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Digital advertising is evolving beyond the desktop computer, leaving companies relying solely on Web sites and display advertising woefully behind the eight ball. More and more, brands are relying on software development to create engaging consumer experiences that span multiple open platforms. Branded mobile applications are fast becoming an important element of this new digital ecosystem, as evidenced by Apple's announcement that its App Store had surpassed 100,000 apps in early November.

This shift away from more familiar mediums for brand communication has important implications for the composition of, and interaction between, established groups within agencies. The pervasive dynamic between technology and creative groups is not always conducive to more technically demanding campaigns because of a fundamental disconnect between these two groups' proficiencies.

With a group of blog posts this morning, one of which literally said paid content was probably not a good idea anyway, Google announced it was making an adjustment to its First Click Free aggregation scheme for news publishers. The adjustment to the service, first rolled out in 2007, will now enable readers to sample more content before subscribing through the publisher's own portal.

"While we're happy to see that a number of publishers are already using First Click Free, we've found that some who might try it are worried about people abusing the spirit of First Click Free to access almost all of their content," reads this morning's post to Google's Webmaster Central blog. "As most users are generally happy to be able to access just a few pages from these premium content providers, we've decided to allow publishers to limit the number of accesses under the First Click Free policy to five free accesses per user each day."

It was an impressive demonstration, once they got it working: H.264 video streaming wirelessly (and slowly, at least during the caching sequence) using Microsoft's Silverlight video streaming, to an Apple iPhone. It's all the more impressive when you realize that Flash video still has not made its way (permanently) to the iPhone, not for any technical reasons we know of...simply because Apple wants to control the video channel for streaming media to its devices.

And yet here it is, a Microsoft stream. You'd think Apple would have stood firm against Microsoft at least as aggressively as it has against Adobe, if not more so. How did this happen? We asked Microsoft User Experience Platform Manager Brian Goldfarb last week at PDC 2009, and the answer was a huge surprise...followed by some caveats. But it contained these four amazing words: "We worked with Apple."

Let's put this simply: If you want to stream free, professional videos online,

Google today announced YouTube Direct, an open source platform that lets media organizations directly connect with YouTube users to request and rebroadcast their YouTube clips.

The application allows custom YouTube uploaders to be built into another site, so users can submit their videos directly and track the viewing metrics in their own profile. Google highlights the rise of citizen journalism as a major reason for the program.

After months of legal controversy which were followed by months of uncertainty about the future of the service, the Pirate Bay's popular torrent tracker has been shut down for good.

But it wasn't a court-ordered takedown or the result of regulatory shuffling, the old Pirate Bay torrent tracker simply became obsolete. As a result, the Pirate Bay is no longer running its old tracker, and has switched over to listing "magnet links," a method for locating DHT (Distributed Hash Table) or PEX (Peer Exchange) nodes.

Twitter reportedly will be abandoning its suggested user list following some unfavorable attention it received last month.

When a new user signs up on Twitter, the site offers him a long list of suggested users he may be interested in following. The list consists of about 500 prominent users in various fields, including politics.

Yesterday, Microsoft launched Windows Marketplace for Mobile's Web component, a version of the store fully accessible through any browser.

I lamented that Apple had not yet created a similar face for the iTunes App store, even though it is the most popular download shop among the smartphone competitors. Users who want to browse the contents of the iTunes store, be it music, videos, or applications, must have the iTunes desktop software installed or otherwise browse it on their iPod Touch or iPhone (in which case they're almost guaranteed to have iTunes installed on their PC anyway.)

Google today officially announced that it had acquired IP telephony software company Gizmo5, a service many users have already tried to use in conjunction with their Google Voice accounts to make SIP calls.

In the Google Voice blog, product managers Wesley Chan and Craig Walker said, "While we don't have any specific features to announce right now, Gizmo5's engineers will be joining the Google Voice team to continue improving the Google Voice and Gizmo5 experience. Current Gizmo5 users will still be able to use the service, though we will be suspending new signups for the time being, and existing users will no longer be able to sign up for a call-in number."

Sure, Apple created the most popular and well-stocked mobile app store in the market, but does Apple provide a Web-based interface to it? No. Through Apple's official channels, you can only browse the store's contents in iTunes or on your iPhone/iPod Touch.

There is an unofficial site hosted on Google App Engine which provides roughly the same experience Apple provides in iTunes, but it lacks search functionality, and if you try to download something, it launches the iTunes installer.

We've known that Microsoft still has work remaining in its itinerary to build Bing into a more competitive search engine -- we knew at launch time that not every feature would compete on an absolute par against Google. If it did, then MSN and Windows Live would have been far more popular. But when Microsoft steps forward to say, "Now, we really have something competitive in this department," it's difficult to give Bing the same number of "Mulligans" as we did at the beginning.

This morning, Microsoft rolled out some replacements to its old MSN Video search engine -- which had remained online all this time -- to produce Bing Video. Like Google Video and unlike YouTube, Bing Video is not a host; it's a search service for publicly accessible videos. So YouTube videos, although hosted by Google, should appear on Bing as well. The differentiator here, theoretically, should not be inventory, since both services should have access to the same material. Instead, it should be how the material is presented, and whether the search process provides access to not only what the user is looking for, but material that may also be pertinent, relevant, and interesting.

Since Microsoft's Bing search engine debuted, it's made a strong charge against Google, the search market's dominant player. It has had diverse and attention-grabbing advertising campaigns, its partnership with Yahoo is one of the biggest search collaborations of the last decade, and it regularly rolls out timely and compelling new features like the recent integration of Twitter and Facebook feeds.

Because of this, Bing has been steadily gaining traffic and revenue, according to recent figures by Hitwise and IDC.

content behind a paywall and remove that content from crawling by Google search bots. Is Google doing evil to traditional media publishers like Murdoch, by making their content easily available for free? In August, over at my Oddly Together Website I tackled this topic in post: "Can You Charge for News? Ask Google."

As Google's might increases, it's reasonable to ask how the company's business practices are changing and whether or not it can stick to corporate philosophy "Ten things we know to be true." Perhaps the best known is No. 6: "You can make money without doing evil." But can Google does this? That's the question I pose to Betanews readers.

Some of us missed the boat and never got in the Google Voice beta test group. With all the controversy the service stirred up among the media, the public, telecommunications companies, and the FCC, there's a distinct possibility that Google Voice as we know it could end up in regulatory limbo after being politicized and thrown into the "net neutrality" conflict.

Today, a beta of an alternative has opened up: Ribbit Mobile from Ribbit, an independent British Telecom subsidiary often billed as "Silicon Valley's first telephone company."

The death of Usenet has been proclaimed for well over a decade now, but the use of some derivative of the Internet's NNTP protocol for the trafficking of messages -- some of which are actually parts of legitimate conversations -- continues today. In fact, it probably can't really be stopped since, as is the case with a P2P network, no one really owns Usenet.

Since 2001, the Web's portal to Usenet has been Google Groups, the successor to the Deja.com archiving system. Google's plans to make something of Google Groups stretch as far back as 2004, with promises to make the experience more personalized and exciting. For the most part, Google Groups provides organizations with an expense-free system for broadcasting memberships to select groups on an opt-in basis.