No, it may actually be the Web site theweatherchannel.com. At least that's what occurred to me while hearing TWC Interactive's Joe Joe Fiveash presenting at OMMA Publishing this morning.

Joe Fiveash, executive vice president and general manager of The Weather Channel Interactive got the OMMA Publishing conference off on a disconcerting note, making the case that the Internet is undergoing the kind of fragmentation that have been hurting the major traditional media. Except he didn't call it fragmentation. He called it the "de-portalization" of the Internet.

At least that's what Neil Sequeira, Principal, General Catalyst Partners, looks for when backing entrepreneurial businesses in the sector. Specifically, Sequeira said he looks for an entrepreneur who evokes “fire and brimstone” and gets everyone excited about his or her business. “Otherwise, everything else is a bunch of numbers we make up on a spreadsheet,” Sequeira conceded.

Smaller publishers face a real uphill battle when it comes to video search, panelists at the OMMA Video show said on Monday. The question of how you get that “Google juice”, as moderator Andy Plesser of BeetTV called it, is a pivotal one for video publishers, and it falls on them to maximize their content for search engine crawlers. For the moment, text search is still king for video search, which means publishers need to make sure they've applied as much meta data as they can to their videos so they'll turn up in search results on sites like …

“I would venture to say that it is somebody you have never heard of,” ventured venture capitalist Neil Sequeira, principal of General Catalyst Partners, when asked that question. “This is so early. Everyone is struggling in the dark to figure out what the right content and model is,” he noted, suggesting that is the great thing about the Internet â€" that anyone who can figure out the next dynamic model for building critical mass with content, and figuring out how to monetize it will be successful in the online video business. How successful …

Asked if the online video marketplace is in the throes of bubble bursting, some leading online video venturists â€" both on the capital giving and capital receiving side, were a little unclear. “I think if we're in a bubble, there's much more bubbling to be had,” gushed a fairly bubbly Jane Hu or Vuguru/Tornante. “I actually don't have an answer on whether we're in the middle of a bubble or not. I'm much too close to it.” Warren Lee, Principal, Canaan Partners, was a little more definitive, asserting, “There is a bubble, but …

Conference goers received a rare glimpse into what marketers are paying for standard online video ad formats at the OMMA Video show in New York on Monday. Philip Braden from the video ad network ScanScout, one of the many companies that helped popularize the overlay, said his company charges a minimum $10 CPM. Eric Hadley, CMO of Heavy.com, which serves a targeted audience of 18-34 males, charges a $25-30 CPM. And Rebecca Paoletti, Yahoo's director of video strategy, said that low-priced CPMs for standard untargeted ads start at $25 per thousand views on Yahoo. For Chris Allen, the lone …

If you ask the Web's major research firms, and CNET's Dan Ackerman did just that at the 2008 OMMA Video show in New York on Monday, the future of Web measurement still belongs to panels. As Maniak Mazumdar of Nielson Online said, “Our goal is to measure people,” not machines. Sure, there are gaps in the measurement, he added, “but the key is the consumer.” Mazumder said he feels that server measurement has a place, but you need panel data to understand how the consumer interacts with content. ComScore's Lynn Bolger agreed, adding that the role panel data plays …

For all the debate surrounding online audience measurement, it all comes down to a very simple principle: What is it that you actually want to measure. At least that's how Lynn Bolger, executive vice president-AdSolutions at comScore sees it.