Our business is doing well yet again, and by our business I am referring to the Internet industry. As a result, there are numerous great ideas being explored and new companies being created, it seems like every week. But what I find most interesting is how many people are unwilling to bootstrap their ideas, and would rather spend 110% of their time trying to raise money, giving up 90% of their ideas, rather than focusing their attention on building out the core ideas for their business!

A couple of weeks ago we got into what is, in my opinion, the most important characteristic of social media advertising: In social media, the publisher is the consumer. It's clear that there is a lot more to social media's advertising potential than as simply another delivery mechanism of ad messages. Within the dialogue of marketers, social media, and publisher/consumers lies the key not only to delivering, but shaping, a brand's message. And deep in the depths of the data of the social media dialogue, is the ability for brands to shape product and service offerings to better serve the …

This digital generation fascinates me. Want to know where to download music, find cool apparel, watch movies and clips, change expressions, personalize your IMs, emails, blogs, anything... just ask a tween or teen. Sure they may give you the eyes-rolling-in-the-back-of the-head look, but, hey, go directly to the source. So let's take a look at this demographic online.

At the end of the day, I have one overarching question: Why does online-media spending still lag so far behind relative to the massive share of time and utility it commands? Sure, online advertising continues to grow at a massive clip, but it's still way behind where it should be.

There's no shortage of news in the advertising world about highly targeted advertising developments. Today, for example, The Wall Street Journal led its Marketplace section with a story about Facebook's ongoing initiative to sell advertising on its user pages, targeted anonymously according to the personal interests and preferences that users and their friends have revealed on those pages. Want to target messages only to state university grads that live in urban areas and are avid runners? Facebook can help you now. Yesterday the news was about YouTube's new video ads.

Last week I made the statement that the majority of online video networks either serve video into existing ad units or are manually attaching video spots like 30-second commercials into existing video content. That set off a flurry of responses from such companies as Scanscout, Tremor Media, Eyeblaster, Broadband Enterprises and a new start-up called QMeCom. Each of these folks professes to be capable of dynamically ad-serving video spots into video content based on cookie profiles or behavioral data. But not enough folks know about these capabilities.

"We are not trying to build yesterday's portal," said Ron Grant, AOL's president. "We are trying to build a network of sites that users can combine or do whatever they are most comfortable with." The above quote is from a recent New York Times article by Miguel Helft that reports on AOL's recent revenue woes. The more interesting issue for our forum here breaks into two parts, which in reality are the exact same issue....

So video has been all the hype for a while now. Quite frankly, I'm getting a tad sick of it. Don't get me wrong -- I have been a proponent for years. Designing for a pixilated world sucks. Video is sexy. For folks like me that came from the traditional side, it's the closest thing to broadcast we've had.

With traditional mass marketing losing effectiveness amid splintering audiences and rising costs, "viral marketing" has somehow seeped into our veins as an answer to the problem. Imagine that: a low-cost strategy whereby everyone embraces your insatiable commercial message as credible, and infects everyone they know. Then, those infected people infect everyone they know, and so on and so on. Hey, it's almost free marketing! Who needs traditional anymore? We do.

There's been a lot of talk over the past two months about "softening" growth in the online display ad marketplace. Destination Web sites and portals, accustomed over the past year or two to 25-40% year-over-year revenue growth in their display ad revenues, found themselves facing flat or moderate year-over-year increases this past quarter. While the second quarter continued to deliver explosive growth at Google, the other search players, and many of the online ad networks, for some reason many of the destination sites were left behind. What happened? Should we all be surprised? Is the online display ad market really …