WSJ reports on jittery advertisers whose ads are being displayed next to risque content on platforms like MySpace and AOL, via ad aggregators and advertising networks such as Advertising.com.  Some examples are:

Last month, Verizon Communications Inc. was surprised to find one of its Internet ads on a MySpace.com page with photos of scantily clad women. Walt Disney Co. was unaware that its ad was next to an article about male sexual performance on About.com. Jobs Web site Monster.com
didn’t realize its spot was on a site that appeared to be offering
unauthorized downloads of copyrighted music and videos. Once they found
out, all three yanked their ads.

My guess is that we’ll see less and less of this type of complaint as companies eventually learn that the association between editorial and advertising content is not as strong on the internet as TV and print.  If a TV set is tuned to ESPN at a strip club, and you see an ad on TV for Toyota, you don’t think of Toyota as sponsoring (or condoning) strip clubs. (I am not suggesting that this will happen very quickly, though.)

The ad networks are making advertising (or getting attention) more efficient, so they will increase in volume.  It’s fun to see old media (read: WSJ in this case) take jabs at the forces looking to eat its lunch.

danah boyd was on O’Reilly Factor last week (do watch the interview – there are a few funny comments).  Bill O’Reilly is as conservative as mainstream TV gets.  Fox News, in its generalized worldview, could be categorized as pro moralist censorship.  It’s interesting to observe how they are dealing with MySpace, now a News Corp. property.

Baris posted about this ranking of Web2.0 companies by a SEO outfit called SEOmoz.  I am not clear what the criteria was, but it seems like their picks would get a general nod in the space.  However, the big misses for me in their list are del.icio.us, down in third place, and Indeed and SimplyHired missing. Baris is surprised about Riya missing.

Further blurring the line between the living room TV set and the PC, and helping establish that how a bit enters your home is irrelevant, six major studios are beginning to offer movie downloads.

Starting today, nearly 300 films will go on sale through Movielink,
which until now has been largely an online rental site.

…

Another
movie site, CinemaNow, will start selling downloadable versions of
about 75 movies from Sony, MGM and Lions Gate, which owns a large stake
in CinemaNow. Curt Marvis, the chief executive of CinemaNow, said he
was talking to other studios about selling downloads.

Nick Carr’s post alerted me to a purge going on at MySpace (reported by FT). 

MySpace, a division of media giant News Corp, has kicked some 200,000 "friends" off the site for posting objectionable material:

Ross Levinsohn, head of News Corp’s internet division,
said some of the material taken down contained “hate speech”. Some of
it, he said, was “too risqué”. “It’s a problem that’s endemic to the
internet – not just MySpace,” Mr Levinsohn said. “The site, in the last
two months, I think has become safer.”

Notwithstanding the operations challenge of policing such vast landscape, this move will act as a good test of the users’ perception of MySpace.  All of a sudden, the closed room where the youth goes to escape from authority (parents, teachers…), the authority is making its presence felt.  I doubt MySpace would have made such a move as an independent company.  The liability-conscious News Corp cannot face some of the risks that Intermix could have.

This fact can mean an inherent advantage for some of the scrappier independent platforms down the line.

From now on, everytime I hear a pitch for a new website/webservice, I’ll check it against Scott Heiferman’s "50 Reasons Why More People Aren’t Using Your Website".