Green is the new black.

Madison Avenue tried to curry favor with consumers this year by coloring products and brands with an environmental tint. A long list of companies such as General Electric Co., Chevron Corp. and Home Depot Inc. all jumped on the eco-friendly bandwagon. One Toyota Motor Corp. ad featured a Prius being created from straw, twigs and other natural elements. The gasoline-electric hybrid car is built up and then fades back into nature.

Despite the energy spent on eco-friendly marketing messages very few stood out, but being green wasn't the only way ad makers tried to grab some attention in 2007. Thanks in part to ad-skipping devices, they littered the Web with viral videos, added smells to print ads and even found ways to have pitches appear in unsuspecting places such as on TV screens on gas pumps.

But one thing stayed the same: Some campaigns were big hits and others were big flops. Our choices for the best and worst in 2007:

Americans invented the Internet, but the Japanese are running away with it.

Broadband service here is eight to 30 times as fast as in the United States -- and considerably cheaper. Japan has the world's fastest Internet connections, delivering more data at a lower cost than anywhere else, recent studies show.

Accelerating broadband speed in this country -- as well as in South Korea and much of Europe -- is pushing open doors to Internet innovation that are likely to remain closed for years to come in much of the United States

After more than 10 years of newspapers slowly migrating to the Web, most have embraced the medium as their future, showing they can break news, provide audio and video extras, and give readers more space to react and rebut than ever before. Successes are many, ranging from exclusive online interviews to sourcing details that give readers more complete information than any daily could have provided just a few years ago. Even the Pulitzer Prizes are giving props to Web-based offerings.  But with those accomplishments and expansions have come no shortage of starts and stops, bumps, flops, and sometimes outright debacles.

New countries have moved ahead of some Western democracies in the fifth annual Reporters Without Borders Worldwide Press Freedom Index, issued today, while the most repressive countries are still the same ones.

"Each year new countries in less-developed parts of the world move up the Index to positions above some European countries or the United States. This is good news and shows once again that, even though very poor, countries can be very observant of freedom of expression. Meanwhile the steady erosion of press freedom in the United States, France and Japan is extremely alarming,” Reporters Without Borders said.

Three things sell newspapers and boost ratings: sex, suffering and silver (money). This at least is the typical formula many news organizations use in planning their offerings. While the decisions of editorial departments should in no way be influenced by what is happening on the advertising and the commercial sides of the news business, this gap has shrunk or evaporated in many news organizations, both print and electronic.

With the decline of family publishing empires, increased mechanization in production techniques and the rising concentration and internationalization of the news business, the autonomy of many editors and publishers has withered. The motto of much of the popular press today is not "all the news that's fit to print" but "all the news that's fit to sell."

Looking ahead to new opportunities and with a glance back to some missed ones, Food is asserting its dominance over the TV genre it practically created, moving beyond its programming bread and butter and aggressively branching out to consumer products. The network will roll out a line of 400 items exclusively to Kohl's stores nationwide beginning Sept. 30.

Food has also increased its focus on in-house talent management, trying to persuade its up-and-coming TV chefs to launch products and give the network a cut of the profits.

“We're the first, top-of-mind, dominant brand when it comes to food on television and on the Internet,” says Food Network General Manager Sergei Kuharsky. “That kind of market power is what earns you the right to go into other categories.”

It also illustrates a major quandary faced by mature cable networks today: With full distribution and reliable though not tremendous annual growth in advertising revenue, they are trying to broaden their palettes beyond the screen to survive in the future.

Local search carries all the earmarks of a gold rush in the making: tens of thousands – no, make that millions – of small businesses hungry for more customers. Even greater numbers of consumers with leaky faucets, dented fenders and crabgrass, all itching to connect with neighborhood service providers as we speak.

Everyone’s now vying for a chunk of the ad budgets of this legion of entrepreneurs – everyone from your local newspaper and yellow pages publisher to Web giants Microsoft, Yahoo and Google. Yet the opportunity is vast and, despite endless odes to the promise of local search, the market remains largely untapped.

Call it TV 2.0, Net TV, or whatever you like: The building blocks of a new Web video industry are falling into place.

New forms of programming and distribution promise viewers an infinite menu of content, new advertising models are in

This year, at the UCLA Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, Marco Iacoboni and his group used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain responses in a gr