Yesterday, we wondered about the future of advertising, and acknowledged that bloggers face a new predicament of impossibly low rates. But there are other technological pitfalls — just ask Gawker Media, who was scammed by a client pretending to be Suzuki into running ads that crashed readers’ browsers and even installed malware onto their systems.

Does advertising work? It’s an age-old question with an elusive answer. Today, TargetSpot, an internet radio advertising network, took a step toward proving its effectiveness by announcing a new system of analytics that will track the performance of audio ads online by monitoring the anticipated influx of website traffic after an internet radio spot airs. But is it accurate? And more importantly, what if the ads don’t do anything?