We’re in Southern California meeting with a fascinating mix of online agencies you have never heard of but soon will.

It is 5:58 AM.  Having beat back the attempts of indie rocker, Johnny Rome to party all night on the strip, we’re up early to beat the Maseratis to our first vente decaf of the day.

As we shut the door to Room 328 at The Standard, we hear the unmistakeable sound of a security walkie talkie around the corner.  Followed by a male voice spelling his last name.  "Yes, that’s Rosenwasp.  R-O-S-E-N-W-A-S-P."  (The name has been changed to protect the idiot.)

Obviously someone has lost their key. 

We round the corner to find Mr. Rosenwasp standing bare ass naked, hands over his essentials, next to said security guard. Not only does he not have his key — he has no clothes on, no wallet, no nothing.

Out of the walkie talkie from the front desk.  "Can you ask Mr. Rosenwasp to come downstairs and show us his ID."

We get on the elevator.  Cut to the lobby.

The front desk sharpies and the New York hotties checking out and the soap star wannabe valet parking dude and the chick in the bikini in the aquarium behind the front desk are rolling with laughter as the walkie talkie spits out amidst a rip of static in Security Guard English at warp volume  "I don’t think you understand.  Mr. Rosenwasp is naked. He has no ID. He refuses to go to the lobby."

So — a free Digital Axle T-shirt (Packy, can you get on that, please?) to the reader who comes up with the best possible explanation as to why our fellow guest found himself in this predicament so early on this fine LA morning.

We’re off to the pool for some long overdue diligence on the state of the art of plastic surgery and to listen in on pretentious one way cell phone conversations.  Perhaps we’ll see what Mr. Rosenwasp looks like with at least some of his clothes on.

One more chink in the great hippy dippy concept of the open
Internet. Yahoo! has shut down its user
initiated chat rooms – evidently, in response to advertiser complaints that
their precious brands were appearing on chat pages devoted to teens having sex
(We’re shocked! Teens are having
sex? And they talk about it online? Who knew?) 

Isn’t it the responsibility of advertisers and their
agencies to tell publishers where they do and do not want their advertising to
appear? And can’t Yahoo’s vaunted
technology team solve this problem?

This is akin to the yuppies who buy houses in the landing path for O’Hare Airport and then complain about the noise.

Basically Yahoo! is saying this is not worth the hassle. So buh-bye to editorial freedom. 

This coupled with Microsoft’s cave to the repressive Chinese
government over content (words like “freedom” and “democracy.” are verboten) so the days of
a completely free and open Internet are crumbling – at least on the corporate
portals that own massive amounts of traffic. You can still do pretty much what you want –if you know how – but don’t
expect any help from these publicly held multinationals.

And to you teenagers — Stop having sex — you’ll go blind!

Three days after its launch, those who now try to log on to the Los Angles Times "Wikitorial" section are now greeted with this message:

Where is the wikitorial? Unfortunately, we have had to
remove this feature, at least temporarily, because a few readers were
flooding the site with inappropriate material. Thanks and apologies to the thousands of people who logged on in the right spirit.

The initial concept was to allow users to "edit the editorials" as it were, but the result was semi-predictable — the proliferation of two Internet staples – profanity and porn.

Both eMarketer and the New York Times weigh in on the meteoric growth of broadband this morning.  None of this is new but both eMarketer and the Times say we’ve hit one of those magical inflection points,  Broadband is now in 52% of US Homes according to the Times, with continued expected growth driven by price cutting by the phone companies. 

With broadband in some cities now costing less than an AOL dial up account, we see a number of implications. Among them:

1) AOL subscriber loss will accelerate (can you hear me yawn?) (Can you hear old Time Warner employees clamoring for Dick Parsons to sell the damn thing?

2) Online commerce will continue to grow because more computers are on all the time and more people are using them.  Obvious, but good news for us trying to make a buck at this.

3) This means more advertising money flowing out of network TV and into the Internet creating opportunities and challenges for online marketing service providers. 

Challenges like: 

Does rich media advertising become more important? 

Does this reduce pressure on Google to leave the home page its barren, clean self (with load times less of a factor)?

Do Web site minimum connection speed standards start to fall by the wayside?  Giving us ever more annoying "Flash Intros" to "Skip?"

Will traditional agencies actually benefit by being able to use their superior capabilities with sight, sound and motion?  Or do they just fall further behind?

Does inventory tighten up, putting pressure on the bottom feeders like Aderactive?

The Times ends by telling us about the poor suckers stuck in rural areas who will be on dial up until after the cows come home (my bad farm joke, not theirs.)

Millward Brown, marketing research, is buying Dynamic Logic, an online marketing research company. Powerful, complementary combo.

Viacom (MTV division) acquired Neopets ("the stickiest site in the world") for an estimated $160 million. Neopets is a free service for users to create and bond with virtual pets. Wow!

Apparently, Interminx is settling Eliot Spitzer’s lawsuit for $7.5 million to be paid over three years. Doesn’t seem like a huge penalty for all the lawsuit hype and the hassle of spyware/adware. Now Eliot can focus on running for Governor.

Merrill Lynch issued a report this week that predicts paid search will increase 47% this year, from $3.5 billion to $5.1 billion, according to this Mediapost article (registration required). Paid search combined with paid inclusion would be $5.5 billion – representing 45% of ML’s prediction for total online ad spending in 2005 – $12.4 billion.

The report goes on to predict that online advertising will reach $25 billion by 2009. eMarketer has that 2009 number at $22.3 billion. Either way, big time growth.

Spyware was the topic of Senate hearing on Wednesday, according to this Marketwatch article, with legislation an "odds-on possibility" this year. Pretty basic stuff, right? Most of us… check that… all of us not in the spyware business likely agree: spyware’s bad, if not checked, could proliferate like spam, etc.

But online marketers need to pay particular attention as one of Senator Ron Wyden’s (Dem, OR) five principles for the law is "users’ information shouldn’t trail from one Web site to another." This is going to be interesting.

According to a Fathomonline study released on Tuesday, keyword prices dropped an average of 15% in May (Mediapost (registration required)).  This comes on the heels of an 11% increase in April. (Much of this up and down has to do with a drop in mortgage-related words.) Gregg Stewart, SVP of Channel Management and Marketing at Fathomonline, urged caution: "you’d have to look at more than a one-month event to have a trend."