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I've advertised on quite a few platforms (although have yet to try Facebook), and this is a common problem. In 2006, there were lawsuits against Yahoo and Google for click-fraud.. both were settled (I was included in the settlement for both.... got virtually nothing.. something like $20 refund for $100k in clicks.)
http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/10294.asp

Google does a pretty good job, which is probably a large reason why they control such a large portion of the online ad market. Yahoo, depending on their platform of the week, can be hit-or-miss. They usually do a good job, but there have been a few times when it is just terrible. When Yahoo announces a change to their search.. watch out. (Bing's ad performance has been pretty good over the past couple of years at least)

I've seen some ad platforms that just ignore the problem, and it's easy to spend several thousand dollars and not get a single customer from it on those platforms. If facebook does nothing to control the problem, I'm sure there will be another class action.. probably won't cost them much to settle it, but might destroy the trust they have with advertisers, their stock price, and business.

Kevin Ryan has a go here. he mentions Swickis as a good use case.

First off, I think you missed the grandparent's point. In the spirit of the parent, who's to say that the next storage medium will be a hard drive? What if someone comes up with a cheap way to manufacture a storage medium that plugs directly into an ethernet port or something similar (or for that matter, completely different). The point here is that we don't know what the next storage medium will be.

Finally, I think you're wrong about consumers thinking long-run. First off, I think consumers do look in the long run for a lot of cases. Granted, when I'm in the supermarket line deciding whether or not to buy a pack of gum, I'm not thinking in the long run. However, when my TV start getting old and unreliable and I decide to upgrade to a new one, I think about how long it will last, which formats it will support, and how much things will be chaning over the next few years among a variety of other factors before I buy it. The same thing happens when buying cars or houses.
But I see that you were trying to argue that the failure of Blu-ray or HDDVD isn't due to consumers thinking in the long-run but instead due to the lack of significant benefit (or new features, or new capabilities, or whatever you want to call it) provided by HD compared to revolutionary things like TiVo. I can definitely agree that that is a factor, but it isn't the only factor by any means, and consumers' long term thinking plays a role. Furthermore, TiVo, or DVRs in general, didn't happen quickly either. In 2005, there were under 8 million DVR users in the US, which is 8 years after TiVo was founded. The DVD format was agreed upon in 1995 (which I'll use as the start of DVDs, even though that isn't necessarily true). In 2003, 48 million homes in the US had DVD players, which obviously blows away TiVo 2 year later. I understand that DVDs really aren't an incremental upgrade in a lot of consumers' minds, but it is to others. As far as my parents were concerned, they could watch a video on a VHS player or they could buy a new player to watch the same videos. In a lot of ways, that is the same as the difference between DVDs and High Def DVDs. The point is, whether or not something is revolutionary doesn't necessarily dictate its popularity, neither does a consumer's tendency to think in the long run or how shiny something is. There are a lot of factors.

I think the addition of labels is the most significant upgrade to Blogger. Now, if only I could tag my Slashdot Journal entries.

I do have a question. Many blogs support both Categories and Tags. I understand Google's desire to simplify things, so I think if I could have only one or the other, I'd choose tags. Now that Moveable Type 3.3 has come out and natively supports both tags and categories, I'm at a loss as to when to use which. Do I stick w/ my Categories and leave tagging for a tag cloud and for hooks for Technorati?

So the L.A. Times thinks podcasting could turn the tide in the 2008 U.S. presidential election? Bwahahahaha... let's run the numbers:

One of the most optimistic predictions of a podcast audience comes Forrester Research Group, who says that 12 million people will regularly listen to podcasts by 2010. So let's roll that number back a bit and generously say that the 2008 podcasting audience is 10 million. Of that, maybe one-tenth will be tuned into anything political; the rest will be listening to crap like this.

So, a million political podcast listeners in 2008. Enough to swing an election? Maybe, if they are all from Texas and/or Florida. But of course, they won't be. And they won't all liberal, or all conservative.

The real advantage podcasting holds for pols is that it's a cost effective means of getting a message out, i.e. bandwidth is cheaper than broadcast air time, and is not subject to campaign finance law (not yet, anyway).

Quoting That site:
United Virtualities announced it has developed Persistent Identification Element (PIE), a backup ID system that will restore erased cookies.

This flash-based tracking technology was discussed here:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/04/17 7238&tid=95&tid=158

I tried to look up this new tracking system from United Virtualities but couldn't find much about it. This site says that it is "tied to the browser" which makes me hopeful that this will only affect IE users, but does anybody know any more about it?

First off, it's already been mentioned but I'll say it again - the technology has been in use for a while. I can remember the first time I took advantage of this and watched a whole half hour segment on the Chrysler Crossfire.

The point I really wanted to make though is that a service like Tivo has the ability to change how commercials are delivered and viewed. I'll admin I enjoy watching *some* commercials. If I can watch targeted ads about things I'm interested in (technology, home improvement, food/wine) or could look actually pick commercials in a season-pass sort of way to find truly unique ones (like the Rube-Golberg inspired 'Cog' commercial from Honda) I'd surf commercials out of curiosity. I think the advertising industry could start making stars out of ad directors/designers/producers much like people follow certain individuals who create the shows we watch. Maybe it seems a bit far out, but Tivo has the technology to deliver the next generation of advertising.

--"I am a strong believer in luck and I find the harder I work the more I have of it." -- Benjamin Franklin