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Reading the tea leaves of advertising’s future gets more difficult each day. As technological advances enable new options, we experiment enthusiastically. Yet in critical ways, our innovations look strangely familiar. Both the Internet and our portable media devices increasingly resemble interactive variations of television.

In the early 1990s, recognized brands and Fortune 500s like Apple and Barun Nissan embraced long-form DRTV. While enjoying the big budgets and credibility boost that these advertisers brought, DRTV insiders worried that shrinking inventory and higher media rates would force out entrepreneurs. That tide has receded. A February Jordan Whitney "Top 60 Infomercials" report listed only one major brand--Humana--whose Gold Choice show registered at number 60. What changed?

More than one-half of US search engine marketers surveyed integrated their search engine marketing (SEM) with at least one offline channel in Q2 2008, according to an iProspect-sponsored study conducted by JupiterResearch.

Google's YouTube is quickly shedding its reputation in Hollywood as a clearinghouse for pirated content and could soon be home to clips from popular movies and TV shows--all legally obtained.

As anyone who has had the pleasure of doing web design and development through marketing agencies knows, Flash tends to be wildly popular among clients and wildly unpopular among, well, pretty much everyone else. Part of the reason for this is because Flash is so inherently un-Googleable; anything that goes into a Flash-only site is basically invisible to search engines and therefore, the world. That will no longer be the case, however, as Adobe announced today that it has teamed up with Google and Yahoo to make Flash files indexable by search engines.

Creating great stories regardless of medium is expensive. This means content creators need seed capital, which can be repaid either by transactional revenues from selling content -- not too effective on the Internet -- or from advertising, which works well. But until the net proves itself able to attract a large audience to great content built expressly for the web, advertisers will continue to be difficult to bring aboard to underwrite that content.

On Thursday the Internet’s main oversight agency approved the most sweeping changes to the network’s address system since its creation. According to new rules unanimously passed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann, at its meeting here, any company, organization or country will soon be able to apply for a new Web address extension, called a top-level domain.