The great digital ad race is an Olympic event with no medal ceremony. But with the numbers trickling in, it's worth a moment to look at this year's games, which are widely seen as the first truly digital Olympics.

In terms of revenue, NBC, which has taken a lot of grief for how it handled the video streaming (no live events that the network was televising), acquitted itself only passably, according to eMarketer. The research group estimated that NBC will have raked in $5.75 million in video ad spending on the NBCOlympics.com site by the time it's all said and done. While that's not a bad haul for two weeks worth of work, eMarketer points out that that figure represents only a shade over 1 percent of its projection for online video spending this year.

Analyst David Hallerman suggested that one barrier was NBC's insistence that users download Microsoft's Silverlight to view the content. A mandatory install is always going to result in a certain degree of drop-off.

But also, NBC's decision to limit the availability of the programming available online, for fear of cannibalizing its TV audience, was almost certainly a drag on the site's ad revenue.

Consider the most recent figures from Nielsen: NBC's Olympics page saw an average of 4.27 million daily unique visitors. Not bad, but also not the best. Yahoo, which had no video but devoted a fair chunk of home-page real estate to the Olympics, had average daily traffic of 4.73 million visitors.

Hallerman's conclusion: "One might just award NBC's online presentation of the summer Olympics a bronze medal then. As a signifier for future online events, the games set a high bar for the competition -- establishing that major sports events, tournaments and professional leagues ought to offer an abundance of video content online, not just snippets."

To some, Microsoft running an ad agency makes about as much sense as eBay placing phone calls over the Internet. But the companies in fact operate in those far-flung business lines, the seeming illogic of which is cause for regular rumors of deal talks that would spin off the appendages.

We hear periodically of eBay in talks with Google about a Skype sale, and, for Microsoft and its ad agency Avenue A / Razorfish, the latest comes courtesy of Advertising Age, which reported over the weekend that deal talks between Redmond and the agency holding company WPP have resumed.

Microsoft picked up Avenue A through its $6 billion purchase of aQuantive last year. That acquisition brought into Microsoft's fold aQuantive's Atlas technology and the DrivePM ad network, but many people at the time questioned the wisdom of the software giant running an interactive agency. The price tag also seemed a little steep, particularly given that it was nearly twice as much as Google had paid for aQuantive-rival DoubleClick weeks earlier, a company that Microsoft had actively pursued.

The reported deal would see Microsoft spin off the agency to WPP in exchange for cash and the ad-serving technology of 24/7 Real Media, which WPP acquired last May.

Microsoft did not immediately offer a comment on the reported talks with WPP, but the company has previously explained to me that they make a conscious policy of operating the agency at arm's length. That approach is due in part to the potential conflict of interest that could arise from the work that Avenue A does with competitors to Microsoft (similar to Google recently unloading the SEM portion of DoubleClick to WPP rival Publicis Groupe), and part, I suspect, because Microsoft really doesn't have an interest in running an ad agency.

Following her decade tenure as chairman and CEO of eBay, Meg Whitman looks to have a bright political future ahead of her.

Whitman, who built eBay from a fledgling online auction play with an unproven business model into an e-commerce powerhouse today worth some $32 billion, has solidified her place in Republican presidential candidate John McCain's inner circle.

On Saturday, McCain told the prominent California pastor Rick Warren that Whitman was one of the wisest people he knew, right along with Gen. David Petraeus and the civil rights leader John Lewis.

Whitman's star rose a little higher when she was handed a prominent speaking position at the upcoming Republican convention. While she is cagey about her own political aspirations, insisting that her role is to support McCain, Whitman has long been rumored a potential candidate for a run for governor in California in 2010.

But following the glowing praise McCain lavished on her over the weekend, Whitman's name is now being whispered as a dark horse for a different position, namely McCain's running mate.

It's a long shot, to be sure -- Petraeus and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney appear the front-runners, along with Joe Lieberman, the quasi-independent Democratic senator from Connecticut, who has been at McCain's side for a good chunk of his campaign. Even for Maverick McCain, Whitman would be a surprising choice.

She is now serving his campaign as an economic advisor, and back when Romney was still in the primary mix, Whitman was seen as a potential appointee to serve as Secretary of Commerce. Whitman of course is a longtime chum of Mitt Romney, dating back to her time as a vice president at Romney's consultancy Bain & Co.

So if Romney got the nod as Veep, a Whitman cabinet spot in a McCain presidency wouldn't be at all surprising. Both Whitman and Romney bring McCain a level of economic savvy that could prove a valuable asset in his fight against Barack Obama, who enjoys a healthy lead in the polls on economic issues.

Of course, Petraeus would bring a very different cast to the McCain ticket. Bringing the general, whom McCain describes as "one of the great military leaders in American history," on board would stack the foreign policy deck even more heavily in favor of the Republican.

But with the every day bringing a fresh batch of dismal domestic economic indicators (today's: Lehman to be bailed out by South Korean buyout?), it's hard to see this election turning on foreign policy. Does the obscure fate of South Ossetia really matter more to us than the pain of $4 for a gallon of gas?

So looking past Romney, Whitman, a celebrated Silicon Valley icon, wouldn't be the worst choice. How much would her lack of political experience matter against her deserved reputation as a skilled operator who for a decade was one of the leading lights in an industry famously short on top-level female executives? In that same sentence, of course, belongs Carly Fiorina, who is chairing McCain's campaign, but Whitman has the notable advantage of a squeaky clean track record and a departure that was entirely on her own terms.

Following a wave of changes aimed at making its marketplace more buyer-friendly, e-commerce giant eBay has slashed the fees it charges sellers to list items on its fixed-price store.

The move continues an overhaul set off by incoming CEO John Donahoe, who took the reins from Meg Whitman in March, declaring that he would work to make eBay a more trusted and reliable engine of online commerce.

Those changes had eBay's Power Sellers up in arms. They had complained about the fee restructuring and the online merchant's decision to shut down their ability to give feedback about buyers.

Now, as it gears up for holiday season in a decidedly unfriendly economic climate, eBay has cut its fixed-price listings by about 70 percent, charging sellers 35 cents for a one-month listing of fixed-price items. Thirty-five cents had previously bought sellers a seven-day listing.

"We aim to be the most competitive marketplace online, and this new, incredibly low pricing helps us achieve that goal," eBay Marketplaces President Lorrie Norrington, said in a statement. "A 35 cent listing fee virtually eliminates the upfront cost for sellers to put more of their great inventory on eBay and creates more opportunity than ever for sellers to build successful businesses."

The move signifies a broader shift in eBay's strategy away from the auction model on which it built its name. As it continues efforts to recast itself as a more conventional e-commerce player, eBay is becoming a more direct rival to Amazon, the Web's leading retailer.

Of course, it remains an open-ended question as to whether the changes will help eBay reverse the trend of Amazon's incursion into its business. While eBay posted moderate numbers in the second quarter, its rival to the north presented a showy balance sheet with a 102 percent surge in profits.

The changes will take effect Sept. 16.

Yahoo Buzz, the Digg-like social news site Yahoo unveiled as an invite-only service in February, is now open to all publishers.

Buzz launched with about 100 publishing partners, expanding quickly to more than 400. A handful of the top-rated stories from each day rotate into Yahoo's homepage, creating a deluge of traffic orders of magnitude greater than most sites are used to.

So now any publisher can place a button on their site to vote a story up on Buzz with a single click. If the publication doesn't have the button, Yahoo has created a submission page where readers can vote for their favorite stories.

The comparisons to Digg are inevitable, but for Yahoo, Buzz is just a part of a broad strategy to become the starting point of the Web, the hub of the wheel, as it were. The service builds on Yahoo's longstanding leadership in the portal category -- itself a business model with a questionable future. But Yahoo's dual missions of cracking open its platform and staking a claim as the crossroads of the Web has produced some pretty innovative results.

Now, fresh off of what had to be a brutal seven months for company morale, it will be a nice change of pace to see if the company (recently expanded to include Carl Icahn and associates) can actually make good on its turnaround strategy.

Upon its introduction in November, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg heralded the Beacon ad platform as a hundred-year revolution in advertising. What it became was a PR nightmare that raised many questions about the maturity of the young company.

When Beacon started broadcasting the Christmas gifts people were buying to all of their Facebook friends, the company stonewalled. It took the weight of a petition from MoveOn.org and thousands of articles in the press, many in this publication, before Zuckerberg finally admitted that the company had made mistakes in the implementation, apologized and rejiggered the permission settings.

Apparently, for some, those tweaks came too late. Facebook, along with several of its Beacon affiliate partners, is the target of a class-action lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California. The suits alleges privacy violations falling in between the period in beginning November when Beacon was rolled out, to Dec. 5, when the permission changes were put in place.

There has so far been no comment from Facebook or the other defendants, who have said that they have not yet been served.

Tiffany is not taking this lying down. Last month judge Richard Sullivan of the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York rejected its claim that eBay had not done enough to keep knockoff merchandise off of its site.

Then today, like clockwork, Tiffany filed its appeal, bringing the matter to the 2nd Circuit Court. This was expected, and quickly praised by the International Anticounterfeiting Coalition, a nonprofit group devoted to combating counterfeit and piracy.

"Tiffany's decision to appeal is the right thing to do," said IACC President Bob Barchiesi in a statement, calling Sullivan's ruling "disappointing."

In his opinion, Sullivan wrote that, "Tiffany must ultimately bear the burden of protecting its trademark."

Sullivan said that while he was sympathetic to Tiffany's plight -- that is, seeing knockoffs of its coveted brand name kicking around on eBay for a fraction of their value -- he said "The law is clear: It is the trademark owner's burden to police its mark, and companies like eBay cannot be held liable for trademark infringement based solely on their generalized knowledge that trademark infringement might be occurring on their Web sites."

That ruling followed two decisions in similar cases involving luxury brands handed down in European courts, where the judges ruled against eBay. The first was brought by Rolex in Germany, the second in France by LVMH, the parent company of brands such as Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior.

Barchiesi didn't pull any punches: "Stated simply, the French court got it right."

On the heels of a congressional inquiry, Yahoo today announced a change to its privacy policy that will give people a little more control over how their data are collected online.

Later this month, users will have the ability to turn off behaviorally targeted ads on Yahoo.com properties, expanding the tracking opt-out that Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) had previously offered on its network of third-party sites.

The move comes in response to a letter of inquiry from leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, who had asked 33 Internet service and content companies for details on how they track people's Web activities to target advertising. That letter was the latest step in an ongoing fact-finding mission as lawmakers seek to ferret out the real threat to individual privacy that new advertising technologies pose.

Of course, for the watchdog groups that have been trying to hold online advertisers' feet to the fire, Yahoo's move falls short of the mark. Privacy advocates have long pushed for an opt-in policy that would only allow Web firms to track user behavior after receiving expressed permission.

Yahoo may have felt a greater need than most of the other recipients of the letter to provide a substantive response that included a change in its privacy policy, albeit a minor one. The Department of Justice is currently reviewing its ad deal with its larger rival Google. While the review centers on antitrust concerns, opponents of the deal (including Microsoft) have warned that a pooling of resources by two of the largest ad players on the Web poses a serious threat to consumer privacy.

As part of Google's ongoing mission to index all the world's information, it continues to send its camera cars around, photographing city after city for the Street View feature of its mapping application.

Included in a spate of new cities for which Google is now offering street-level imagery is New Orleans.

If ever there were a tale of two cities. Anyone who's spent any time in the Jewel of the South since August 2005 -- and wandered outside the French Quarter -- knows that negotiating the town has become very much a block-to-block proposition.

As Louisiana Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu noted in the official Google blog, New Orleans is "a city marked by extremes.

"You will see some areas spared the worst of Katrina's fury which have quickly recovered, and you will find other neighborhoods that remain flattened by the floodwaters that broke the levees. You will see that our residents call both FEMA trailers and antebellum mansions home."

Those who are there. Among the neighborhoods that Landrieu properly describes as "flattened" are those that have become ghost towns. The 3,000+ FEMA trailers that still decorate the front yards of New Orleans are an eyesore, without a doubt. And the city is trying to speed their removal.

But the people living in those trailers have made a commitment to New Orleans. For a city that has lost about two-fifths of its population, that commitment counts for something.

Google Street View gives us more of the story, but certainly not all of it. It doesn't give you the feeling that comes from driving down the roads -- the images are grainy and it's not possible to recreate how far the wasteland actually stretches. It doesn't capture the spirit of the acres and acres where no one is living, littered with the stuff that used to make houses, empty churches and abandoned playgrounds. The houses that survived, in various states of wholeness, are of course empty as well. There are no FEMA trailers. Street View doesn't tell the whole story, but it's something.

Pretty powerful, too. Thing is, a lot of those people aren't coming back. Many of the properties are in a legal limbo with the owners scattered to the winds. The state is in the process of buying some of them back, but, after three years of inaction, conservative estimates place a resolution for areas like the Lower Ninth Ward at a decade away.

But in the spirit of finding opportunity in tragedy, Landrieu describes New Orleans as something of a blank canvas, holding out hope that it will serve as a model for innovative problem solving in areas ranging from crime to levees, schools to health care. Without dwelling too morbidly on the just how steep of a climb that will be (murder capital 2006, 2007, a strong showing so far this year), we can be charitable and suggest that Rome wasn't built in a day.

That the city has been largely forgotten by the arbiters of zeitgeist doesn't help. And here Landrieu rightly suggests that Google bringing the world the unvarnished truth about where New Orleans sits today, with its crazy contradictions, can only help they city -- by bearing witness, if nothing else.

You can't help but think of Florida on this one.

Yahoo has revised the results from its annual meeting, posting new figures that show far less shareholder support for some of the key directors.

The culprit? A tabulation error on the part of Broadridge Financial Solutions, the firm that handled the proxy votes for Yahoo's largest shareholder in this high-profile test of corporate confidence.

The recount follows the cry foul from Gordon Crawford, who leads Capital Research and Management Co. and has been an outspoken critic of Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and Chairman Roy Bostock for failing to consummate a sale to Microsoft.

A software glitch apparently counted Crawford's votes for Bostock and Yang, when he had meant to withhold them.

The revised returns look very different.

Bostock only received 60.4 percent of the vote, in contrast to the 79.5 percent that had been previously reported. Support for Yang dropped from 85.4 percent to 66.3 percent.

All of the incumbent directors who were standing for reelection still won the contest, but Yahoo will no longer be able to claim the sweeping mandate that it had under the original count.

Eric Jackson, another major shareholder, called on Bostock and Yang to "do the honorable thing" and step down if they received only a faint show of confidence, as Jackson said they had last year. The narrow majority of revised figures look very similar to last year's results.

The recount did not change the vote on any of other proposals considered at the meeting.

The old chestnut about Time Warner spinning off AOL got some new life this morning, courtesy of The Wall Street Journal. Time Warner reports its earnings on Wednesday, and the company is then expected to inform us that they have finished all of the internal legwork required to separate the content and advertising business from the dwindling dial-up Internet service division.

Once that process is complete, bankers will be able to apply real numbers to gauge each part's value. Then what happens? Well, fire up the rumor mill!

People "familiar with the situation" told the Journal that informal talks are taking place with both Microsoft and Yahoo about selling off the content division.

We've been talking about those scenarios since a few short days after Feb. 1, when Microsoft made its offer to buy Yahoo. Back when Microsoft was breathing down Yahoo's neck, Yahoo buying AOL and Time Warner taking a minority equity stake (I was told about 20 percent) was one of the more reliable rumors. We knew talks were happening, but we didn't know how serious they were. And clearly no deal came to pass.

For Microsoft's part, AOL seemed a logical backup plan in case Yahoo got away. Which it did, at least for now. An AOL acquisition would doubtless give Microsoft a shot in the arm when it comes to building out its portfolio of Web content. AOL has oodles of verticals that do pretty well and the AIM instant messaging client would certainly be a nifty pickup.

But the gem of AOL's business would be Platform A, the centerpiece of which is Advertising.com. The latest comScore ranking identifies Platform A as the leading online ad network, reaching 90 percent of the online U.S. population. Yahoo is ranked No. 2, with an audience reach of 83 percent.

So that would deliver Microsoft a rather dramatic bump in its display advertising activities, but that really doesn't get at the reason it was interested in Yahoo in the first place. Buying Yahoo, Steve Ballmer has reminded us, wasn't a strategy unto itself -- it was a "tactic." Microsoft's real strategy, Ballmer proclaimed at its annual meeting with financial analysts, is to improve its position in search, which he called a trillion-dollar market. With fewer than 5 percent of all search queries, AOL doesn't really move the needle there.

It fits, then, that the Journal's anonymous sources suggest that the talks with Yahoo are further along than with Microsoft. It's a better fit, although Time Warner might not have engendered much good will with the recent word that it won't let Jonathan Miller take a place on Yahoo's board, owing to a non-compete agreement. Then again, given that Miller was widely seen as a potential successor to Jerry Yang, the incumbent Yahoos might be just as happy to leave him on the outside. Things would be more colorful with Mark Cuban around, anyway.

Compared with the rather humdrum reaction that greets most FCC's proceedings -- drab, technical debates on things like spectrum allocation and the digital television transition -- a survey of the talk coming from this morning's hearing suggests that something truly sensational happened.

By now, no doubt, you've heard the news.

The deeply divided commission voted to rebuke Comcast for the way it has been managing its network and communicating its policies to its subscribers -- namely, "degrading" transmissions from BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer services.

Here's a sampling:

Free Press Executive Director Josh Silver, on a conference call with reporters following the hearing:

"Today's decision by the Federal Communications Commission will go down in history as one of the most important milestones in the fight for an open, accessible Internet."

Affirming Commissioner Michael Copps:

"This is a landmark decision for the FCC -- a meaningful stride forward on the road to guaranteed openness of the Internet. ... We recognize that protecting Internet openness is like protecting the Internet's immune system, safeguarding it from bugs and infections that could slow its circulation, make it sick, maybe even kill it."

And a few gems from dissenting Commissioner Robert McDowell at the hearing this morning:

"For us to enjoy online video without interruption or distortion, video bits have to be given priority over, say, e-mail bits. But now that all traffic must be treated equally, that is going to change. The new regime is tantamount to a congested downtown area without stoplights. Gridlock is likely to result."

"By depriving engineers of the freedom to manage these surges of information flow by having to treat all traffic equally as the result of today's order, the Information Superhighway could quickly become the Information Parking Lot."

"For the first time, today our government is choosing regulation over collaboration when it comes to Internet governance."

"So today, for the first time in Internet history, we say 'goodbye' to the era of collaboration that served the Internet community and consumers so well for so long; and we say 'hello' to unneeded regulation and all of its unintended consequences."

Note that all of those came after McDowell had declared, "Continued escalation of rhetoric serves no one well, least of all American consumers."

The rhetoric indeed flies high from both sides on this issue. It's towering. It's also maddeningly conflicting: both sides claim that if the other carries the day, it will be the end of innovation and the Internet will grow unwieldy, slow and decadent. And whither goes America's prestige.

What really happened this morning? The FCC voted to enforce a rather narrow policy (protocol-agnostic traffic management) that Comcast had already said it was moving toward anyway. It's just going to make sure.

And Comcast is going to sue. Maybe.

But remember, we're playing for big stakes here. So if the court upholds the ruling, then what happens?

At the first sign of a compliance violation, Kevin Martin will frog-march Brian Roberts down Constitution Avenue for a summary trial at FCC headquarters, where a Swiss flag will billow ominously. The proceeding will be a pig-circus, the jury packed with leering liberals plucked from the ranks of MoveOn.org, Public Knowledge and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, with Josh Silver grimly presiding as foreman.

Then, properly defanged, Roberts will be shipped back to Philadelphia, where he will promptly terminate all operations that would expand the network's capacity and reach. Engineers will be replaced wholesale by brigades of compliance officers, who will spend their days checking off boxes on endless forms and attending government-led obedience-training sessions. The dream of universal broadband will die on the vine; the poor and ignorant will remain poor and ignorant; the digital divide will simply become a digital void.

But what if Comcast wins in court, and this great victory for Net neutrality is erased?

Why, the death of innovation as we know it, of course! Insatiable ISPs will bleed Google's coffers dry, extracting quality-of-service fees that will slay the great white whale that Microsoft could never catch. Then what? Since this will be the End of Innovation, there will be no two-geeks-in-a-garage startup that will rise to take Google's place. Instead, they will take network-engineering jobs at AT&T and Comcast, toiling in service of a great, bloated relic to deliver a homogeneous sludge of content and services.

Maybe. Or maybe McDowell was right to say that escalating "rhetoric serves no one well, least of all American consumers."

A nod of commonsense also goes to dissenting Commissioner Deborah Tate, who amicably concluded that the debate is a splendid reminder that "reasonable minds truly can differ."