Today is a goulash of various stories worthy of your consideration. I spent Tuesday evening thinking hard about some pretty serious issues thanks to the DNA foundation, moderating a conversation with some of our industry’s best and brightest. It further solidified my sense that our industry is maturing well past its focus on the next new thing, and into becoming a full citizen of the world. It was invigorating, and expect this vibe to infuse both my work and the work of many others in the future.

Meanwhile, we have bills to pay and plenty to learn. Signals worth monitoring today:

PointRoll Debuts Unit That Blends Advertising With Editorial (ClickZ) Well, looks like the peanut butter and chocolate are getting together in traditional media as well. Good thing we’re in a world that understands both ingredients, and how together they can make something of true value.

How Privacy Vanishes Online, a Bit at a Time (NYT) Er…yes, but. Or rather, yes, AND. As I discussed in yesterday’s Signal, we’re in the midst of a conversation about what it means to be both public and private in a world that facilitates entirely new approaches to both. This story strikes me as missing a fair bit of nuance.

Bing Hits All-Time High Market Share: Nielsen (SEL) Just because I predicted Bing will surpass Yahoo this year, I figured I better keep tabs….

B2B Marketers Up Social Spend (eMarketer) And again, I’m posting stuff that makes me happy.

Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley Talks Revenue, API, Brands, and “Beyond the Badge” (NextWeb) Want more? Come to the CM Summit and ask Dennis a question!

Delivering More Search Results as You Type (Facebook blog) Look, Google, if you’re going to get into OUR game of social via Buzz, we’re going to get into YOUR game of search. Game on.

Case Study Collection: LinkedIn Success Stories (Marketing Profs) You have to get a membership to get this, but a good reminder that there’s more out there beyond Facebook and Twitter.

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If you read FM’s Signal, then you’ll want to come to the CM Summit this June 7-8 in New York City. Join the founders of AdMob, Boxee, Foursquare, and the CEOs of Razorfish, Moxie, GroupM, as well as top execs from Adobe, Google, The New York Times, Starbucks, AT&T and more.

Also, if you want Signal by email, sign up for it on the Signal home page(upper right box)!

I was ready to push the publish button when my blog editor, Ecto, unexpectedly ate the entire draft. So forgive me if today’s Signal is a bit brief. I lost two hours of work, something that’s never happened. That’ll teach me.

Anyway, allow me to attempt to reconstruct my post. In short, I’ve noticed a definite trend in the stories and links I find interesting lately: our society is starting to have higher order conversations about the implications of our passionate embrace with social media. And this is a Very Good Thing.

I’ve long said that I’m a fan of social networks and media, of course, but I’ve also pointed out that most of it is artless and ingenuous in comparison with the sophistication each of us has when it comes to “being social.” So far, our technologies lack the instrumentation each of us employs when interacting in the simplest social situation. We have the benefit of hundreds of thousands of years of social evolution – not to mention millions of years of biological evolution. Yet as social creatures we flock to technologies that allow us to express that fundamental need, even if it fails to truly reflect our nature.

What’s heartening is how our culture has begun to ask interesting questions about what this all means – for our businesses, as marketers, as citizens, and as individuals. As Danah Boyd states in her opening keynote at SXSW: “ChatRoulette may be a fad, but the idea that publicity and privacy will get mashed up in new ways will not be.”

Tens of millions have flocked to ChatRoulette – and while it may well be a fad, the impulse which sent so many to “only connect” is not. Understanding who we are as private and public beings will be a fundamental component of what it means to be literate in a modern society. And marketers who make a practice of understanding this will succeed over those who do not.

I predict a punctuation mark in this conversation over the coming months, in the form of Facebook’s public data firehose. Expected at their F8 developer conference this June, the Facebook firehose will allow developers to create all sorts of unexpected applications and services which leverage Facebook status updates, wall posts, and more. Twitter should get the credit for pushing this open architecture, but Facebook’s implementation of it will be revelatory – and not necessarily in ways that might be positive. I predict one of the first applications created will be a site publishing Really Stupid Pictures You Probably Should Not Have Posted To Facebook, for example. Cue media frenzy and….well you get the picture.

But far more good can come from an open ecosystem, and over time, our conversation around how we expand what it means to be social will only become more fascinating and, I believe, liberating.

(Video above of “Society” by Jerry Hannon, a pal who lives in Marin, featured in “Into the Wild.)

Onwards to a brief list of links I find worthy today:

Filtering Social Media To Find Signal Out Of Noise (AVC) Fred points us to a portfolio company that sees signal in the noise of social media, at first for financial gain, and next, for marketers.

“Making Sense of Privacy and Publicity” (Danah Boyd) Read this piece!

@anywhere (Twitter blog) Twitter did not announce an ad platform yesterday (nor did I expect them to), but the company did announce a framework for allowing its service to be integrated even more fully into third party sites. This is a good thing and continues to raise the bar on what other social services will have to do.

Confirmed: Marketplace will be the only way to get apps on Windows Phone 7 Series (Engadget) Oh, please, Microsoft, don’t do the same thing Apple is doing. This path will only lead to pain and failure. Please, please, PLEASE don’t do this.

Now A No-Evil Zone (Tim Bray) A noted Internet pioneer chooses Google over Apple for the same reason I’m pleading with Microsoft to not dictate its mobile ecosystem.

Brands Must Become Media to Earn Relevance (Solis). I’ve been saying this for years, good piece. In an age of social media, all brands are publishers, all businesses are media businesses.

State of the Media, By the Numbers (CJR and Pew) Worthy overview of new Pew research.

The future of display advertising (Google blog) Susan Wojcicki, VP Product for Google and one of the originals at the company, kicks off a series on Google’s intentions as it comes to display advertising. Think data, data, data. And come to the CM Summit, where Susan will speak.

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If you read FM’s Signal, then you’ll want to come to the CM Summit this June 7-8 in New York City. Join the founders of AdMob, Boxee, Foursquare, and the CEOs of Razorfish, Moxie, GroupM, as well as top execs from Adobe, Google, The New York Times, Starbucks, AT&T and more.

Also, if you want Signal by email, sign up for it on the Signal home page (upper right box)!

Letitia Pulaski worked at AOL for 3 years prior to joining the Federated Media team. Most recently, she was the Sales Development Lead for AOL Sports and AOL News, as well as all their subchannels. She worked closely with the editorial and sales sides of the organization to drive millions of dollars of sponsorship revenue for those particular sites. Prior to AOL, Letitia was on the sales team at ESPN television for nearly 4 years working on hefty accounts such as Nike and Anheuser Busch. In her spare time she enjoys traveling the world. Her goal is to visit every continent at least once. One of her favorite places she’s visited is a small island off of the coast of Auckland, New Zealand that’s known for its laid back attitude and vineyards. Letitia was born in Bucharest, Romania and grew up in Queens, NY. Welcome to FM, Letitia!

Happy Monday! This past weekend was dominated by coverage of the SXSW conference, which I’ve pretty much ignored, because I figure the good stuff will come out in the next 24 or so hours (folks usually wait for a Monday to announce anything newsworthy). Also hot was advance sales of the iPad, which were predictably good. And with that in mind, I spent part of the past few days thinking more about Apple’s device, its spat with Adobe (and Google, for more on that, see this NYT piece), and why my piece last month (I Don’t Like the iPad Because…) brought such strong response. We all know Apple has its fanboys, as well as its detractors….but there’s more going on here.

What I find interesting is the media’s response to the iPad (and I include tech blogs in the category of “media”). Overwhelmingly, the media wanted to believe that a hip magazine like Wired (caveat, I was a co-founder) would, natch, have the hippest iPad demo, a demo that, natch, would prove the viability of … the media’s own threatened business model!

The truth, however, is a bit more complicated.

The Wired demo was pretty much the starting gun for a month of media frenzy about how great the iPad is going to be. Wired’s own posting about its demo is titled “Wired Magazine on the iPad”.

However, the truth is this: This demo was made using Adobe software (not available in native runtime on the iPad) and run off a Dell laptop. I’ve confirmed this with Adobe. Also true: the software used to create the demo will absolutely NOT create or compile apps that work natively on the iPad. And this is due to decisions made by Apple. Yes, there is a kludgy workaround that Adobe has authored, but it’s handicapped, to say the least. As much as the Apple would like to claim it has banned Adobe for technical reasons, by all accounts outside of Cupertino, Apple has banned Adobe due to control and economic issues: It simply doesn’t want developers able to create software from which Apple won’t profit.

So why is the Wired app called an iPad demo? Good question. Up until the iPad came on the scene, this demo was, according to very well placed sources, a tablet demo – after all, nearly 50 such devices are coming to market in the next year.

But at the moment it as unveiled at the prestigious TED conference (where, by the way, both Wired and the Industry Standard were also unveiled), Wired’s tablet demo became an “iPad demo”.

And therein lies the issue I have with the mainstream media’s approach to the iPad. It is, in the main, uncritical in its large type. Some representative coverage: Wired iPad Edition: Best Magazine Tablet Demo Yet – Wired – Gawker. While I won’t go so far as to say “breathless”, I will say this: It’s unquestioning. All the coverage points out that there’s this tiny little issue of how the software actually won’t run on the iPad, yet they all title their posts as “Wired’s iPad demo”.

Even Wired’s own post attempts, either awkwardly or disingenuously, to gloss the issue of Adobe’s participation in the demo’s creation by dismissing the technology as unimportant: “But enough of the technical details”. Well, NO, Wired. Not enough. In this case, technology is really, really important. But by ignoring this issue, the spin cycle regurgitated the headlines, and boom, there you have it: Wired has a kick ass iPad app.

Expect the truth is, the app was developed by Adobe and Wired engineers using InDesign and Air, which run on operating systems that are open and allow anyone to play as long as the code compiles correctly (this is true for Windows, Mac, Linux…but not the iPhone or iPad). If it weren’t for open operating systems, the very demo that has has become the poster child for how the iPad is going to save media companies….well, that demo would never have existed.

Somehow, the irony of that is lost. I have no doubt that Wired will indeed create a kickass iPad app. However, I sense that Wired, like most media companies, will soon come to realize what a huge pain in the ass it is for them to port, edition after edition, all their native Adobe InDesign workflows (not to mention their website content) into Mr. Job’s iPad straightjacket. Mark my words. The headlines here are going to change.

OK, I feel better now.

Well, anyway. More on this if time and your patience permits. Moving on to the weekend’s best linkages:

I Just Ordered an IPad: Here’s Why (AdAge) Look, I may not be a fan of the device’s approach to open standards et al, but I’m probably going to own one too (after the first or second generation, of course). Also read Do Marketers Still Need News Brands? (AdAge)- more on tablet mania.

Advertising: Instant Ads Set the Pace on the Web (NYT) The Times notices the speed with which marketers can purchase and deploy messaging. One of the many reasons we’ll have the Google’s head of product at the CM Summit this year – this is really “marketing in real time.”

U.K. and U.S. Agencies Throw Cold Water on Standards for ‘Black Box’ Data (ClickZ) Look, data is dull but important, right? Right. But I’m paying attention.

Google to shut China search (FT) The report claims it’s all but a done deal. I tend to think a deal will be done and Google will stay in China. However, if it does not, it will be historic, I think, in terms of a major company standing for something.

The Brand Dashboard: A Window to Relevance (Brian Solis) A detailed review of various free services to monitor social media conversation.

Consumer Confidence Rallies in March: RBC (MarketingProfs) Who doesn’t want to hear that?

Marketers Buzz About ROI (eMarketer) Ah the elusive game that is determining what a real return on investment is.

4 Ways to Effectively Use Social Media as a Catalyst (Mashable)

If you read FM’s Signal, then you’ll want to come to the CM Summit this June 7-8 in New York City. Join the founders of AdMob, Boxee, Foursquare, and the CEOs of Razorfish, Moxie, GroupM, as well as top execs from Adobe, Google, The New York Times, Starbucks, AT&T and more.

Also, if you want Signal by email, sign up for it on the Signal home page (upper right box)!

Today’s Signal is brought to you by the letter B. For Baseball. Every year around this time my son and I head out to Scottsdale, where our beloved SF Giants play Spring ball. We play hooky for a Friday and see a few games. It’s bliss.  

So despite a few interesting bits of news about location services, Signal will be a bit weak today – back at you strong on Monday. Here are some links worth perusing:

In stock nearby? Look for the blue dots. (Google Blog) Local is the new black. In this case, Google closes the loop between local, mobile, and commerce. Great idea, but it needs scale and participation from major retailers. Lucky for Google, it has AdWords. Which nearly every major retailer uses. Watch this space.

What’s Happening—and Where? (Twitter blog) As I said…location location location.

Foursquare and Starbucks Team Up to Offer Customer Rewards (Mashable) Foursquare is the new black of location for marketers.

AOL Launches Lifestream As New Standalone Product. This Is What Google Buzz Should Have Been (TC) Mike likes him some AOL.

Who Are We Really? And Why Marketers Should Care (AdAge) Smart commentary on our multicultural reality.

Google Is Bing’s 4th Largest Referring Source (SEL) Google is the heart pumping the oxygen of attention around the web (at least, it is for now.) So this isn’t that big a surprise. But it is kind of fun.

I’m not claiming to be deeply informed about the app marketplace, which Google stirred up today (and, to my mind, the market could use a few more spoons). But I do use apps. At least, I use enough of them to feel like a nearly typical member of the species (as compared to a few of my peers, who are so deeply involved in AppWorld that they have – just maybe – lost a bit of perspective.)  

So, here’s my beef with AppWorld. In short, it reminds me of computing back in about 1987. Yeah, 24 years ago, back when I was a cub reporter for MacWeek, I covered the burgeoning world of Apple and Apple developers. And trust me, I’m getting a pretty strong sense of deja vu. I guess being old counts for something.

Back in the late 1980s, folks who developed applications for the new Macintosh OS had two very strong sentiments about Apple. One, they LOVED the company and its Macintosh development environment. They loved it for what it was, for what it could be, and for the opportunity it presented to them – a newly fallen bowl of virgin powder, into which clever and entrepreneurial programmers could strap it on and push off to lay fresh tracks. Imagine the possibilities! A program that let you paint with your mouse! A program that let you visualize otherwise mute spreadsheets! A program that taught you how to type by watching actual fingers move on a keyboard on the screen! Holy cow, the possibilities were limitless!

But then there was the second strong sentiment. I’ll sum it up in a phrase: F*cking G@#$%damn Apple! The company was impossible to work with, utterly controlling, miserly with its developer tools, overbearing in its demands, myopic in its decision making. In fact, an entire organization sprung up, the Macintosh Developers Network (I think, not the current MDN, which is a UK org), seemingly driven by its members need to console each other in the face of the inscrutable Cupertino. (Apple never did really embrace the MDN, though I found in its members some very good sources…).

So let’s fast forward to today. Once again, Apple has created an extraordinary new environment for developers and entrepreneurs, and once again, it has fostered pretty much the same two sentiments.

But unlike the late 1980s, this time the world is different. It’s connected. It’s web-driven. The Web is the World, and the world demands connections.

But so far, what I’ve noticed most about apps in AppWorld is that they are, for the most part, all about themselves. They’re not connected to the greater web, and they don’t encourage you to move seamlessly from one app to another, depending on your intent.

And that, to my mind, can’t stand.

Just a thought. Now, onto some good linkage:

Google Launches the Google Apps Marketplace (Mashable) As I said….

comScore Reports January 2010 U.S. Mobile Subscriber Market Share (Comscore) Because you can’t get enough datapoints about something that confuses us all.

Engage your users to survive, Google tells newspapers (Guardian) Google, lecturing publishers on engagement. The world is truly upside down.

Gen Y Goes for Online Banking (eMarketer) Take heed. Are you offering your services online? Why not?

ARM sees over 50 new iPad-like devices out this year (Computerworld) Thank God.

Why MySpace Co-Presidents Aren’t Worried About Growth (PaidContent) Well, I doubt that will last.

FTC Said to Ask Google Rivals for Statement on AdMob, May Signal Challenge (Bloomberg) My my. Hmm. My.

Corporate Branding Goes Rogue (AdAge) “Social media is not just another tactic to be tacked onto the proverbial backside of a corporate identity system. It needs to be recognized for what it is — the disruptive technology that radically changes the game. So much of what operated in the old corporate branding model simply does not apply anymore.”

RealNetworks’ Rob Glaser on why Apple’s model must be stopped (TechFlash) ….and as long as I’m on the hobbyhorse…comScore: Android Shows Strength As Mobile Web Usage Grows (SEL)

Announcing The Fifth Annual CM Summit: Theme and Initial Lineup (FM blog) I had to remind you of this, didn’t I? Great lineup….

Ad Publishing Tool Bridges Traditional And Online Media (MediaPost)

Google Gains Traction In Display-Ad Push (WSJ via ATD)

I’m very excited to announce the theme and line-up for our fifth CM Summit, to be held in New York June 7-8 (it’s the kickoff conference to New York’s annual Internet Week).

We’ve got a lot to talk about this year – our theme is  “Marketing in Real Time.”

2009 was the year the web went real time. Twitter grew five fold and became a major online player, tens of millions of us learned how to live out loud in public. Facebook responded by changing its approach to user data, making its more than 400 million user profiles publicly searchable. And Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo began integrating Facebook and Twitter’s real time signals into their search offerings, creating an ever-circulating ecosystem of conversation across the web.

2009 was also the year the web went mobile and local. The “broadband of mobile” – 3G – became ubiquitous. As Apple’s iPhone consolidated its grip on the smart phone market, Google and its partners introduced the open-platform Android, Palm introduced its Pre and Pixi, Verizon its map, and AT&T responded in force, kicking off what is sure to be a multi-year, multi-party marketing war. “There’s an app for that” became a cultural catchphrase, and even Intel prepared to become a player in the new app economy, driven by the rise of a new class of devices, including netbooks. By year’s end, Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker had predicted that the mobile web will far exceed the current web in scope and opportunity.

Mobile, local, real time, social – in its second decade, the web has matured and taken a central position in our culture, one that no longer relegates the Internet to role of “other.” The web is now a part of every aspect of our lives, and as marketers, we must integrate this fact into our strategy and our execution. That means rethinking what we’ve grown accustomed to calling “traditional media” and imagining new ways to blend offline and online. It means developing the skills and practices of a publisher, and taking a platform-based approach to connecting with customers. And it means rethinking some of our “best practices” – including measurement, research, and the agency-client relationship.

So what can we learn from the past year as we enter a decade where the real time web will become ubiquitous? What worked, what failed, and why? What platforms have emerged as steady new partners? What startups are lurking in Silicon Valley’s wings, poised to once again change the game and offer new channels of communication with our customers?

At the CM Summit you’ll hear cross-platform case studies from senior marketers at brands like Starbucks, AT&T, Adobe, Paramount, and many more. You’ll meet the leaders of platform companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, Bing, and Yahoo. And as always, you’ll discover the next wave of disruptors – companies like Foursquare, Boxee, and AdMob.

Here is the initial 2010 speaker lineup – expect more announcements in the coming weeks. Register now (while the early bird price is still in effect!), and I look forward to seeing you in New York!

Omar Hamoui – Founder & CEO AdMob

Ann Lewnes – SVP of Corporate Marketing and Communications Adobe

Chris Schembri – VP Media Services AT&T

Henry Blodget – EIC The Business Insider

Avner Ronen – CEO boxee

Ken Wirt – VP, Consumer Marketing Cisco

Deanna Brown – President and COO Federated Media

Dennis Crowley – Co-founder foursquare

Rob Norman – CEO Group M North America

Bradley Horowitz – VP, Product Marketing Google

Susan Wojcicki – VP, Product Management Google

Dennis Woodside – VP, Americas Operations Google

Arianna Huffington – Co-founder & Editor-in-chief Huffington Post

Joel Lunenfeld – CEO Moxie Interactive

Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. – Chairman The New York Times Company

Amy Powell – SVP, Interactive Marketing Paramount Pictures

Bob Lord – CEO Razorfish

Chris Bruzzo – VP- Brand, Content& Online Starbucks Coffee Company

Dick Costolo – COO Twitter

Hilary Schneider – Executive Vice President Yahoo

The CM Summit thanks its sponsors:

Premier: Adobe Diamond: American Express Platinum: Blend Interactive, Intel Gold: Dell, HP, Verizon Media Partners: IAB, Internet Week NY

PS – If you’re interested, follow us on Twitter, fan us on Facebook and join our Linked In Group. We look forward to shaping this conference together.

Welcome to FM’s new Signal Series! If you like, you can check out Signal-only content here.

Mobile. It’s on everyone’s lips, but no one knows what the hell to do about it. At least, that’s what I hear from every single marketer I talk to, and I’ve made it a point to talk to a lot of you in the past few months.  

It’s a source of significant frustration: Everyone’s saying mobile is the next thing, but no one has a solution for how to market in the space in a way that delivers the four pillars of brand marketing: Scale, Safety, Quality, and Engagement.

Sure, you can now buy banners across ad networks in mobile, and lord knows that ability has paid off handsomely for AdMob and Quattro (acquired by Google and Apple, respectively, for very large multiples of very small revenues), but honestly, we all know that’s not an endgame. More like an opening gambit in a chess match where nearly everyone feels like they’re playing checkers. (Except Steve Jobs, natch. He’s got it ALL figured out).

OK, forgive me the snark, but if Apple has this figured out and the rest of us are consigned to tithe at the church of iPad/iPhone, we’re well and truly screwed.

Ditto for the strategy of “I’ll get me a cool app”, which feels about as innovative as “Get me a viral video” did back in 2007. I’m not saying having a good app isn’t part of a great mobile strategy (I love what Oakley has done for surfers, for example), but one good app don’t a solution make.

Earlier in the Signal, I wrote about MOLRS, my entirely non-viral and made-up acronym for Mobile Local Realtime Social. My point was this: Mobile is not a singular use case. Mobile is related to an ecosystem of local (where I am), realtime (what I’m doing right now), and social (who I’m with, who I want to tell about what I’m doing, etc.).

I sense the answer to a truly quality, scaled marketing solution in the “mobile” environment has to do with understanding this broader framework. It’s a complicated landscape with way too many middlemen at the moment. But my Spidey senses are tingling, and something’s about to happen, I can feel it. If only I knew what it was….

Meanwhile, here are some links to chew on, much of it MOLRS related. It’s better than eating your phone. (image credit )

Internet Services: Mobile Advertising: The Hype, The Hope, And The Financial Reality (Weisel – pdf download) This is a research report sent to me by Thomas Weisel’s Jordan Rohan. I’ll probably get in trouble for posting it. Maybe.

Foursquare Introduces New Tools for Businesses (NYT) Analytics so businesses can figure out what they want to do with Foursquare. Smart.

Just In Time For The Location Wars, Twitter Turns On Geolocation On Its Website (TechCrunch) As I said earlier, expect Twitter and Facebook to play for the Checkin signal in the Database of Intentions.

Facebook Will Allow Users to Share Location (NYT) Hey, wait, on the SAME DAY! Seems *everyone’s* MOLRS are coming in at once…

US online ad spend set to overtake print (Guardian) Well of course it is. About time.

Bingo! Microsoft’s Search Numbers Keep Going Up (Paid Content) Bing gains, Yahoo! loses.

10 neglected interactive marketing best practices (iMedia)