Revolution Magazine have this month published an article regarding how the digital sector has evolved over the last 10 years. It show’s that strategies that once worked, may not be relevant in today’s online Ad spend.

Here’s how things have panned out over the last 10 years:

January 1997 - Banner ad’s reign supreme
Banner ads were first created in 1994 by a firm called Modem Media for AT&T and Coors Brewing Company. By 1997, they were the principle online advertising medium.

January 1998 - Real Media and Double Click
Ad serving companies launch in the UK to help advertisers set up their online ad campaigns.

September 1998 - Google is founded
A small company called Google, co-founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin was recognised has having potential by Andy Bechtolsheim who writes out a cheque of £50,000 to help out the company which now has a turnover of around £5 billion a year.

October 1998 - BMG Campaigns receives 61,000 leads
BMG Interactive runs a banner ad campaign for a CD-Rom game You Dont Know Jack which has 41,000 downloads and 61,000 leads.

October 1998 - Lastminute.com is born
The travel and leisure services website becomes an icon of the dotcom boom. More than 7 million people subscribe to their newsletters and they become one of the first companies to harness the power of email marketing.

January 1999 - Big Spenders
Low interest rates help increase start-up capital to enable people to set up internet ventures. Entrepreneurs are able to sell their ideas to investors because of the novelty of utilising the web.

March 1999 - E-commerce boom
Domino’s Pizza trials an online service in Milton Keynes aimed at office workers.

FT.com relaunches its UK website and embarks on a £37 million international advertising campaign in the run-up to launch its US website.

January 2000 - Humbling times
Zealous venture capitalists trip over themselves to plough money into online investments only watch their ventures die a death only a short time later.

May 2000 - ValueClick is here
Some of the world’s biggest online ad sectors merge to show ad spend is hotting up. DoubleClick spots the potential in the market and invests £40m into US Group ValueClick to bring them into the UK.

May 2000 - Boo.com booed off the stage
Boo.com goes into receivership after burning through £60 million in just 6 months.

December 2000 - Banners go downhill
New-media agencies rush to find the next best thing as Banner ads are on the wain. Companies look to invest in pop-up boxes, microsites and viral messages via email.

January 2001 - Companies merge to survive
Real Media and 24/7 merge to stay afloat!

May 2002 - Online Banking takes off in the UK
Egg finds that 6.6 million people bank online and EMarketer reveals that 8.7 million people have bought products online.

March 2002 - Dell the Dominator
Dell is responsible for 4 of 10 widespread campaigns during March. Freeserve, eBay and Zurich bank are among the rest.

April 2002 - ITV Digital folds
ITV Digital, the pay-TV platform jointly owned by Carlton Communications are left owing £178 million to football clubs after collapse following a deal to broadcast football league games.

January 2003 - Broadband in UK homes
Oftel reveals that 14% of UK homes have broadband. The average customer spends 10 hours a week online.

February 2003 - Search Marketing is noticed
People grasp the understand of where search marketing fits into online marketing. People are more aware of their return on investment with Pay per click campaigns.
Yahoo! acquires Overture and Findwhat.com proposes a merger with Espotting.

April 2003 - Budgets on the increase
Internet advertising is one of only two sectors to see an increase in budget.

March 2003 - Big names are back
Big names in digital make a return. Procter & Gamble signs its first pan-European internet advertising deal to promote Pampers on MSN.

July 2004 - Online ad spend up 53%
Advertising Association predicts a rise of 4.8% year on year in advertising expenditure in the UK. The online sector is set to increase the most.

July 2004 - eBay Wins
eBay is the top-ranked brand in the UK, beating Google. Alex Burmaster tells Revolution

Everyone seems to be using eBay. It isn’t just the preserve of the young and web-literate; eBay is pretty much used by as many over 50’s as by those aged under 25. the site has a broad appeal, which is probably responsible for attracting large numbers of first time users.

Sept 2004 - First Viral online ad
Guiness claims the first viral online ad with it’s “Dancing man” campaign which found it’s way all over the world.

January 2005 - It’s the Digital Decade
Bill Gates dubs the next 10 years as the “Digital Decade” and foresees a home/work scenario by 2010.

You’ll have a wristwatch like Dick Tracy’s that will just give you ‘glanceable’ information. You’ll have your pocket-sized device, which will be the successor to the phone but far more capable

2006 - Integration is the Buzz word
Yahoo! say they are seeing big planning agencies and traditional media agencies pulling digital up into their everyday planning. They say a seat for digital has been long overdue at the top table.

March 2006 - Getting together
Cable, satelite and telco firms are clamouring to buy up more channels to offer services of TV, telephone and broadband in one. BskyB buys Easynet and Carphone Warehouse acquires AOL UK. NTL and Virgin complete their merger and soon after 3 and Yahoo! sign a global deal to provide rich-mobile services to 3 customers.

March 2006 - Rich-media ad campaigns proliferate
With banner ads now out of fashion, new types of media see the proliferation of podcasts, mobile media and online video.

May 2006 - Content is King
User generated content and social networking experience huge increases through portals such as YouTube, Bebo, MySpace, Piczo, Wikipedia and Flickr. Savvy brands set up their own profiles on social sites.

June 2006 - Taking digital seriously
MSN takes on Google’s dominance with ad-centre. Elsewhere Google announce three major online advertising deals with MySpace, MTV and eBay. Vodafone hires its first digital UK agency, Dare.

October 2006 - Online platforms populated
Ofcom says 17.7 million UK households have access to digital services at the end of June 2006.
The Mobile Data Association reveal that 40.7 million people used their mobiles to access the internet during Q3 2006.

December 2006 - A star is born
Online ad-sense overtakes print ads in national newspapers. Guy Phillipson, chief exec. of Internet Advertising Bureau said that online is now worth 10.5% off all ad spend in the UK.

March 2007 - Publishers invest milliions
Major publishers invest millions in online initiatives. Newspapers are falling over themselves to invest in online initiatives recognising the platform for growth.

An Application Security Trend Report has today been released by Cenzic Inc.

The top 10 vulnerabilities in Commercial and Open Source Web Applications from Q1 2007 included software offered freely by Google, called Google Desktop:

Multiple vulnerabilities were discovered in Google Desktop taht allow a remote attacker to conduct cross-site scripting attacks. The Desktop Preferences pages of Google Desktop does not properly filter script code from user input when using the “under” keyword. Under certain circumstances a remote attacker could exploit this vulnerability to compromise the machine running Google Desktop appliation. The code will be able to access data on the users system with privileges of the Google Desktop application.

In general, Cross-site scripting is where a web application gathers malicious data from a user. The malicious data could be in the form of a link on a webpage you have clicked on. The link will look just like a normal link, however the malicious portion of the link will have been encoded into the link. When clicked on, this link will create and send data to the encoder.

So how can Cross-site scripting affect you?

Often attackers will inject JavaScript, VBScript, ActiveX, HTML, or Flash into a vulnerable application to fool a user (Read below for further details) in order to gather data from them. Everything from account hijacking, changing of user settings, cookie theft/poisoning, or false advertising is possible. New malicious uses are being found every day for XSS attacks. The post below by Brett Moore brings up a good point with regard to “Denial Of Service”, and potential “auto-attacking” of hosts if a user simply reads a post on a message board.

Google Desktop is a desktop search application enables you to search over your email, files, music, photos, chats, Gmail, web pages that you’ve viewed in the past. Once downloaded and installed Google Desktop starts indexing the email, files and web history stored on your computer.

For more information on Cross-site scripting and how you can be affected, visit CGI Security

Chris Pirillo has discovered that if you search for public documents in Googles online calendar, you will be presented with hunderds of unprotected documents which include Google’s registered users login details!

Just a search on Google Calendar in “Search Public Calendars” with the keyword “password” or “login” will instantly reveal results. Not only will you see the information for that particular result, you will also be able to view any events posted by that user in their personal calendar.

Google Calendar is an online contact and time management web application offered freely by Google. It works much the same as Microsoft Outlook, except this is an online version

Whether this could be classed as a security flaw or not is negotiable. An event is made public before anyone can view the information posted, but if nothing else, at least it might make people think twice before sharing information publically that could be considered confidential.

After browsing around Google Calendar, it would seem that people are possibly not fully aware just how much information they are sharing in the public domain.

Using Google Calendar for time management is a good idea, even having the ability to make information public when it makes sense could be classed as resourceful, but when you come across information from a someone in New York which tells you dates and times for when they are on vacation, doctors appointment and when they need to pay their bills kind of makes you think people may not fully aware that this kind of information is availble for anyone to see.