Don't blame me for mixing my metaphors. It's this damned platform war. It started as an uncomfortable divorce in Steve Job's weird little missive about why he and Adobe grew apart. But the Apple vs. Adobe squabble has broken out into a kind of gang warfare this week where neighborhoods seem to be taking sides. Straight from the front lines (in this case the blogosphere) here are the latest troop movements, as this whole debate takes on new metaphors and heads straight into true weirdness.

Because I write about media and advertising, all of my acquaintances seem to think I am personally responsible for their many frustration with online ad units. At the very least, they think I should be able to do something about it. "Dad, make them stop sending me Viagra ads, and tell them I am not really interested in penis enlargement," my teen daughter whines. My partner sends me detailed notes by email about how an oversized push down unit on her favorite woman's site repositions all the content on the page and then retracts it all back again when the …

There are only a handful of branded entertainment series that can claim to reach a "second season," or even aspire to. Ikea's "Easy to Assemble," and Topps' "Back on Topps" come to mind. But over at the teen-focused AlloyTV the LG sponsored "Haute & Bothered" not only launches a second 11-episode set of episode cycle yesterday but even filled the interregnum with mockumentary teasers about what the characters were doing between seasons. Even more interesting is that it is a rare case of branded entertainment that actually has to undersell its own product.

Thomson Reuters is getting into the financial news video business, because, well, apparently there isn't enough of the stuff to go around. Wall Street Journal reports that the new Reuters Insider offering has a special mission to counteract cable's tendency to make even business news as much about entertainment as information. "This is about turning video into actionable information," Devin Wenig, chief executive of Thomson Reuters told WSJ. No screaming Jim Cramers here, we guess. No, wait. CNBC is actually one of the content partners.

Serialized viral video campaigns run the risk of overstaying their Web welcome. There is a tendency to drive a good idea into the ground when distribution and media costs are negligible. This is the down side of digital media technology no one wants to talk about. It is the home video effect. At least when film cost an arm and a leg to buy and process, there were some kinds of natural limits. I will leave it to some smarter cultural analyst to figure this one out. But it seems to me that we are at the moment when the …

A curious bit of data emerged from yesterday's study of Q1 2010 video metrics from Brightcove and TubeMogul. Twitter referrals to videos on every major category of destination resulted in longer viewing times than any other traffic source. A Twitter referral to a music video averaged a 2:33 viewing time compared to 2:01 of time spent by people coming from Google. Tweets drove viewing sessions of 1:52 on broadcast locations, but traffic coming from Facebook, Bing and Google were all in the 1:37 to 1:38 range. The exception to this rule was Tweets landing on newspaper sites, where Yahoo customers …

Remember when Google was a proud member of the too-big-to-advertise club? Not so anymore. Last year's Super Bowl ad buy demonstrated that even the mighty search engine de tutti search engines is merely mortal after all. The company seems to be working against its own dweeby mythology and by trying to affect a more human appeal in its ads. But in a new set of viral video promotions for the Google Chrome browser, the kids in the lab are back in action ... and back in the lab. To coincide with a new beta release of the browser, which is …

Want to see every instance of Joy Behar taking a verbal nine-iron to Tiger Woods' sorry cheating ass? Can't get enough of Whoopi's funny stories? The new VIEWer's Choice feature for the daily women's talk show The View is taking video search to a new level of granularity. When tech dweebs like some of us think about search, we conform nicely to Google's regimen of keywords and phrases. We think ahead about how a search engine might think about a given set of pages and adjust our queries accordingly. But most earthlings do much different media searches in their …

All due respect to the superb journos at the Washington Post, but I can't imagine that in the midst of all your other writing and researching duties throughout the day, you relish worrying about how bad that bed head looks for all to see online. Starting last week, WashPo has recruited its writers to do online live video chats with readers from their desks. As Interactivities and Community Editor Hal Strauss told Beet.TV last week, the reporters at the paper have already gotten used to being part of the cable TV 24/7 news cycles where they do on-air stand-ups on …

Most hot tech companies get only one over-hyped product launch day per item. Sony's PS3, Nintendo's Wii, Verizon's DROID? One day, press sees if there are lines at the local store, interview some of the geeks with "Wii Rulez!" t-shorts, "more at 11" - move on to the next story. Apple, of course, is special. They don't get one over-hyped roll-out for the iPad. They get two. The lines were forming late in the afternoon at some Apple stores as the next wave of iPad shoppers sought their 3G.