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Several patent applications made by Google point toward a product that allows people to drop specific advertisements into their online communications. SEO by the Sea's Bill Slawski has plumbed the patent depths for something new. This time it's a compendium of applications made by Google, where the various technologies add up to a user-managed ad placement product.

Slawski's finds indicated a potential product where an individual could place an ad inside just about any form of electronic communication: IM, email, blog post, forum message. The person would be compensated by Google in exchange for doing so.

Slawski wondered about the appeal of such a mechanism to advertisers:

If you are an advertiser, would you want your ads to be distributed in a manner like this?

Might metrics gathered from the effectiveness of User Distributed Ads (UDA) be used for “later ad serving arbitration?”

The appeal would likely take hold in specific niches, which seems like a logical way to use such a placement product. If Toyota wanted to promote a new Matrix, for example, making ads available to people who post regularly in the forums at MatrixOwners.com should be a sensible business move.

Such an advertising method could have its drawbacks. Nick Carr suggested the definition of spam would get "fuzzier" with this product.

"It would also mean the injection of commerce, and commercial incentives, into the most intimate of electronic communications," Carr wrote.