The River

This week in SF brought a multitude of priceless moments, so the next couple of entries will chronicle a few.

Passing through the always-crowded (during Ad:Tech, anyway) hotel hallway, my colleague Janis and I caught sight of a name tag. It was the famous Scott Richter, aka the Spam King. We said hello, caught up on events in Richter’s lawsuit against IronPort’s SpamCop, checked out samples of the SpamKing clothing line, and did the obligatory business card exchange.

It wasn’t until we were walking away that Janis called my attention to the fact that we’d just given our e-mail addresses to a notorious spammer. Hmm…

P.S. Richter also happened to mention that wide distribution of the SpamKing duds had been held up by the little matter of a trademark holder called Hormel. Good thing Scott’s dad is also his lawyer.

We’ve seen a big rise in the attention accorded to the ad network model, as evidenced by a significant presence by such networks at this show. In some ways, networks — and I include Google and Overture in my definition of network — are playing an important role in the resurgence of the industry.

But John Battelle, in his talk here and in his blog, brought up a good point — not one for which I have a counterpoint or answer, however. He talked about the role of advertisers as participants in the community formed around publishers and their audiences.

The whole size and scale issue lies behind this problem. Just as a practical matter, advertisers don’t have the bandwith to participate in the micro-communities that build up around blogs, for example. Once you begin to aggregate, you start depending on technology to pick appropriate pages for participation — and sometimes, there’s just nothing like the human touch.

Somehow Blogger’s e-mail posting feature on my blog was commandeered by spammers this morning, resulting in a frightening amount of pollution. I feel so… violated.

I’ve deleted the “chopper slut” deluge, but let me apologize profusely to anyone who had to deal with the excessive postings in RSS feeds. Aargh.

I’m in serious sleep deprivation/information overload mode here at Ad-Tech, but it’s generally a good thing. There’s a lot of energy fueling things here, which says good things about how the industry is doing. Our team has been doing a bang-up job, if I say so myself, of covering the incredible flow of news issuing from this conference. I’ll be writing my column this week on some kind of show-related theme, so stay tuned.

Meanwhile, there’s the Ad:Tech Blog. Worth checking out.

Posting will likely be light the next week or so as I will be at Ad-Tech in San Francisco. Will try to post daily with general thoughts and tidbits, but I’m making no promises. Looking forward to seeing old industry friends and making new acquaintances.

For those who’ve been commenting about my obsession with Google, let me share another obsession: punctuation. I’ve been reading this book — shockingly, a bestseller — called “Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.” It’s fantastically funny, and it’s so pleasant to discover someone else get so riled up about apostophes.

P.S. I love that the Google software is reportedly code-named Puffin.

A lot of interesting rumors, etc. roiling around re: Google. This company drives me crazy, I’ve gotta tell you. Anyway, I just wrote up something re: the New York Times piece (free registration) everyone’s talking about.

As for the rumors about Google “quietly” testing a terabyte of storage for Gmail…. I tend to agree with Danny, who suspects it was a bug. (Google hasn’t responded to my request for info, and my Gmail account has reverted back to saying 1000 meg.)

Then again, people I’ve talked to seem to think 1 gig is plenty of space for e-mail, so maybe this is more of the Google “Web desktop” idea. That’s the scenario where Google offers a Yahoo!-like suite that lets you do everything from store files, to keep your calendar, to maintain contact and task lists. So, let’s say the terabyte is the full storage amount for the whole suite….. Anyway, just an idea.

UPDATE: News.com’s story, which had been fanning the flames of the whole “terabyte” rumors, has been updated to reflect the reality.

Seth Goldstein shares his “I was there” musings on the beginnings of the paid search industry. Super long post, but interesting.

DoubleClick today agreed to acquire affiliate and search marketing firm Performics for up to $65 million. Nate has some interesting analysis of how the two companies will fit together, based upon a discussion with DCLK CEO Kevin Ryan. (Nate worked at DoubleClick before quitting to travel around the world and eventually join JupiterResearch.)