As far as I'm concerned, some old media went up in smoke along with the wild fires that set Southern California ablaze in late October. When my San Diego-based sister and my nephews were forced to evacuate their home and relocate temporarily to safer ground, I went through the normal food chain of personal communications to find out how they were doing.

The Apple iPhone suffers from a cruel irony. Much like a comely Mormon, the sexiest phone on the market is also arguably the most inhibited - the famously closed deck allows little personalization.

Most recently, cc has been criticized for lacking a standard model release form that would be compatible with some of its licenses. Despite being used by commercial photographers the world over, it still does not supply the proper authorization forms to publicly display a person's image in a commercial format.  

Is a new licensing agreement an open-source answer to restrictive copyrights?

How does Chris Anderson chase his own "Long Tail?" Last year, the editor-in-chief of Wired gave us such a compelling name and a theory for the digital economy that hardly a business plan goes by this year without dropping the term. After showing us how the Internet helps empower and monetize niche markets and tastes, Anderson will explore what he calls "the radical price of zero." Free, planned for late 2008, suggests that the new economies of abundance that he outlined in The Long Tail make it possible for companies to succeed by charging consumers little or nothing. After reviewing …

It's been said, there's no free lunch. But how many people know where that phrase originates from? It comes from a time when bars and taverns would put out sumptuous free lunches to entice the working crowd in for a midday pint or two.

Free lunch? What's the catch? People seldom trust the offer of something for nothing. When the new music service SpiralFrog tested its ad-supported free download model with focus groups, consumers met them with suspicion. "Everyone was looking for the catch," recalls senior vice president of marketing George Hayes. And consumers, with their inherent skepticism, are quite right in questioning free. Just as at spiralfrog.com, where the music expires after 30 days without a re-visit, there always is a catch. After all, even in the promised land of low-overhead digital, somebody is going to have to pay for all of this.

Welcome to the world of 4D. No, it's not a new science fiction show - it's a new way of looking at communications. While communications are largely still organized by discipline - advertising, PR, digital, etc. - the 4D model neutralizes the disciplines and focuses on consumers and the role they have in communications efforts. 4D organizes communications by the amount of participation the consumer has with the different channels.

Now that we are deep into the NFL season, you may be rooting for your team to make the playoffs. But if your company (or client) will be running an ad during the Super Bowl, you are already in training for the championship game. With advertising costs nine times more than a typical 30-second primetime spot, this investment has to make a positive impression and get people talking about your brand. For the 2007 game, Doritos rewrote the rules with a radical and risky strategy that drove tremendous levels of positive traditional media coverage and social media discussions around the …

Some market and media researchers have moved from expensive random digit dialing, mailings and in-person research to the significantly less pricey platform of online research.