You have to commend the Wall Street Journal for assigning the resources and churning out the investigative pieces as part of the "What They Know" series. But I thought they missed a lot of things.

For example, didn't they forget Google?

The series of articles goes on at length about cookies, with much detail about data aggregation firms such as BlueKai and [x+1], and the way advertisers target you through your browsing. But there wasn't much in depth about the bigtime data machines like Google or Bing and where that will go in the future -- such as location-based tracking and artifical intelligence. 

BlueKai CEO Omar Tawakol, who just landed $21 million in financing and whose company has an interesting vision for the future of the Internet advertising industry, spoke with The Rayno Report on Monday about the direction of his company and the new financing.  Tawakol believes his company is onto a multi-billion dollar opportunity. BlueKai aggregates anonymous user data from across the Internet for advertising agencies. It tracks the anonymous user data with a cookie. BlueKai's partners and customers then pay for access to that data and the cookie through an auction process, so that they can see more detailed information about users and target their ads more specifically. Tawakol believes the industry is in the midst of a data "paradigm shift," in that the data aggregation model exists in the offline world, but has not yet been effectively implemented in the new online world. "It's a paradigm issue," says Tawakol, "The new winners usually come from the new paradigm, not the old one."

A few weeks ago I told you that Redpoint partner Scott Raney was bullish on many things, including Ad-data aggregation firm BlueKai. Guess I should have listened more closely. Today BlueKai allegedly announced a $21 million round of financing , according to TechCrunch, though we are still trying to confirm this because we have not seen the actual press release. GGV Capital, Redpoint Ventures, and Battery Ventures are in on the action. If true, this would bring BlueKai's total funding to $35 million, not an insubstantial sum in a crushing econmomic recession (can I have some?). What does BlueKai, a Seattle-based Internet marketing firm, do? The BlueKai Data Exchange aggregates annonymous Internet data . Think of this as creating a new "data aggregation" layer across the Internet, allowing advertisers to look at the behavior of potential customers over a wide variety of advertising platforms. BlueKai says this data includes the information of more than 145 million users.