The irony of using Social networks as new age advertising platforms is that anyone can do the same. There have been a bunch of interesting advertising partnerships appearing on MySpace lately - most of which involve a combination of featured listing and display promotions, and a bespoke profile page allowing the brand advertiser to 'make friends' with their target audience.

I met Ramin during the late nineties when he was running Australia's first online research agency. Everytime anyone wrote anything about the web, they would ring him up for a quote. Since selling his business to AC Nielson in 2000, he has been busy as an angel investor backing mobile messaging play MIG33 as well as helping other entrepreneurs as a mentor. We had a great chat at the last FED. Read on for the videocast.

After nearly a decade of protest, Show Business has discovered the web. Whether it be Disney selling episodes of Desperate Housewives on iPods, Fox screening prime time TV shows on the Web, Hollywood Studios selling full versions of their movies online, or Mark Cuban blowing up sequence windows with his movie Bubble – this year been a major turning point for the titans of Tinseltown.

The Harvard Business Review has a great feature on marketing to avatars that is worth a read. Its a strange concept - but closely linked to one of the fastest growing trends at the moment - identity personalisation. Marketing to who people really are is so passe, compared to spruiking to the idea of who they want to be. Kurt Vonnegart said it best in Mother Night - "We are what we pretend to be.."

If its not Blogs, its Bittorrent. Media’s death has been proclaimed so many times, it might be time to question the diagnosis. Without doubt the game is changing. Audiences, content creators and advertisers are being thrown into bed together. A situation – which as you might expect – is not to everyone’s comfort. And that really is the point. Mediums don't die. The economics just change.