Gator debate is back in the industry news again and has inspired the hottest and heaviest rhetoric in the biz since CBS Marketwatch declared they were no longer going to report on click-through rates. But the real issue with it is not who own the impression or the users's desktop. It's that businesses are too lazy to come up with the obviousl solution.

Every few years there comes a new mantra in business. One of the most memorable that comes to mind is “Greed is Good,” spoken so eloquently by one Mr. Gordon Gecko (Michael Douglas’ character in the movie “Wall Street”). This quote seemed to epitomize the 80’s, and was briefly resurrected in the 90’s with the boom of the dot-com economy, but now it would appear that a shift has occurred - we've moved from Greed to Accountability.

I see some interesting parallels between Minority Report's view of advertising in the future and things going on in the Interactive advertising industry today. We seem to have problems with determining appropriate time, place and manner for our ad campaigns. Things like spam, spyware and database-driven ad servers probably shaped Minority Report's take on the evolution of advertising.

Stock prices are in the dumper. We have burned all of the gains made in the Internet run up and then some. Many Internet stocks are in the $1-5 range at best. Interestingly, that’s the same range that CPMs are.

Concepts and models from online media's forebears, namely, traditional media, are finding their way into the de rigueur activities and applications of the online media practitioner. One such concept from the world of traditional media is finally making its way onto the web. It is an idea from broadcast media, called the daypart.

To me, what's really interesting in this latest round of Gator legal tussles is that no one seems to be asking the right questions with regard to how Gator operates and how the World Wide Web works. To adequately understand what's going on here, we have to ask the right questions.

Last summer, Commercial Alert, a consumer advocate group that’s not at all fond of advertising, launched a complaint against search engines that placed pay-for-placement links confusingly among search results.

Last week I talked about the resurgence either happening or about to happen in the business. I do expect the summer to be fairly quiet but I am bullish about the fall. My point was that if we are going to ramp up (hopefully a little more slowly this time), we need to put a better infrastructure in place. That started with the signing of Ts & Cs as they are for the good of the business. This week, I will talk about some other infrastructure issues, which should help.

What’s the real comparison in media prices between TV and the Internet? We’re certainly not getting it from comparing CPMs.