First, Harper Collins came out with an announcement that it would offer free electronic editions of some titles online. Then author Suze Orman’s announced on Oprah that she would be offering a limited number of free copies of her latest title on the Oprah website. Now Yale University Press is the next publisher to get on board with free electronic titles.

Why the sudden push toward giving away content? One reason may be tied to the decline that’s happening with traditional advertising models. Businesses are shifting advertising away from radio, newspaper, magazine, and even TV ads and are moving funds into new models of promotion, including using ad dollars to cover the cost of giving away some products to drive up interest in others.

Author Chris Anderson, famous for his book "The Long Tail", expands upon this new trend in his upcoming book, which he plans to make available for free (or as free as his publisher will allow). Check out the free 6,000 word preview of his book "Free: Why $0.00 is the Future of Business" in this month's Wired Magazine.

Back in September, I wrote about an interesting article in Dr. Dobb’s Journal about how the pendulum is swinging back toward the delivery of desktop-like experiences. With Adobe’s official announcement of its new Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) yesterday, the pendulum has picked up even more momentum. AIR allows application designers to think beyond the browser to cost-effectively add desktop support into their clients’ web interactions and deliver RIAs in a partially connected environment.

Even though AIR is just out, there are already a number of early deployments that range from consumer-facing media players, games, personal shopping assistants and product configurators, through to business-oriented data-entry and dashboard tools. Big name brands like eBay, Nickelodeon, and NASDAQ are already delivering applications that leverage AIR.

The biggest hurdle toward adoption is helping those responsible for client communications understand the potential of AIR and how to leverage it within the scope of client interactions.

Would it be wrong to say that just a few years ago when rich internet applications (RIAs) were starting to make serious strides on the market, Adobe was confronted with a dilemma: they would either need to promote Flex as an alternative to AJAX solutions, which would polarize the market, or to just embrace (and potentially lead) the AJAX market.

Adobe settled on the latter, and brought forth Spry, a framework for AJAX. This was a good move, as it seems clear today that Flex and AJAX have a symbiotic relationship. Google (author of the famous Google Web Toolkit for AJAX), Yahoo (author of the equally famous Yahoo! User Interface Library toolkit), and many other mainstream players consistently use AJAX and other tools, such as Flex, in their projects.

In retrospect, Spry was an excellent investment for Adobe not only because of the great value it brings to the developer community and to Adobe itself, but also because it saved them from a potential public relations nightmare.

I think the lesson to be learned from this, is that not all communications come in the shape of a formal press release, a blog posting, or a hosted event. Spry is a very successful communications vehicle disguised as a product.

This morning, at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, CA, Adobe announced Director 11. For those familiar with Director, this won’t come as much of a surprise, as this release has been highly anticipated for awhile now. What is interesting about the announcement is where it took place, and how Adobe is repackaging Director. While Director has been strong for the creation of multimedia applications, educational software and casual games for years, it’s now being squarely pegged as the solution for interactive games and eLearning. This may be due to the fact that Adobe has discontinued Authorware, its previous gem in the eLearning sector, and that Flash is lacking the Xtras and extensibility that developers need.

Also new with this version is some very aggressive pricing for students, with a student price tag of just $99 USD per license. This should help Director break into more of the animation and game development schools.

It will be interesting to see how the community reacts to this new version. At INM, we are excited about the potential it provides developers and will continue to be a strong contributor to the Director community.

In the very noisy announcement of Microsoft's bid to acquire Yahoo last week, very little attention was devoted to AOL's acquisition of Goowy, the company behind Yourminis. Granted, this acquisition was not of a comparable scale, but it was still a significant step for AOL in building stronger relations between its users and advertisers.

Yourminis is a fully customizable start page (a.k.a. personal portal) similar to iGoogle that users can personalize with any number of widgets including weather forecasts, e-mail, instant messaging, games and more. Widgets can live on a web page inside a web browser, or can stand-alone on the desktop. Unlike Google's Desktop Gadgets and Yahoo's Widgets, Yourminis desktop widgets use Adobe AIR and thus don't require the installation of a large local application.

The growth in widgets, combined with the shift away from pure advertising toward the creation of marketing experiences, and the projected decline in traditional advertising dollars, has created a "perfect storm" of change in the industry.

One size no longer fits all users' needs any more and thus some degree of personalization and engagement is required to get people's attention. Likewise, the internet has brought greater accountability to advertising which means that measuring users' behaviors is critical for gathering business intelligence and determining best spent advertising dollars. Widgets can help accomplish both of these goals, making this acquisition a little more important then the media coverage reflects.