Advertising will be an early indicator of whether people without vision and taste are moving in at Apple. It will be interesting to watch.

There seems to be a mass of cheerleaders out there who are celebrating this digital revolution, particularly in education.

I think that we live in techno-enthusiastic times. We celebrate our technologies because people are frightened by the world we've made. The economy isn't going right; there's global warming. In times like that, people imagine science and technology will be able to get it right.

I've used Diceware to generate secure passwords for a few years now. It really is a simple system. Basically it's just a list of 7776 common English words, mapped to the outcomes of dice rolls. Combined with a set of five dice (or one die rolled five times), it is an easy and extremely secure method for generating strong passphrases.

As highlighted by XKCD, most human-generated passwords just aren't very strong - they don't have high levels of entropy.

Americans are swimming in a sea of messages.

Each year, legions of ad people, copywriters, market researchers, pollsters, consultants, and even linguists—most of whom work for one of six giant companies—spend billions of dollars and millions of man-hours trying to determine how to persuade consumers what to buy, whom to trust, and what to think. Increasingly, these techniques are migrating to the high-stakes arena of politics, shaping policy and influencing how Americans choose their leaders.

Graphic of current display advertising landscape for interactive advertising.

Online panel service from Kartik.

For the first time, an agency-designed ad unit goes live on Facebook today. The unit -- called Comments -- is the result of an AdExpo Facebook held last year, where it gathered agencies and challenged them to create a new way for Facebook users to engage with brands. The comments from users and their friends have the ability to become a corresponding sponsored stories. Out of the 100 ideas submitted, Leo Burnett, Chicago's was selected. The move is part of Facebook's initiative to work closer with advertising agencies and creatives.

Facebook is the number one seller of display advertising in the US according to research by eMarketer. It's expected to generate $2.19 billion in US display advertising revenue this year.

Klout has tapped Involver's marketing platform to bring its social influence measurement tools to Facebook. The deal, announced Wednesday, will provide brands with a new way to engage with influential fans and reward consumers based on their influence.
An agency or brand can create a custom experience using Klout scores to unlock the ability to uniquely target connected influencers. Facebook has been largely devoid of the ability to filter how brands focus their attention, so this integration marks the first time brands can engage with their fans on Facebook using Klout's scoring system, according to the companies.

Organizing your circles in Google+ can be the most confusing part of the new social network. Yet people are learning to embrace and even optimize their circles for better productivity, filtering and privacy.

We spoke with some Google+ mavericks about how they’ve corralled their circles to be more effective. Below, they share their clever tricks and best practices so you can learn from both their mistakes and their successes.

Advertising budgets decreased during the second quarter of 2011, according to a survey of ad agency executives released Wednesday by Strata, the big media-buying processing firm owned by Comcast. The survey, which is the most recent in a quarterly series conducted by Strata, signals a reversal from the first quarter of the year, when a majority of agency executives responding said their ad budgets were increasing. Strata claims to process about $50 billion worth of media transactions for agencies each year.

Interestingly, Google+ demonstrated strong intent coming out of the gate, with 27% of agency executives stating that they plan to utilize it in their client's campaigns.

May 26th, 1995: Bill Gates sends a memo, entitled "The Internet Tidal Wave," to all executive staff within Microsoft. In it, he makes clear his intention to focus the company's efforts online with immediate effect and "assign the Internet the highest level of importance," going on to call it, "the most important single development to come along since the IBM PC was introduced in 1981."

The IAB addresses major issues in supply chain, measurement and simplifying the processes associated with buying, planning and creating interactive media.

Use this quick list of Writing Tools as a handy reference. Share it and add to it.
For fresh takes on these ideas and more, visit writing tools: the blog at
www.poynter.org. To purchase a copy of “Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for
Every Writer,” visit your favorite book seller

Computer science has always been a male-dominated field, right?

Wrong.

The following ranking is a component of a comprehensive three-sample study published in the Journal of Marketing Education (Spring 1997). The objective of the study was to rank marketing journals based on their importance in disseminating scholarly marketing knowledge. Two indices were used to rank the journals: (1) importance/prestige index and (2) popularity/familiarity index. To be included on the ranking list, a journal had to be ranked by at least 5% of the number of respondents that ranked the top journal in the field. A stratified sample of 1,000 marketing academicians at the assistant, associate, and full professor levels was used to compile the rankings. In addition, two samples of 500 academicians each were used to validate the initial results using different ranking methods. The complete study includes rankings pertaining to the overall sample and also segmented samples (i.e., doctoral, non-doctoral, AACSB accredited, and non-AACSB accredited institutions). Please look for the complete study in the Spring 1997 issue of the Journal of Marketing Education. The complete reference of the article is:
Hult, G. Tomas M., William T. Neese, and R. Edward Bashaw (1997), "Faculty Perceptions of Marketing Journals," Journal of Marketing Education, 19 (1), 37-52.

Personality and Social Psychology Review is devoted to publishing original theoretical papers and conceptual review articles in personality and social psychology. PSPR is intended as a forum for conceptual pieces that initiate new lines of research and theory or provide a coherent framework for existing theory and programs of research. The journal emphasizes theory-based reviews of empirical contributions to a substantive area of research and offers integrative theoretical formulations concerning work in a given area of personality and/or social psychology. The journal does not publish methodological papers or methodological critiques unless they make a direct and substantial contribution to theory. Suitable topics for submission include, but are not limited to, attitudes and social cognition, personality development, personality assessment, interpersonal processes, group behavior, and intergroup relations. Occasionally PSPR publishes other pieces of particular interest to members of the Society, such as special topical issues, selected symposia, and invited addresses. All papers are reviewed with respect to their scholarly merit.

Articles should focus on social science related to cyberspace. The journal is inter-disciplinary. We publish work by scientists emphasizing psychology, media studies, sociology, political science, nursing and also other disciplines with relevance to psychosocial aspects of cyberspace. We accept the first of all original research articles as well as theoretical studies and research meta-analyses. All articles will be reviewed by editors and at least one reviewer. The author and reviewers are anonymous to each other. The reviewers will fill the standardised review form which will be forwarded to authors along with the editor's decision.

Apple Inc.’s iAd mobile-advertising business has cut rates by as much as 70 percent as some marquee clients are using rival services, two people with knowledge of the matter said, signaling the company is struggling to parlay its technology leadership into success in the ad industry.

Forrester is publishing a major piece of research, nearly a year in the making -- our analysis of the social media maturity of organizations. There are two ways to consume it: if you're a client, read the report Accelerating Your Social Maturity. Or you can get the newly updated paperback edition of Groundswell, which includes this material as a chapter.

"Five years from now - on the web for free - you'll be able to find the best lectures in the world," the Microsoft billionaire said last year. And in Gates's opinion this extraordinary and constantly expanding digital smorgasbord of educational choices "will be better than any single university" in the world.

If it’s complex it can’t work until it’s empty.

Completed by Taylor Chatfield for her senior seminar.

New phone ad featuring wooden ball moving through instruments in the forest.

he internet is consuming ever more of our waking moments, not to mention ever more ad spending, but that doesn't mean that traditional media is the loser. At least not when "traditional media" means TV.

According to the latest research from eMarketer, advertisers are spending more than ever on the broadcast networks and cable, around $60.5 billion on commercial time this year, making TV the richest media segment, with 39.1% of all ad spending, up from 38.6% in 2010. The research firm attributes the share growth to the "recovering economy," but also found the industry is expanding at the expense of other media, specifically newspapers and magazines, and to some degree the internet.