Since I downloaded and started using Chrome yesterday, I have had to rediscover the world of online advertising. Using Firefox and Adblock Plus for nearly three years has shielded from their existence for the most part.

Stephen Noble, in a post on the Forrester Blog for Interactive Marketing Professionals, seems to discover that Chrome will be a source for injecting greater personalization and targeting into the online advertising market.

This is the key reason Chrome exists, right now.

While their may be discussions about the online platform and hosted applications, there are only a small percentage of Internet users who rely on hosted desktop-like applications, excluding email, in their daily work and life.

However, Google’s biggest money-making ventures are advertising and search. With control of AdSense and DoubleClick, there is no doubt that Google controls a vast majority of the targeted and contextual advertising market, around the world.

One of the greatest threats to this money-making is a lack of control of the platform through which ads are delivered. There is talk of IE8 blocking ads (well, non-Microsoft ads anyway), and one of the more popular extensions for Firefox is Adblock Plus. While Safari doesn’t have this ability natively built in, it can be supported by any number of applications that, in the name of Internet security, filter and block online advertisers using end-user proxies.

This threat to Google’s core revenue source was not ignored in the development of Chrome. One of the options is the use of DNS pre-fetching. Now I haven’t thrown up a packet sniffer, but what’s to prevent a part of the pre-fetching algorithm to go beyond DNS for certain content, and pre-fetch the whole object, so that the ads load really fast, and in that way are seen as less intrusive.

Ok, so I am noted for having a paraoid streak.

However, using the fastest rendering engine and a rocket-ship fast Javascript VM is not only good for the new generation of online Web applications, but plays right into the hands of improved ad-delivery.

So, while Chrome is being hailed as the first Web application environment, it is very much a context Web advertising environment as well.

It’s how it was built.

Read it here.

Interesting that most of the people who came to read my post about the sale rumour came from Forrester Research. Perhaps this is an indication that they were as surprised as I was.

I wonder if Brian Kardon, chief strategist and marketing officer at Forrester, would like to post a comment to set the record straight, as he is the one quoted in the article. Or perhaps Alan Meckler will comment on his theory why someone would want to start a rumour like this.

John Battelle points to this.

$2billion. Wow. Sure feels like another bubble.

Was Ask REALLY worth that much?

And yes, this means that Barry Diller effectively owns Bloglines.

More here and here.

Read more here.

You kind of knew this was going to happen, as Bloglines is an idea that someone would try and turn into a revenue-stream.

Russell Beattie has the best comment on it. [here]

Charlene Li’s perspective here.