Recently some sparks have been flying across the fashion and photoshop worlds when a controversial Ralph Lauren ad surfaced on two blogs. The picture depicted a woman with an inhumanly skinny body. Ralph Lauren went as far as to issue a DMCA letter to the sites ordering that the picture be taken down.

The Internet still has some way to go to replace television as the main form of entertainment, particularly when it comes to shared experiences. But in one country advertisers clearly believe it’s now the most effective media for marketing.

Facebook and Nielsen Media have agreed to a deal which will see site users polled about their attitudes to adverts placed on Facebook. It’s another sign that firms may find social media better as a source of consumer data than a means of promotion in itself.

Web monitoring services ComScore and Omniture are to combine their different methods of measuring traffic. The results could give a more accurate insight into Web site popularity and improve the relevance of adverts seen on sites.

The New York Times says it has confirmed its initial suspicion that a bogus advertiser put site visitors at risk of malware. Embarrassingly, it appears the “advertiser” dealt directly with the newspaper rather than going through an ad sales network.

Despite being three years old and growing at an exponential rate, Twitter is still very much evolving. It recently changed its Terms of Service to better reflect the changing nature of the site and how it’s being used. Areas which saw changes include the capacity for advertising to us, the users, and the always-controversial issue of ownership.

Chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices is rethinking its marketing strategy to put less emphasis on specifications. It says most customers are more interested in what their machine can do, rather than what’s inside.

Facebook is preparing to increase staff by 50 percent this year to take advantage of the surplus of talent caused by the recession says CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Microsoft has finalized a pact with Wolfram Alpha that will allow their Bing search engine to display some of the specialized scientific search results returned by the Wolfram engine.

Comcast is the largest cable service provider in the US, providing hi-speed broadband Internet service to millions of homes. The cable company recently came under fire for implementing a new service that redirects bad URLs to a page with advertisements. This has many questioning Comcast’s motivation as it seems like the company is capitalizing on the user’s misfortune.

Advertising is key to how a big part of the Internet works at the moment. Without it, few sites could continue to exist, including Blorge and most of your other favorites. Which makes the increasing popularity of advert blockers a worrying trend for the millions of sites who rely on revenue gained from advertising merely to exist. Could this trend mean the end of advertising as we know and the introduction of pay walls?

IZEA has already built a reputation for providing a platform for paid blog posts with its Pay Per Post initiative. Now, it’s bringing the same idea to Twitter with Sponsored Tweets. That’s right folks, you can now be paid for tweeting, that is if you’re comfortable selling yourself and your Twitter account out for a few bucks every month.

In tough economic times, shoppers are now looking for deals online to make their money go further. The Grocery Game site is rising in popularity as a way to make saving money into a game.

After having recently announced the Chrome OS to compete with Windows, Google is already courting Microsoft customers. The campaign includes billboards that change daily and do-it-yourself flyers to post at the office.

The AP is threatening search engines with legal action for bringing an audience of millions to their doors. Too bad the venerable news organization’s war on the Internet is likely to end up much more like Chernobyl.

It’s not the most shocking piece of news to discover that Twitter gets a lot of media coverage. But what is shocking is to hear quite how much monetary worth there is in that media coverage. The question, of course, is whether this attention will last or whether Twitter will soon be superseded by the next big thing.

If the editor of the Financial Times is to be believed, the halcyon days of free news on the Internet are coming to an end.