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Eight months after being announced, Nielsen’s TV/Internet Convergence Panel, launched with ESPN, has gathered a large enough sample to track combined TV and digital media consumption for the sports network. The panel of some 1,000 participants is intended to correlate usage across platforms, including TV, the Internet and mobile. The initiative is just one step in networks’ attempts to sell packages to marketers based on branding and engagement that moves well beyond ratings and gross rating points.

Profiles of emerging companies make for compelling reading, but sometimes that's only half the story. The marketplace has a pivotal role for the partners who demonstrate a long-term vision and commitment to the industry - those who have the bandwidth to vet an untried concept, and in the process, validate new models for broader adoption.

Jonathan Harris was an artist studying computer science at Princeton. His early art project, 10x10, extracted text and images from newsfeeds to build a matrix. The site would ultimately generate ten million visitors. Among them was Upendra Shardanand, an MIT undergrad who made his name and fortune selling his personalization software (MSN Passport) for $40M. A news aficionado himself, he saw in 10x10 the future of news aggregation.

There's an elephant in the online advertising room, and no, it's not the threat of Recession. The rate of click fraud is keeping up with, and in some cases exceeding the pace of online ad growth. In response to the challenges posed to the industry by rampant click fraud, a cottage industry in click forensics has cropped up in the past two years.

At this week's Traffic Audit Bureau Conference in Boca Raton, the out-of-home industry embraced digital advances as a catalyst for maintaining the industry's status as the fastest growing segment of the traditional media marketplace (excluding online). Tim Hanlon, EVP Futures for Publicis Groupe's Denuo, called for media and creative advertising agencies to break-down their organizational silos and focus more aggressively on innovative opportunities within all media, and especially out-of-home.

A three-minute presentation slot at the annual TED Conference is considered a coup, but that didn't suit serial entrepreneur Ben Kaufman. You couldn't have asked for a more auspicious debut – call it a cotillion for the Digerati. But Kaufman requested -- and got -- more for Kluster: a room of his own to mount 72 Hours – the ideation and rapid prototyping of a concept from inception through implementation, leveraging the entire TED community and its Web-connected global outliers.

Last month Harper Collins published Wagner James Au's The Making of Second Life: Notes From The New World. With a Second Life backlash in full swing (Ad Age named it most overhyped trend of 2007) and the Virtual Worlds 2008 conference kicking off this week in NYC, it was an ideal time to chat with Wagner, a unique figure in the Metaverse, particularly Second Life.

With the recent announcement that Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale was stepping down, only a few months after the departure of CTO Cory Ondrejka, it's time to consider Second Life: The Next Generation. If ever there was a textbook example of the Gartner Hype Cycle look no further than this virtual world.

If you're a luddite who isn't interested in twittering about your commute or heading out for pizza, you're missing the point, Failing to Twitter is like refusing to believe that TV had a future. Twitter is a new communications medium, and if you're ignoring it, you're missing your best opportunity to stay in touch with your friends, family, company, industry, nation, world and universe. In May 2007, we gave our readers a heads up preview of what Twitter was to become, featuring an exclusive interview with Twitter founder Biz Stone. In case you weren’t paying attention, we’re reprinting it here.