Why do we love this industry? Well, it’s complicated. On the favorable front, last year digital advertising revenue increased 22 percent over 2010 — that’s terrific news for all of us in the industry … er, sort of….depending on your segment. If that’s too complicated, there’s always TIme, which happily presents the ten most turbo-charged sectors of the U.S. economy. On the gloomier side, there’s nothing but downward pressure on online ad rates, and plenty of questions about whether brands will keep spending given the fracturing of platforms in the face of Facebook’s growing dominance. Meanwhile, clients are getting wise to their agencies’ technology plays (sometimes, too much play). To the links:

Internet Ad Revenue Totals $31 Billion in 2011 (Clickz) The Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Internet Advertising Report reveals that digital advertising revenue totaled $31 billion in 2011. That represents an increase of 22 percent over 2010. Yay for us! But…take out mobile, search and programmatic, and the numbers would tell quite a different tale.

Facebook Tests ‘Trending Articles’ in Newsfeed  (Mashable) FB’s prominent new feature, Trending Articles, which Mashable calls “more annoying than helpful,” is designed to promote only articles from social reading apps, not the most popular news articles being shared on Facebook from across the web. Not only is Facebook trying harder and harder to be a media company, but also its attempting to redefine the word “trending.” Can this church lady dance?

The Jig Is Up: Time to Get Past Facebook and Invent a New Future (The Atlantic)  The future that tech visionaries imagined in the late 1990s is here. So now what? The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal ponders that question: “For at least five years, we’ve been working with the same operating logic in the consumer technology game. … I want us to get back to those exciting days where people were making predictions about the affordances of the future that seemed wonderful and impossible.” Yeah, what he said.

Why Earned Media Alone Won’t Cut It (Digiday) All you need to do is take a look at Facebook, where just ten percent of fans actually see a brand’s content organically, to understand that earned media doesn’t replace the need for paid media. Brands need some of that lovely paid and owned. Oh, and yes, FM can help.

The Top Ten Fastest-Growing Industries in America (Time) Sure, some rising industry sectors are apparent (generic pharmaceutical manufacturing, for example), but others might surprise you. Take hot sauce production, for example. In 20 years, Frank’s Red Hot just might be as popular with Americans as Coke.

Are Agency Trading Desks Headed For Trouble? (Digiday) As agency clients become more familiar with real-time media buying, they’re beginning to think carefully about where their money is going, prompting them to ask difficult questions about the relationships behind the technologies their agencies choose to utilize. Let’s clarify: Clients are wising up to the arb some of their agencies and vendors are executing.

Media: What’s Past is Prologue (aweissman.com)  Is the future of media to be found in its past? Perhaps, if you know where to look. Weissman believes that “branded tastemakers” should take center stage at media companies. “If we strip out distribution, promotion and marketing as core competencies,” he suggests, “the role of the media company might be, quite simply: curated products chosen by a small group of people who just have better taste than everyone else.” Taste matters and, when paired with content-related principles, it could make all the difference in the world.

TECHNOLOGY: Are We Running Out of Spectrum?  (NYTimes) The electromagnetic spectrum, that is. The FCC says that demand for spectrum could exceed supply by 2013. Meanwhile, wireless companies say that smartphones are threatening to overwhelm their networks, so they want the government to help. But some experts maintain that technology already has the answers. (video)

Making the web work for major brands  (Google) More on Google’s Brand Activate initiative, a new effort to re-imagine online measurement for brand marketers and to help brands turn measurement into action, immediately. Just a quick thought – how weird would it be to see a post like this from Google just three or four years ago? Really weird. Right?

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(image) It’s a day of pivot and spin – Founder David Karp of Tumblr realizes marketing ain’t so bad,  and Google’s Sergey Brin, perhaps concerned that he might have (overly) offended his peers at Facebook and Apple, took some time to clarify comments he made on Sunday to The Guardian. Meanwhile, the inventor of the Internet makes a plea for all humanity; and if the people in search of your goods and services can’t spell, don’t sweat it, AdWords has got you covered. Oh, and apparently, not everyone thinks Facebook is a golden ticket to unlimited devotion. All that and more, including a piece on a topic we at FM know well — content marketing as a core discipline. To the links…

Tumblr Will Start Selling Ad Units On May 2  (BI) Young founder comes to realize, marketers aren’t so evil after all.

Tim Berners-Lee: Demand Your Data from Google and Facebook (Guardian) Lee, inventor of the Internet, has hit on a matter of great importance, urging users to demand their personal data from online Goliaths such as Google and Facebook to usher in a new era of highly personalized computer services “with tremendous potential to help humanity.”

I believe the internet has been one of the greatest forces  (Sergey Brin via Google+) Google co-founder Sergey Brin clarifies his views on Internet openness in a bid to not anger Facebook and Apple. Then again, he pretty much agrees with Tim, above… Here’s the article that spurred his attempt at a cleansing — a piece he calls “a pretty good read,” but a distraction from his “central tenets.”

Story Time: The Rise Of Content Marketing (cmo.com) It’s a story that FM knows inside and out; we’ve been doing this in the digital space since day one.

Google To Back Branding Measurement Standards With “Brand Activate”  (Marketing Land) Google’s Brian Zeug introduces the company’s Brand Activate Initiative (video): “We’re filling gaps for the industry, and we’re working extremely hard and extremely fast to understand the inter-relationships around who saw the ad, what did they think, and what did they do?”

NBC to Live Stream All London Olympic Sports (Media Decoder) Finally, Olympic broadcasters get a clue. The live streaming of every event is a major shift at the NBC Sports Group. Now let’s see if they get the sponsorship and UX right.

Advertising: Marketers Find a Friend in Pinterest (NYTimes) More on the phenom, for those Pinterested: “Brands are scrambling and trying to figure it out,” Andrew Lipsman, VP for industry analysis at comScore, told the Times. “They know it’s going to be big, but they don’t necessarily know the best way to use it.”

Facebook’s Achilles’ Heel (Digiday) Dr. Augustine Fou, chief digital strategist of Marketing Science Consulting Group believes that while the Facebook IPO story may look shiny on the surface, there are deeper, fundamental issues that he considers weaknesses of the Facebook model. It seems no one really wants to hear this, and we’re not sure if it’s just  a bear roaring, but it’s certainly interesting and worth looking into.

AdWords To Automatically Match For Misspellings, Other Variants (Search Engine Land) This seems both logical and a sign that things are getting a bit tight in CPC land. See the story above about Facebook, as it’s related.

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(image) The past 24 hours have provided some provocative stories, from Twitter’s extremely clever approach to patents to the rise of the Urban Datasexual (er….yep). Let’s get to it…

Introducing the Innovator’s Patent Agreement (Twitter Engineering) Twitter is changing the game and encouraging its engineers to take patent control back. This is a significant and commendable departure from the current state of affairs in the industry, as it ladders up to one of the most persistent and nasty problems in our industry’s ecosystem.

Twitter’s Revolutionary Agreement Lets Original Inventors Stop Patent Trolls (TechDirt) More on Twitter’s guarantee that any patents obtained by past or present employees grant lifetime control to the actual inventors. Will others jump on board?

Will TV Ad Dollars Move to Online Video?  (Digiday) The answers, provided by attendees of Digiday Video Upfront (yes, FM will be there), range from discussing the mass reach of TV and moving money to where it’s most effective, to the notion that people don’t hate ads, just irrelevant interruptions.

How open is your internet? An interactive map (Guardian) The Guardian takes a look at the OpenNet Initiative’s aim to investigate, expose and analyze Internet filtering and surveillance practices. The level of tampering is graded in each of 74 countries.

On-Demand Robots From A 3D Printer (SingularityHub) Sci Fi, meet Wifi. We’re aware that 3D printers churn out toys and even human tissue, but now scientists at MIT want to print robots. What happens when the robots take over the printers?

Facebook: Like?  (MoreIntelligentLife) By July of this year, over 1B people will have a Facebook profile. “Facebook is the undisputed champion of the world,” writes Robert Lane Greene of The Economist. “To give real credit to its achievement today and its ambitions for the future, it can only be said that Facebook’s true competitor is the rest of the entire internet.” Yeah, we’ve made this point before: Put Your Taproot Into the Independent Web

Mavericks Invent Future Internet Where Cisco Is Meaningless (Wired) Witness one in the march of new approaches to a key segment of our world: Martin Casado, CTO at Nicira, has mapped out a new future for the world of networking — a breed of computer network that exists only as software.

Technology in America (American) Michael Sacasas addresses technology addiction: “In the middle of the turbulent 1930s, with Nazism, Fascism, and Stalinism flourishing, T. S.
Eliot wrote of men who dreamed ‘of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.’ The ideology of technology tempts us in a similar manner.”

Meet The Urban Datasexual (Big Think) If you think the obsessive recording of everyday activities is cool, you might want to think again. The quantified self isn’t a movement, it’s a human need, but our mirrors and our instruments are so crude that they could potentially warp a generation’s understanding of itself. Let’s work on making it better.

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If it suits your information consumption goals, sign up for Signal’s email newsletter or RSS feed on the FM home page (upper right box). And sign up for the CM Summit, NYC May 14-15.

Thanks and welcome to Kim Ficera, who authored this post with my light editing.