I’m getting really excited about the upcoming Fourth of July holiday weekend. I’m all about the red, white and blue, embracing freedom and, of course, large slabs of beef on the grill. Having an extra day off from work ain’t so bad either.

As a kid this was always a special weekend for me. It was my dad’s birthday, my parent’s anniversary (or the day my dad lost his independence as he would jokingly tell us kids every year) and the weekend that we made the trek to our summer place on Cape Cod.

My Grateful Dead/jam bandlovin’ hubby is trying to drag me to a hippy music festival for the weekend. But that event conflicts my personal aversions to wearing tie dye, group camping and listening to “songs” longer than most people’s lunch breaks.

I’d prefer to just stick close to home. Then I can check out an old fashioned county fair, maybe hit the multiplex, try and watch the Live 8 concerts and possibly catch a glimpse of San Francisco’s fireworks display. If the fog doesn’t cooperate, then I’ll get my pyrotechnics fix elsewhere.

Okay, enough about my summertime fun. After all, it’s only Tuesday and there’s still plenty of work to be done. Plus, some explosive fireworks are happening right here in the online marketing space. Here are a four (in honor of The Fourth) hot topics that lit up the sky for affiliate and performance marketers over the last week or so.

Direct Response Technologies has settled its lawsuit with PrimaryAds, which was using DirectTrack, Direct Response’s proprietary affiliate and ad serving technology as the back bone for their network. PrimaryAds is also a wholly owned subsidiary of Think Partnership, a rival of r of Direct Response.

#2: Google will launch an in-browser video playback feature based on the open source VLC media player.

#3: Just days after high-power advertisers pulled ads appearing on user-created Yahoo chat rooms being used to lure minors for sex, online audience auditor I/PRO released BrandGuard Content Audit, a service to help advertisers protect their brands on the Internet.

#4: On Friday Microsoft unveiled plans to increase support for RSS applications in the upcoming seventh version of Internet Explorer, as well as its upcoming operating system, code-named Longhorn.

Let me know about any other issues that are setting off fireworks in your world. lisap@revenuetoday.com