The parent company of MTV and Comedy Central sees the future, and it is online. According to MediaPost, Viacom wants to make half a billion dollars per year in online and download sales and ad revenue.

Viacom's stable of properties, which includes iFilm, DreamWorks, Nickelodeon as well as the extensive music video library, are ripe for selling or ad-supported short videos that can be viewed online or downloaded to mobile devices.

Setting up the video servers (hello Brightcove) that can deliver content on demand through cable or online should be the first order of business. Next, the company should set up personalization services that enable delivering matching content across all of its properties so that you can get everything the company has (movies, videos, interviews) about a celebrity like Jon Stewart at once.

Network programmers such as Viacom are slowly getting past the idea that distributing their content online is a threat to their TV revenue. Regardless of their actions, "scheduled" TV revenue is going to be replaced by on-demand video, so opening the keys to their kingdom and working with and not against YouTube gives them the best chances of success.

Web 2.0 companies looking to cash in by being acquired had better stay near their Blackberries. At the FourSquare investor and media conference there was ample interest in Facebook and the like, but the money holders warned that their guarded enthusiasm might not last much longer, according to the New York Times.

One media exec was quoted as saying "We’ve seen how this movie ends," referring to the over valuation and subsequent fall of web start ups. Digg and Brightcove were also mentioned as companies ripe for acquisition.

What's different this time around is that these companies aren't trying to go public, so they have less leverage in negotiating with suitors. The competition between Yahoo et al has been enough to make YouTube's day, but we are now largely onto second tier acquisitions.

I'm guessing that if these companies aren't purchased by spring, they will have to build their success solo or fade into history.

While history will remember Web 1.0 as more of a cultural and economic phenomenon by opening the doors to the Internet, Web 2.0 will probably have a longer last effect on companies through the introduction of useful tools for rich media and greater user participation. Before we could see lots of interesting stuff; now more of us will be part of it.

It's hard not to have politics in your head right now, and writing about it seems apropos since campaigning is marketing sans the checks and balances.

But as Bill Maher points out, those vying for office give the world of marketing a bad name. On Larry King live last night he said that campaigns should be required to follow the same rules as traditional advertising. Namely, you can't lie about your competitors or boast things about your product that are untrue. Nike can't say in its ads that Adidas uses slave labor, and politicians should pay a sizeable fine if they allege similar scandalous things about each other. If candidates misbehave, we have bloggers to call them on the carpet. We should requite that 75 percent of a candidate's ads can not mention their opponents.

If you consider voter turnout as a goal of campaigning, then these folks couldn't do any worse to sabotage themselves. Let's spend all our dollars saying how awful everyone is, but come Tuesday, please use your valuable personal time waiting in line.

If having fair and open elections are a way to market the ideal of America to the world, then we need to fix the problem of voting machines. Several friends around the globe have remarked how laughable it is that in the tech capitol of the world, we can't make voting machines that work as well as an iPod or Xbox.

Some of this (and I blame both parties) is intentional, but let's forget the clowns (Diebold et al) of today, and hire companies like Oracle, IBM, Apple Microsoft and Intel to design a machine that is reliable, has a sleek interface, and leaves a paper trail. Open source the initiative, and let the tech competitors do the QA on the machine. These things happen only every two years, so these "surprises" of machines not working is pathetic.

Sadly the billions that are wasted in scandalous ads likely will never end because the media (print, TV, radio) does not want to see the biennial revenue stream dry up.

Video advertisements are now being seen as a suitable alternative to TV and are expected to continue their exponential growth during the coming years.

Online video adverts will haul $410 million this year, up 82 percent from 2005, according to eMarketer. In 2008 revenues will exceed $1 billion, or 6 percent of the total online spend.

The growth is due to advertisers becoming more comfortable with online video in general and as a replacement for TV. According to one estimate, TV ad revenue will drop by 6 percent in 2007.

David Hallerman, eMarketer senior analyst, says agencies like working with a familiar creative format and "have long favored television as their marketing medium, and extending that preference to the Internet is a logical leap."

For example, Dodge is running spots for its Nitro SUV on TV and unique and repurposed shorter spots on MSNBC and its website. The company planned for the web spots up front and shot additional material instead of just reusing TV content.

I also heard from comScore that they also expect a boom in online video and are working on ways to better track performance.

So Google's $1.6 gambit on YouTube may not have been so crazy after all.

Chip maker Intel is showing its paternal side by collecting a group of Web 2.0 apps and reselling them as a suite. It is a strange pairing for Intel to be shepherding business software into the suite space.

Usually in Intel promotes applications that reinforce the "Intel inside" message that its hardware can make the software run faster. But, RSS, blogging software will not stress a CPU. Hmm.

The SuiteTwo software, which Intel will promote through its reseller channel, includes Newsgator's RSS aggregator, SimpleFeed's RSS syndication software, Movable Type, Socialtext's wiki application, and SpikeSource, software that checks applications to make sure they are behaving well.

I would have expected Novell or Netscape to promote software like this, but not Intel. But bully for them for recognizing that information creation and dissemination applications can enhance business productivity nearly as much as YouTube and Digg detract from it. Like IM and VOIP before, wikis and social software will find a home in the enterprise.

Microsoft's announcement that it was entering the video rental business using its Xbox Live platform is bad news for Apple and Amazon, but over time none of these companies will win the video download war.

The Xbox advantages are that it's already connected to the TV, has some HD titles, and the 10 million video-ready consoles give Microsoft a user base that is willing to pay for content. It will take Apple a long time to sell that many movie download boxes. Although pricing hasn't been announced, movies are a commodity, and the entire cost of the system will (as always) be less expensive than Apple's offering.

Amazon's service has had its share of problems , and the company will never be an impact player.

But in the long run, watch out for Comcast to dominate this market by acquiring a movie download service or developing its own. What's holding back movie download services like MovieLink and CinemaNow is the lack of a simple way to move the content to the big screen. Cable companies have been held back by inferior selection of titles in their video on demand offerings, an inferior search capability, and inability to play Internet content.

Comcast should develop an integrated content service that enables people to pick their movies, TV shows and web content online and deliver either online (for people who are supposedly working) or through the cable service to their TVs. The combined service would offer some movies as video on demand while the "long tail" of video content would be sent to a locally stored or networked DVR.

Comcast is already in the business of high speed access as well as entertainment services. The crown jewel would be offering wireless router that could share content from a DVR to any TV or PC in the house. Managing the account online makes it that much easier.

The iPod and Xbox services will have their niche audiences (like Apple's computers), but look for Comcast to become the Microsoft of digital movie distribution.

No matter where you stand on the implementation of video ads, better performance metrics are needed to legitimize the format.

Some publishers are shying away from pre-roll video ads out of fear of user disapproval, but folks like Comedy Central seem to be doing fine with them. Other folks have suggested that graphic ads that must be launched by the user (ala YouTube) is the way to go. But even more effective in getting attention are the clever Apple ads that play silently -- it's impossible not to watch at least a portion of the ad. In this video-saturated world, advertisers need motion to drive an ocean of traffic.

DoubleClick has customized its DART Motif ad platform to better track the performance of video ads, which should help convince advertisers that have been reluctant to move from banners that these ads can be worth their additional cost. Motif for In-Stream measures pauses, midpoints reached, as well as how many times the ads were watched in full screen mode.

Advertisers should also incorporate interactive components within the stream that are linked to special offers or more information about what is appearing in the window. Interactive TV hasn't really made this work, but delivering ads to PCs provides a better interface.

Found via Adotas.

Call it My Space meets Second Life in 3D. New company 3B introduced an entertainment/personal publishing/virtual world today at Web 2.0.

The 3B space enables people to create avatars and pages using themed backgrounds (beach, club, etc.) and share music and photos. And there's ample opportunity to shop as your avatar cruises the virtual world as 3B has teamed up with leading retailers to pitch products through billboards and virtual storefronts. The advertiser relationships allow 3B to offer the virtual villages (and required browser plug-in) for free.

I can't wait for the first virtual "flash mobs" to start doing odd things in the virtual malls.

Also at Web 2.0 this week is eSnips, a social networking site that groups users by their common interests. Through Micro-Portals, folks interested in art, karaoke, photography and music can share or sell files or hang out with like-minded folks.

The company says it has almost 1 million users and will create new micro-sites based on user interest. Independent artists may find this useful to get their name out and find potential customers without relying on a mega corporation.

The ability to herd people of similar interests together online is a shift that has staying power. While it enables you to meet people from across town or around the globe who you would never have met otherwise, the downside is you may get to know your neighbors less.

Reporters are overrated, let the inmates run the asylum.

That seems to be what Gannett, the publishers of McPaper, (USA Today) and many local papers is saying by "reinventing" newsrooms to become funnels for user generated news, according to Wired News.

The YouTube/MySpace phenomenon has clearly penetrated the minds of media moguls (I've recently heard references to MySpace on two prime time shows), but refocusing the news collection process to rely on readers is crazy.

Having a social aspect to news gathering will let publishers tap into the public vibe, but be careful what you ask for, because I'm sure the papers will get overwhelmed with crap. Why do you think newspapers are written on a 5th grade level?

Adding blogs and letting people rank stories is a smarter way to tap Web 2.0.

Or, you can let users customize their news experience by aggregating news from around the web, as reported by Bambi Francisco. Inform is grouping news and distributing to publishers to add context to articles, and she says a MySpace news page would make sense. A smart RSS reader can do that for you today, but it is a time-consuming and imperfect process.

The site aimed at gaming social media site Digg has sent out notices to its users that is has reached their required number or users to go live. When you log in for the first time, you have to agree to their terms of service, which I find is the best part:

Spike the Vote Terms of Use
You are not allowed to login at Spike the Vote:

1. if you are currently employed or ever have been employed by Digg, Netscape, or del.icio.us;
2. if you are a current contractor or ever have been a contractor for Digg, Netscape, or del.icio.us;
3. if you or the company you work for has ever been paid by Digg, Netscape, or del.icio.us;
4. if you are affiliated with Digg, Netscape, or del.icio.us in any way more than a registered user of their services;
5. if you intend to contact Digg, Netscape, or del.icio.us about anything related to Spike the Vote.

I'm not sure that this will stop anyone from logging in let alone stand up in court, so its point I am not sure. There are no "missions" yet, they start Saturday, so stay tuned for how it works out.

It is round two for Google's print advertising, and I'm not optimistic that it will go any better than the previous lackluster attempt to penetrate magazine advertising.

Google has a deal with more than 50 newspapers to start selling its excess online inventory to print, according to the LA Times.

But this idea is like trying to wear gloves on your feet -- it just doesn't fit.

Google's expertise is in matching advertisements with search terms, and companies are thrilled with a whopping low single-digit conversion rate. But print costs a hell of a lot more than your average CPC ad. Google collects small amounts of money from lots of people based on lots of searches. Advertising in the Washington Post is limited to relatively big-budget advertisers in a particular geography, not a good match for the small-time advertisers. AdSense is about context, which newspaper advertising is not. The sports and entertainment sections are not specific enough to know what people want.

For example, I advertised in my local newspaper and used direct mail for my wife's massage therapy practice, and despite a good demographic, got zero results. For a fraction of what I was paying in print, we've had great results in finding customers who searched the relevant keywords online. AdSense works (to the degree that it does) because there is context.

Newspaper ads are about branding through (usually) graphical ads, so transferring the expertise and customers of banner ads (which is not Google's forte) is a much better match. Advertisers who would want to advertise in newspapers most likely already have lots of experience in that area, and don't need a web company's help.

Google could create revenue for newspapers by running its "extra" inventory on Google News, which shockingly still has no ads. To encourage the publishers' cooperation, they could share the revenue with publishers based on the frequency at which their headlines appeared on Google News. Now that would make GoodSense.