Monday, December 17

• Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) has landed a blow in its ongoing tilt with Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) for online advertising supremacy, announcing a deal with Adobe Systems (NASDAQ: ADBE) to add dynamic ads into PDF documents distributed over the web.
  
  Good on Yahoo for sifting out another scrap of free web space to stick an ad on -- the leading web portal depends primarily on ad revenue, and this should add a little to its bottom line, or at the very least, keep Google from capitalizing. Newsletters, e-zines and other PDF providers should also benefit from a little more ad revenue without the fuss of negotiating rates and artwork from their sponsors.
  
  With an easier means to embed ads in the document, niche content providers are that much more likely to adopt the PDF as a medium. And the ads don't show up on print-outs -- welcome news to folks concerned about the integrity of their content.
  
  On news of the deal, Adobe was trading up 1.31% at $42.58 Thursday afternoon, while Yahoo sat at $26.32, 0.46% higher.
  
  Dating back to the first half of the 1990s, Adobe's PDF -- Portable Document Format -- was initially created to compress memory-intensive PostScript formats down into fixed documents that would ensure all recipients saw the same thing, regardless of what sort of computer they were using -- no broken images, no wonky font issues, no pagination shambles. The PDF has since evolved, adding dynamic forms, edit tracking, bookmarks, sticky notes, links, character recognition, management rights and scores of other obscure features that rarely come up outside of a Kinko's.
  
  Like Adobe's other flagship products -- Photoshop, Illustrator -- Acrobat and the PDF own that market. There are likely a handful of open-source and Linux-based contenders, but the PDF is by far the web's go-to memory-efficient format for anything from one-page forms to thick annual reports.