Some guy named Bob probably hates me. I don't know him and he doesn't know me ... but he's the unfortunate registrant of Bob.com and has used his first name for his email address. Yup, you guessed it - that makes his email address bob@bob.com. That also happens to be the email address that I have used for the past ten years to fill out forms that require an email address that I don't want to give. For more than a decade, Bob has been getting my junk email and to tell you a truth, I feel bad about it.

NYTimes.com wasn’t the first traditional media brand to aggregate third-party content — and it certainly won’t be the last. But the New York Times, once considered the national newspaper of record, represented one of the last bastions of the traditional media approach to content, i.e. we produce it ALL ourselves.

If the future of advertising is online, many companies, including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and WPP, are betting that the future of online advertising is in ad networks, i.e. centralized platforms for the buying and selling ads, where the company that controls the network controls the sale and the flow of revenue to the publisher. This is entirely counter to traditional ad sales model, where the publisher controlled the sales channel — unfortunately, there weren’t (and still aren’t) many metrics or ROI involved, which has lead to the rise of online ad networks, with Google’s AdSense leading the way. But is it possible that online publishers, perhaps from the bottom up, might start to wrestle control away from the ad networks?