For a few days, I waited for the other shoe to drop after Gawker’s John Cook pretty much destroyed Deadline Hollywood blogger Nikki Finke. Then I realized I was being an idiot–I was being naïve–in thinking it would matter.

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If you’re a Gmail user who also happens to use Twitter, it’s probably been about five minutes since you’ve seen an ad promising to boost your follower count. The folks at online ad firm uSocial are taking that a step further: Pay them money and they’ll make you at least appear to be very big on Facebook.

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Last September, Henry Blodget asked me and several other VCs on a panel–titled “Dot Bomb 2.0″–how many of the estimated 300 to 400 ad networks were “toast.” (My personal view is that only 15 to 20 really matter.) Comments like “rampant consolidation” and “decimation” were used to describe the impending, inevitable shakeout that was sure to come.

Almost a year later, no apocalyptic shakeout has hit yet. So what happened?

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Freaking out about the easier opt-outs proposed by some online-privacy advocates? Maybe you don’t have so much to worry about.

In June, Fetchback, an advertising network that specializes in ad “retargeting,” added a link within its ad units that, when clicked, took consumers to a page that explained who the advertiser was and how the ad got there and gave contact info for Fetchback, as well as a way to opt out of future targeting.

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To hawk its fall season, CBS (CBS) has teamed with PepsiCo (PEP) and Entertainment Weekly to create a video ad that will run in the magazine.

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What does the TV network of the future look like? A version of it is coming into focus at New York-based startup blip.tv.

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Here’s one of the things we do at Forrester Research (FORR): we interview as many marketers as we can about their plans, identify trends and project future likely conditions, and then we put together some numbers to make a projection. If you’ve ever seen a Forrester projection, it comes from a process like this.

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Twitter’s been the toast of TV news programs, daytime talk shows, magazine editors and newspaper reporters. But what’s all that chatter worth?

According to news-monitoring service VMS, a cool $48 million over the past 30 days.

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Google’s (GOOG) got a not-so-secret weapon in its bid to convert the world to applications such as Gmail, Google Docs, Google Talk, Google Sites and, soon, Google’s Chrome operating system: the 17 million college students on more than 4,000 campuses across the country.

For more than two years, Google has approached colleges and universities with a near-unbeatable offer: provide unlimited hosted e-mail and other applications, all branded by the institution and delivered free of charge.

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In the past few months, two of the highest-profile and most heavily-funded online-video startups–Veoh and Joost–have given up trying to compete with Hulu and YouTube and have now drastically switched their business models in hopes of surviving.

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In a world of double-digit unemployment and old-line industries in mid-collapse, here’s a sales pitch tailor-made for the times: “Get Paid by Google” (GOOG).

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Package-goods marketers tried — and largely rejected — e-commerce about a decade ago. But their interest has rekindled lately, and a novel start-up named Alice.com is betting they’re ready to party again like it’s 1999.

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Gawker Media impresario Nick Denton, one of the more vocal Cassandras of media collapse last fall, got a surprise this spring when things turned out to be, well, not so bad. Mr. Denton told us earlier in the year that sales were actually up double digits, and it appeared marketers’ reactions to the recession were “more strategic” than he thought.

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In The New York Times (NYT) last Sunday, Frank Rich became the latest to argue that cable- and satellite-TV subscriptions should give hope to the newspaper industry, which has decided during this steep ad downturn that it wants to charge for some content it puts online.

“It’s all a matter of priorities,” Mr. Rich wrote. “Not long ago, we laughed at the idea of pay TV.”

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Myth: newspapers stuck their heads in the sand and just hoped the internet would go away.

Reality: Newspapers took some of the biggest, earliest swings on the web, most turned out to be misses, and then got steamrolled by Google (GOOG) just like everyone else.

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