Digital Ethnography at Kansas State University

One pundit at Web 2.0, Brian Fling, put it more succinctly. He sees the iPhone as a new medium in and of itself, as significant as radio, television, and the Internet itself have been.

When you think about it, the Smartphone is the first device that fulfills McLuhan's prediction that electronics will become an extension of the human nervous system.

Part of that success for mobile ads could relate to the novelty of the format, Strother suggested. As people grow more accustomed to seeing ads on mobile Web pages, clickthroughs will decline, the argument goes.

Nevertheless, Apple's (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPhone has shown that with a decent screen size and intuitive navigation, U.S. consumers will use their phones for activities other than talk and text messaging. Google is hoping that efforts such as its own Android initiative will lead to a new generation of handheld devices that help the mobile Web live up to its promise.

While "some of the bigger brands have made some serious commitments to mobile," Strather said that the tendency among advertisers is to make mobile a microcosm of an aggregate digital budget, or to treat mobile advertising as an experimental expense. "Very few companies on the advertising side have made mobile a standalone item on a line-item budget," Strother told InternetNews.com.

The company is trying to keep file sizes small, so that the ads do not unduly slow the load times of mobile Web pages, Agarwal said. Slow speeds have been a common complaint about the experience of browsing the Web on a mobile device.

Google also said it will only show one display ad per page.

businesses can learn from young people who create their own sites.

Social media can be used to create word-of-mouth advocacy for products or services,

real estate agents, for instance, are using Web sites that include reviews from clients after their homes have been sold.

23% of social network users have installed an application – 18% of bloggers have installed applications in their blog templates

Blogs are a mainstream media world-wide and a collective rival to traditional media (184m bloggers world-wide, China has the largest blogging community in the world with 42m bloggers) – 73% have read a blog, 45% have started a blog

Social media has strong impacts over brand’s reputation – 34% post opinions about products and brands on their blog – 36% think more positively about companies that have blogs

Interestingly, comments on news websites show almost no increase

Estimated 272m users world-wide.

Users are posting variety of content – 55% uploaded photos – 21% installed applications – 23% uploaded video • Social Networks becoming social utilities for managing peer to peer relationships: 74% use them to message friends