I recall with fondness doing a lot of advertising on AOL in 2004-2005. AOL placed a lot of additional creative and technical restrictions on advertisers. One of the most annoying of these not just on AOL but on a variety of platforms was with respect to the version of Flash that Flash ads were published in. It caused endless strain because while everywhere else pretty much accepted Flash 6, AOL still required ads to be in Flash 5 format. Pain. Some things just weren’t possible in earlier versions, or when you had painstakingly had your designers make sure the ad was under 30kb in size, doing it in the older version now made it > 30kb etc. etc. You get the idea.

 I was reminded of this when I saw the message below on Facebook’s ad platform. This is just for the display of the dashboard graphic, mind you, that shows you clicks and fans and so on (in general I find 90% of these types of dashboards useless, but that’s a topic for a different, much longer conversation). This is certainly not requiring me to change the Flash version of all of my ads and is really a minor annoyance, but seriously, you’re making me upgrade from Flash 9.0.45 to 9.0.47? Sheesh, what’s up with that?!

Not so secret, but Techcrunch has a good compilation of tricks, tips and other “magic” to boost viral viewership of online video clips. A whole new layer of people and companies has arisen over the past several years that one could describe as “media market makers” or “attention arbitrageurs” in a sense; they’re often only indirectly making money but are moving user attention around, building on top of relationship- context- and relevance-graphs that are increasingly addressable online.