In writing four articles on audience online engagement, I have jumped into the debate about the validity of the panel approach, how to define engagement, and what the significance of a new engagement index could be for the advertising industry. An index, though, is most useful to a publisher as a marker: Here is where we are today on our way to a better index tomorrow. Good publishers examine their site metrics carefully; great publishers seek to understand what the audience experience is and how to improve it.

I was living in San Francisco in 1999, which was a considerable upgrade from Union City, N.J., where movers picked up my milk crates five years prior. It was in 1999 when my beloved Shanghai Kelly's softball team won the league championship, stocks I knew nothing about made my bank account swell, and I started working for Snowball.com. I haven't swung a bat in years and the swelling has gone way down, but the lessons I learned from my time at this dot-com venture continue to play an integral role in my professional life.

In the movie "Pleasantville," there was a social stigma attached to anything that represented change, or that failed to measure up to a pre-defined idea of what was, well...pleasant. For the citizens of Pleasantville, pleasant meant roads that don't go past the city limits, colors that don't vary from the approved palette, and books with no controversial ideas. If we fast-forward from that black and white Mayberry-like town set in the '50s to our current online media culture, we see new stigmas developing just as quickly as we dismiss old ones. Such is the case with in-text advertising.

I bet not, and suspect you don't know anyone who did. And yet you and anyone else who has been on the Internet the last eight years have an unusually high awareness of this institution. I first learned of this school back in 2000 when someone on my team sold them an online advertising campaign at a rate much lower than we sold to others, and eight years later this advertiser is one of the largest on the Web. It's a classic case study of brand building on the Internet -- and yet we still find ourselves losing the battle …

In my Metrics Insider series on "The New Metrics of Online Audience Engagement," I looked at three dynamics of the current challenge of measuring engagement: * Part 1: The challenges facing comScore and Nielsen in defining and measuring engagement and whether there is a better method * Part 2: A new model of engagement that recognizes and gives insight into the complexity of audience behavior on a site * Part 3: How the new model can impact advertising decisions. The online and offline dialogue the series has generated provides good food for thought....

Online publishers today are under tremendous pressures to ensure their sites are as efficient as possible to not only engage their readers so that they keep coming back, but also to make their sites valuable and attractive advertising properties for media buyers, advertisers and the top online lead generation providers to create revenue and remain competitive.

Henry Ford said "If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse." In this new world of Web-based applications, advertisers and application developers alike are mistakenly searching for a faster horse.

There's been much attention paid recently to whether or not social networking and community-based sites will embrace advertising. It's a touchy subject for publishers in this realm, and understandably so. Much of the controversy revolves around concerns that consumers won't tolerate marketing messages in this environment, since they often feel a very personal connection and a certain level of ownership over the contents of these sites. Publishers worry about turning their visitors off and sending massive amounts of their traffic to competitors.

The dust still hasn't settled over the controversy surrounding Facebook and its Beacon ad-tracking program. Industry observers are falling all over themselves commenting on the company's misfortunes -- one columnist says Facebook has gone beyond "jumping the shark" and is now being devoured by it.

We're hearing a lot about innovation these days. And we're going to hear a whole lot more, as audiences click their way to a more immediate, individual, and impatient online media experience. Publishers will need to measure up to a two-tiered expectation -- outside and inside -- that's a cut above convention.