hat the hell is mobile search anyway? I ask this after spending time exploring a partnership between Yahoo oneSearch and HFMUS's ELLE magazine. During New York Fashion Week, searching "fashion" at m.yahoo.com will return a prominent helping from its promotional partner ELLE's coverage of the event. There are blog entries, an image of the magazine cover, a direct link to subscribe, and sign-ups for ELLE text alerts. This is not to say that there aren't "natural" search results down there somewhere, but on my Samsung phone they were a good ten screens down.

According to some recent stats, there are over 20 billion SMS messages passing across the ether each month in the U.S. market alone. As the father of an adolescent, I am not surprised. I think my daughter's teen suitors alone account for a good chunk of that figure. But if you are a resourceful media innovator rather than the father of a teen girl, all of those SMS alerts sound more like ad inventory being wasted. It was only a matter of time before someone came along to knit this flow of messages into networked ad inventory.

As I approach age 50 this year, I am learning to appreciate youth again, if only because now it is a distant fantasy rather than an identity I can cling to. My teen daughter and youthful girlfriend seem to be egging me into decrepitude, forever underscoring all of the vital functions (hearing, seeing, memory, walking, etc.) I "really should have checked." "Did you just wheeze, Dad?" asks my daughter -- followed by Nurse Girlfriend checking my pulse. Is it any wonder I find the childish enthusiasm surrounding mobile so invigorating and addictive?

It goes without saying that the voice channel is the under-utilized and under-appreciated piece of the mobile content and marketing puzzle. I say that it goes without saying because so many companies have been saying precisely that for a couple of years now.

If only I had known how much my consciousness was worth back in the day that I ODed on Oscar Meyer spots (you bet I was a "weiner") and knew by heart every jingle for every sugar-and-fat encrusted cereal Battle Creek could produce. Yeah, I was getting free cartoons on Saturday morning in exchange for renting my consciousness to advertisers every few minutes. That is the implicit deal we all make with modern advertising. But if I knew that my attention span could be priced by the minute, I might have watched a little less "Penelope Pitstop" (who really wasn't …

My daughter has embraced "I Love Lucy" in TVLand reruns lately, which fills her media maven dad with such pride. It also gives me the opportunity to teach her a few things about TV history, the golden era when networks actually mattered. I was the kid who had the whole prime time schedule committed to memory so my family never needed to consult TV Guide. My "dweebiness" notwithstanding, I bring this experience forward to the current situation and wonder what role mobile plays when TV networks are barely clinging to their relevance.

Vacationing with the women in my family leaves me with a lot of waiting time -- as they prep for the beach, for outings, for walks, for just about anything. I am not sure which paparazzi will be present at breakfast shooting pictures of them for the cover of "The Star," but apparently they need to be ready for them. So I get to spend a lot of time this week catching up on the new iPhone apps companies have been sending me this month.

test

I am all for anything that speeds up the traffic at shopping malls. Not that I am the fastest walker in the food court, mind you. There are loads of septuagenarians speed-walking their way to health in those boat-sized, super-white striders who blow back my thinning hair as they whisk by. But here in SUV-America, where the cars, the serving sizes, and the butts come super-sized, I sometimes feel like a ferret winding his way through the walk of the elephants. I know I am being intolerant and mean. But you can imagine my excitement when I heard that NearbyNow …

Virtual social networking is one of those phenomena that makes me feel my age. My teen daughter had to teach me how a Xanga and MySpace page are made. "You know HTML?" I wailed a couple of years ago. As if she had just dropped an innocent S&M reference, I said accusingly, "Who taught you HTML? I know I didn't."