Last year, Twitter got a taste of significant revenue when it inked data-licensing deals with Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOG). The multi-year deals were worth a total of $25 million, but Yahoo! (YHOO) found an alternative way to access the social media site's data – free – which made it seem like the licensed data business model was on the brink of a short life. Well, it looks like some new deals have breathed a bit more life into this approach, though the details remain unclear.

In a blog post Monday, Twitter announced that it was opening its data "Firehose" to a number of companies: Ellerdale, Collecta, Kosmix, Scoopler, twazzup, Crowdeye and Chainn. According to the post, this step makes it "possible to move far beyond the Twitter experiences we know today."

I'm not sure why a good scent would make you want to go see a movie, but apparently some ad executives are willing to bet that it will.

According to The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times will be running an ad for the upcoming Mr. Magorium's Emporium, complete with a scented ink that will remind the sniffer of frosted cake. Pretty cool. It will cost the studio about $55,000 to add the frosted cake-scent to to the ads.

It's easy to see why the newspapers would be pushing this kind of thing: If they can convince advertisers that scratch and sniff is the way to attract consumers then -- and only then -- will they have found a way to preserve their relevance as they lose revenue to the internet and other media outlets.

It just might work. People will show the ad to their friends because it's something new and different. The extra $55,000 has already generated a story in The New York Times business section. I doubt that scratch and sniff is the wave of the future (I thought it went the way of the hula hoop around 4th grade or so) but creative marketing strategies like this are the newspaper industry's only hope of remaining (or becoming) relevant.