Today’s social networking executives seem hell-bent on making history repeat itself. MySpace, Google, Facebook and others are trying to “out open” each other by giving third-party developers access to their users, their platform, and their data. They are even coming together to join groups like OpenSocial to simplify data portability between platforms. But while opening your network may be popular in the media, it could have devastating results.

What is the value of an established print media name? Let’s take a simple test to find out. Which of these URLs do you recognize: www.desmoinesregister.com; www.eastvalleytribune.com; www.drudgereport.com; or www.perezhilton.com? For those of you who claim to recognize the first two, you are either lying, or you have lived in both Iowa and Arizona, as I have.

I can’t help but feel very badly for Jerry Yang these days. I don’t know him — but I’d bet he wasn’t a bully growing up, but rather a prime target for one. He was probably one of those students who went unnoticed and was so unnerved by the capacity of his own brain that he “dumbed down” to fit in. I don’t know Steve Ballmer, either — but I can’t look at pictures of him and not see the face of a bully.

Advertisers typically go out and spend media to place advertising at Web sites to win the hearts and minds of their desired audiences. Those people who click on a banner are driven to a landing page or Web site where the visitor may spend a little time exploring but typically leave and don’t return to the destination again.

Advertisers typically go out and spend media to place advertising at Web sites to win the hearts and minds of their desired audiences. Those people who click on a banner are driven to a landing page or Web site where the visitor may spend a little time exploring but typically leave and don’t return to the destination again.

One of the most painful lessons I learned early in my career is how easy it is to focus on the wrong metrics. I was distributing consumer electronics products from Asia into the United States, and I was fixated on raw material costs, labor prices, and dozens of other metrics that I tracked on a constant basis to gain a slight edge. Yet ultimately, I was completely caught off guard by a measurement I never thought to track - the impact of a banking and currency crisis. The collapse of the East Asian currencies in 1997 rendered all of my metrics totally useless, and wiped out many of my suppliers. Today, online brand advertisers suffer from the same problem. They track dozens of the wrong metrics, because they are readily available.

In writing four articles on audience online engagement, I have jumped into the debate about the validity of the panel approach, how to define engagement, and what the significance of a new engagement index could be for the advertising industry. An index, though, is most useful to a publisher as a marker: Here is where we are today on our way to a better index tomorrow. Good publishers examine their site metrics carefully; great publishers seek to understand what the audience experience is and how to improve it.

I was living in San Francisco in 1999, which was a considerable upgrade from Union City, N.J., where movers picked up my milk crates five years prior. It was in 1999 when my beloved Shanghai Kelly’s softball team won the league championship, stocks I knew nothing about made my bank account swell, and I started working for Snowball.com. I haven’t swung a bat in years and the swelling has gone way down, but the lessons I learned from my time at this dot-com venture continue to play an integral role in my professional life.

In the movie “Pleasantville,” there was a social stigma attached to anything that represented change, or that failed to measure up to a pre-defined idea of what was, well…pleasant. For the citizens of Pleasantville, pleasant meant roads that don’t go past the city limits, colors that don’t vary from the approved palette, and books with no controversial ideas. If we fast-forward from that black and white Mayberry-like town set in the ’50s to our current online media culture, we see new stigmas developing just as quickly as we dismiss old ones. Such is the case with in-text advertising.

I bet not, and suspect you don’t know anyone who did. And yet you and anyone else who has been on the Internet the last eight years have an unusually high awareness of this institution. I first learned of this school back in 2000 when someone on my team sold them an online advertising campaign at a rate much lower than we sold to others, and eight years later this advertiser is one of the largest on the Web. It’s a classic case study of brand building on the Internet — and yet we still find ourselves losing the battle for the value of branding that takes place online on our sites.