A few months ago, the Federal Trade Commission approved a new rule provision under the CAN-SPAM Act that clarified opt-out and other legal responsibilities for "multiple sender" e-mail messages — those messages that contain advertisements from numerous parties.

The number of online advertising networks, companies that aggregate and sell advertising inventory on behalf of a group of publishers, has continued to grow in recent years. But is there room in the market for all of them? Experts in the space say maybe.

Two more members of InfoGroup's board of directors have resigned as part of a shareholder lawsuit settlement. The company announced that George F. Haddix and Vasant H. Raval submitted their resignation as directors on August 25.

Web security firm MessageLabs has acquired Fortium ICA Limited, an image composition analysis technology firm, in an undisclosed deal. Fortium offers a scanning technology that can scan e-mails as well as Web sites and instant messages for inappropriate images.

In an effort to further the transparency of the US Postal Service's reporting practices, the Postal Regulatory Commission has published its proposed regulations for the form and content of information the agency routinely reports to the PRC.

Lately, I've become interested in the sub­ject of trust as it relates to Internet mar­keting. Two annual studies that I've read recently, the 2008 Edelman Trust Barometer and Harris Interactive Reputation Quotient (RQ) survey, piqued my interest.

The Federal Trade Commission today issued its final Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR) amendments regarding prerecorded calls. Two TSR amendments were passed - one will ban calls that deliver prerecorded messages unless the consumer has first agreed, with written consent, to receive calls.

Spammers are known to take advantage of a legitimate company's good reputation. EBay, PayPal and MySpace have all had their social tools misused by scammers — in eBay's case, spam e-mails contain deals that seem too good to be true; while on MySpace, scammers have made false accounts to send spam messages to other members.

The CAN-SPAM Act has now been law in the US for more than four and a half years, yet many marketers misunderstand the law, how it applies to their business, or fail to know where the law falls short of best practices.

Over the last few years, online video consumption has grown exponentially. However, video advertising has failed to meet the expectations of investors — even the most popular publishers struggle to sell sufficient inventory.