The system offers low transaction costs for merchants and mediation between buyers and sellers online in exchange for access to what will be a huge amount of data about shopping and sales conversions. There doesn’t appear to be many benefits for buyers in the system.

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It’s no secret that Ford is at a crossroads, and the century-old company is facing some of the toughest challenges in its history. Having both participated in and covered the documentary film scene for the past decade, I have heard countless tales of horror from filmmakers who try to follow important stories like these, only to encounter so many roadblocks along the way that the project has to be scrapped. Ford, however, has chosen to pull back the curtain at this critical time, allowing a film crew to capture the behind-the-scenes drama as an iconic American company struggles to right its path.

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The people formerly known as the audience are those who were on the receiving end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and a few firms competing to speak very loudly while the rest of the population listened in isolation from one another— and who today are not in a situation like that at all.

• Once it was your radio station, broadcasting on your frequency. Now that brilliant invention, podcasting, gives radio to us. And we have found more uses for it than you did.

• Shooting, editing and distributing video once belonged to you, Big Media. Only you could afford to reach a TV audience built in your own image. Now video is coming into the user’s hands, and audience-building by former members of the audience is alive and well on the Web.

• You were once (exclusively) the editors of the news, choosing what ran on the front page. Now we can edit the news, and our choices send items to our own front pages.

• A highly centralized media system had connected people “up” to big social agencies and centers of power but not “across” to each other. Now the horizontal flow, citizen-to-citizen, is as real and consequential as the vertical one.

The people formerly known as the audience are simply the public made realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable. You should welcome that, media people. But whether you do or not we want you to know we’re here.

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General Motors has taken its estimated $200m (£110m) Cadillac account out of Leo Burnett in the US after 70 years and moved it into Modernista, an independent ad agency in Boston.

Jim Moore, president of Leo Burnett Detroit, said that the agency regrets the loss of the business saying that it was "a major piece of business".

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How do you deal with socialistic anarchists?

The internet is the most socialistic force you’ve ever seen.

We are Google’s third-largest customer, but on the other hand they are talking about an electronic media buying and planning exchange.

Ah, now we get to the bottom line, Sir Martin. The dirty little secret for ad agencies (and hence their holding company owners) is that the real money these days is made in media planning and buying, a model jeopardized by Google and by the dispersion of media which disrupts advertising price points.

When I was at Leo Burnett in the mid-90s we joked that Leo’s slogan “We will make the best creative in the business, bar none” had been changed to “We will PLACE the best creative in the business, bar none.” That pretty much sums up the shift in priorities at the big boys, Sorrell’s empire included.

Make no mistake, says Sorrell, the 'legacy businesses', the ones with heavy plant, heavy staffing, heavy weights of history on their shoulders, are in trouble. They can never move quickly enough: they are bound to be out-thought and outfought.

Keeping your balance also means keeping calm - for the wisdom of Sorrell wanders around many mansions. Five years ago he told a Yale audience that 'the world is being Americanised'. But that was before he saw India. And, three weeks ago, he said that new media would 'almost certainly' not supplant existing ones.

For aren't J Walter Thompson and Ogilvy and Mather, historic names from the WPP collection, legacy businesses, too? And what precisely are advertising agencies and their great media-buying adjuncts for any longer? The legacy newspaper distribution business, under OFT pressure, is currently being asked whether driving diesel-fuming lorries along motorways in the middle of the night is the best way of getting millions of surplus copies to recycling dumps 24 hours later. You could ask much the same question about advertising agencies.

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Sometimes I feel as though I am standing at the graveside of a well-loved friend called advertising.

At the age of only 50, advertising was cut down in its prime. Advertising holding companies used to boast about their share of the advertising market. Now they are proud of how much of their business is not in advertising. How did this happen?

This, apparently, is what makes it possible for a modern teenager, in the 30 seconds of a normal television commercial, to take a telephone call, send a text, receive a photograph, play a game, download a music track, read a magazine and watch commercials at x6 speed. They call it "CPA": continuous partial attention. The result: day-after recall scores for television advertisements have collapsed, from 35 per cent in the 1960s to 10 per cent today.

Pick a brand. Any brand.

Now, think of what you are trying to say. Can you precisely describe, in one word, the particular value, the characteristic, the emotion, you are trying to make your own?

If it runs to a sentence, you have a problem. A paragraph? Sell your shares.

Why? Because nowadays only brutally simple ideas get through. They travel lighter, they travel faster.

And you can send me dead flowers every morning.
Send me dead flowers by the mail.
Send me dead flowers to my wedding.
And I wont forget to put roses on your grave.

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Are we primed to cope with the growth of the presence of online? Probably not. I don't any traditional business has embraced the growth and presence of online, and that refers to agencies as well. I don't think that clients have embraced it properly, I don't think that media owners have embraced it, and I don't think agencies have.

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• MySpace: 75M users, 30B impressions/month, $1M/day homepage revenue, $500M paid by Fox
• Bebo: 88% of 18-34 in IRE, 25M users, 100M impressions/day
• Cyworld: 20M daily users ... in South Korea
• Gusto: $4M VC, emerging "editorially enhanced" vertical network
• Boompa: $30K to build, 2 guys, 2 months
• Hi5: 40M users, India, the subcontinent and beyond
• Faceparty: 4M users, micro ecommerce-enabled
• Xuoa: 1M users, "gamer" interface for social interaction

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Social networking for the sake of social networking just doesn't cut it. Put simply, we want more from SNS-enabled sites than association. If we're going to invest our time into a SNS site, make it worth our while. Make it a game, make it entertaining, make it useful - but don't expect us to come if you think its enough to browse our friends profiles.

Content-free, networking-for-the-sake-of-networking is a pointless exercise, now that we have gotten over the novelty of fooling with these sites. He seems to miss the intensely geolocal aspect of social networks: people naturally network with others that a close to them, physically. And he misses OpenBC, which is a big sucess in Germany and Western Europe. While I think he is dead on re: micropayment, he only touches on social commerce lightly, which is the big bang of our socialized future.

Social networks will become the centerpoint of online commerce. I state this unequivocally. The revolution will be socialized: in the future, essentially all online consumer commerce will be conducted through social means. The Web 1.0 metaphor of wandering around in a warehouse, putting gear into a shopping cart and then heading for a checkout counter, that shopworn motif will be replaced by various social metaphors.

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With the recent disclosure of wiretapping by the National Security Agency and the booming success of sites like MySpace and Friendster, social networking is much in the news today. But serious interest in social networks can also be found among academics, consultants and corporations seeking to deepen their knowledge of how companies operate. While organizations have been aware of the power of social networks for some time now, researchers at Wharton note that mapping these connections can yield some potent insights, such as how board members interact within and among companies, and how employee relationships can be better understood to improve productivity and the dissemination of ideas.

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When she gets home from school, 14-year-old Jennica Paho of San Jose switches on the computer and goes to MySpace.com. ``It's very exciting to get new pictures, comments and new friend requests'' on the social networking site, she said.

What she doesn't do is check or send e-mail.

New statistics show that, for the first time, teen e-mail use is dropping -- apparently in favor of more "instant'' alternatives.

Since February, teen e-mail use nationwide has been dropping compared with a year earlier. In April, it was down 8 percent -- 11.8 million users compared with 12.8 million users in April 2005, according to comScore Media Metrix. Even though the average time spent online by teens increased 11.6 percent from April 2005, to 22.5 hours a month, time on Web mail declined 9 percent.

By contrast, general e-mail users are increasing, growing 6 percent in April over a year earlier.

Even instant messaging, while popular, is slowing, comScore's surveys show. Total IM users increased only 1 percent, while the number of teen users declined 8 percent -- in part, some experts say, because of the rise of MySpace, which allows users to send comments and messages to each other.

During the same period, MySpace users multiplied from 3 million to 7.8 million.

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When Seth Jayson at Motley Fool suggested the other day that Google’s AdSense is killing the internet by driving the creation of sites that exist solely to squeeze money from AdSense, many people scoffed.

Pay-per-click advertising is destroying the economics of content, making it more profitable to create entire sites with nothing but ads.

“Direct navigation” is a euphemism for navigating around content and right to ads.

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The BBC's new media strategy came in for heavy criticism from a number of bodies - the committee was attended by the UK Association of Online Publishers, the British Internet Publishers Alliance, the Newspaper Society, the Satellite & Cable Broadcasters Group and the Digital Content Forum - who are concerned that its actions threaten their commercial operations.

"Sky has the power of life and death over us. The BBC just has the power of death," said Fred Perkins, former chairman of the Digital Content Forum and founder and chief executive of Information.tv.

There is a feeling that the BBC has a gameplan of a predatory approach and this is not true, said Highfield. We are aware of issues and are not a standalone gatekeeper ... we must be more porous.

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A white paper by Alexander Cameron of Digital TX in London, about piracy, the failure of the music and movie industry to address customer demand, and how the ages of net neutrality and the big boys controlling the content industry are about to come to their end.

This below will tell you the tone of it: “A lot of the content industry’s problems come from insularity, and it’s a lot easier to see that when you’re on the outside, as many ISPs are. Theirs is an exclusive club, massively reinforced and defended from outside influence. These are high-profile businesses with incredible popular products that see them fielding off requests from everywhere, all day long. Their cynicism has become institutional. They simply have too much business and can’t get involved in it all. They have got into a habit of closing the door to new people, ideas and new business. The only way in is to know someone who can make an introduction. It’s particularly bad in the US and the UK, the latter run exclusively on “who you know” as its modus operandi.”

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MySpace has 75 million users (see somewhat dated comparison stats here), 15 million daily unique logins, is growing by a massive 240,000 new users per day, and is generating nearly 30 billion monthly page views (that’s 10,593 page views per second). The number of page views generated by each unique visitor is stunning - clearly these users are very, very passionate about the site, and it’s unclear if they do much else on the web besides hang out on MySpace.

MySpace hasn’t overtaken Yahoo yet in terms of page views (see UBS Comscore Analysis PDF here), but they are a solid second and are ahead of giants like MSN-Microsoft, Time Warner (including AOL), eBay, Google and Facebook.

MySpace also has the sixth largest market share among search engines, even though they aren’t, actually, a search engine.

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Seventeen of the 23 players on Brazil's current World Cup roster go by a single name. Players with the same first name often change their moniker to differentiate themselves. In recent decades, there have been several Ronaldos at the national level. One became known as Ronaldao, meaning "big Ronaldo." Another became Ronaldinho, meaning "little Ronaldo." When another Ronaldinho came along in the late 1990s, he was called Ronaldinho Gaucho—that is, "little Ronaldo from Rio Grande do Sul." Eventually, the first Ronaldo left the Brazilian national squad, so Ronaldinho became Ronaldo. Ronaldinho Gaucho became Ronaldinho.

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This is a story about how 2 enterprising web developers quit their jobs at CNET Networks and built an enterprise level community driven site (boompa.com) complete with all the modern "web 2.0" bells and whistles in almost exactly two months on the smallest possible budget with open source software. It covers the planning, technology, accounting and business decisions we made along the way and is meant to be an honest portrayal of the realities of opening up your own shop and what you will need to do.

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The investment that Simply Hired took from Fox Interactive seems to be paying dividends already. Tonight at 9 pm PST MySpace, a subsidiary of Fox Interactive, will unveil MySpace Careers, a new job site on MySpace powered by Simply Hired. This is interesting news mostly because of the massive traffic that the MySpace home page drives - and the new site has a link on that Myspace home page. No word on the deal terms, although I assume there is a revenue split based on the numerous advertisements MySpace is including on the new site.

Deals like this show the positive impact a corporate investor can have on a startup. Note that competitor Indeed took an investment from the New York Times last year, and they partially power the NYT online jobs search engine.

College career counselors and other experts say, some recruiters are looking up applicants on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Xanga and Friendster, where college students often post risqué or teasing photographs and provocative comments about drinking, recreational drug use and sexual exploits in what some mistakenly believe is relative privacy.

Concerns have already been raised about these and other Internet sites, including their potential misuse by stalkers and students exposing their own misbehavior, for example by posting photographs of hazing by college sports teams. Add to the list of unintended consequences the new hurdles for the job search.

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DatingAnyone helps you track the dating status of people on your MySpace friends list, and presumably catch them on the rebound. When there’s a change in your friend’s status, you’re sent an email alert. The service doesn’t log in as you - it simply sends out a bot to grab the status info from the profile pages.

Surprisingly, DatingAnyone isn’t the only player in this space - a more lightweight service called SingleStat.us does exactly the same thing. However, SingleStat.us charges a one-time fee of $3.95 for notifications, while DatingAnyone is free. On a similar note, newly-launched Stalkerati lets you search for a person’s name across multiple services - social networks, blogs and image search.

This isn’t feeding the MySpace beast - it’s more like leeching off it. But these services all add value, so hopefully MySpace won’t feel the need to throttle them or (worse still) build an in-house version.

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MySpace's ad latest deals include Walt Disney Co. and Pepsi-Cola, pushing the daily value of its home page inches toward $ 1 million. Meanwhile, Bolt, which has been revived with the social networking “boom” after being around for a long time, has signed three big-name brands to sponsor highly interactive microsites through the summer. Pages for Toyota Motor Sales USA and Procter & Gamble Co. are expected shortly, while Wendy’s got a head start last week with a site, which has already drawn more than 365,000 page views.

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According to estimates released on Friday by the Newspaper Association of America, newspaper print ad spending in the first three months of 2006 increased only 0.3 percent, to $10.5 billion, over the corresponding period last year. At the same time, spending for online advertising surged 35 percent.

"I think this industry is in for exceptional long-term growth from online revenue," said Jason E. Klein, the president and chief executive of the Newspaper National Network, a marketing partnership of advertisers and newspapers. Much of the current growth is coming in the technology and automotive categories, he said.

One hope for online newspaper classifieds is the control their staffs can exercise over the content, unlike free sites like Craigslist, which are mostly managed and edited by anonymous users.

"I think newspapers will attempt to differentiate their classified products as authentic, reviewed and updated regularly," Mr. Bennett said. "It's a much more authentic database.

The results show that the Web is now clearly a mass media -- ranking right alongside other major media when it comes to reach and duration of use. And when it comes to at-work media use, the study found that the Web clearly dominates (with 54.6% reach, compared to television's 21.1%), and is the only medium that ranks among the top two at both work and home.

The research found that the Web increased the reach of television by a remarkable 51 percent in the morning, 39 percent in the middle of the day, and 42 percent in the afternoon. With magazine advertising, the impact is even greater -- the Web more than doubles the reach of magazines.

Web users tend to have greater buying power than television users.

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We have not found anything in the online commerce area that has interested us until earlier this year when we met Rob Kalin and his co-founders. Last July they launched Etsy to serve the needs of artists who wanted a place to sell their handmade goods.

In the past 10 months, Etsy has grown by word of mouth to over 10,000 artists selling their handmade goods to over 40,000 buyers. Today, there are over 100,000 listings on Etsy, every single one of them handmade and available for sale. And over 70,000 items have been sold on Etsy at a sell-through rate that beats eBay.

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The problem is that the studios have sold the exclusive digital rights for most movies (which don't apply to physical DVD's) to a television channel, like HBO. The agreements last for years and, since they bring in millions of dollars, the studios aren't about to stop signing them.

So what's saving Netflix - allowing it to thrive when the technology to obliterate it already exists - is yet another attempt by Hollywood to hold onto a fading business model. Remember, this is the industry that filed lawsuits in the 1970's to prevent people from watching movies at home.

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• The name of the game is Petals Around the Rose.
• The name of the game is important.
• The answer is always zero or an even number.

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Poised for what could be their country's finest performance since the Pelé show of 1970, Ronaldinho and the Brazilians hope to prove that beauty and soccer are one and the same.

A few months ago it was announced that Mark Bryant, the former editor of Outside, was heading up a new magazine for the New York Times, Play.

Play, as the New York Post once reported, is aiming for the larger sports pub market, as in Sports Illustrated (3.3 million circ) and ESPN: The Magazine (1.7 million circ), the two dominant titles in sports magazines today.

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eBay Blogs will enable sellers to more efficiently market their products.

Working off the Auctionbytes story, I dug a little deeper and found more details including a tag/search platform. The eBay Blog help pages here and the wiki information pages here.

So if an eBay seller uses tags like "Pez", "dispensers" and "collectibles" they can increase their visibility in search results. All blogs will also support RSS.

I would not be surprised to see the company take this a step further and build eBay into a giant social network that lets like-minded buyers and sellers find each other.

The biggest gripe from Ebay sellers has nothing to do with their items not turning up in a search or the ability (or lack thereof) to blog -- it's the rising price of their fees.

Additionally, a lot of sellers are already spending time taking photos, creating listings, doing their homework on price points, etc. -- What makes Ebay think they'll want to cut more time out of their day to blog?

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How do you visualize one of the largest, most complex networks in existence? How does one represent the information, interaction and brand architecture for over 100 similar-yet-distinctive websites, applications and tools with varying degrees of integration? How much coffee would this require? Could this network diagram influence decisions about how the brand should be used?

The Yahoo! Network Diagram, in addition to the requirements mentioned above, includes traffic data such as top 5 referring URLs and countries of origin. It measures 3.5' high by 12' wide.

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• Contacts: It might be an old-school paper Rolodex, but it is full of contacts and relationships.
• Money: They've got the cash to aquire talented individuals ... or entire shops. Competition getting a bit too rough? Buy 'em.
• TV: Social Networks are huge and internet advertising is booming, but TV is still a cash cow, and that's not going to change for quite some time. Brian says "the market for making elaborate :30 films and holding on to the expensive talent this archaic activity requires must be seeing strains," but I think Sorrell and co. would disagree.
• Full service: It isn't just about the internet. Agencies which cannot deliver (or facilitate the delivery of) comprehensive, measurable, integrated campaigns across multiple platforms might as well hang it up. Big or small: They're dead.
  
• Scale: Your blogging business might be great, but I doubt it can handle a company wth hundreds of products in 34 countries and languages. This is why big international agency networks exist.

These organizations are built to be in the content business. They exist to develop and distribute messages. In the world of social media, content isn’t king. Connection is king. We are all bringing our own share of content to the party now, and companies have to play a much different role in the coming conversations about their products and services. Communication people will come to be valued by how they improve conversations. Not start or manage them. Improve them. Plus them up.

In a YouTube world, speed, savvy and responsiveness of our communications (video included) will trump high-production values and the fantasy of a tightly integrated campaign.

I think the tendency will be towards smarter communication directors and managers rolling their own teams to form ad hoc social media bomb squads, and outsourcing very specific ad creation skills (and not strategy & messaging) to ad shops.

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