For a business that is all about building community and that has grown on its ability to facilitate communication between ever-larger numbers of people, Facebook continues to do a pretty poor job of communicating, itself. Apart from consistently over-claiming for its brave new commercial initiatives before proving that users will even accept them, much of the negative response Facebook generates every time it changes something or introduces a new protocol could be nullified if it actually behaved like a company that cared about its communications and the loyalty of its users.

Weddings are beautiful, a dream come true, a day that comes around once in a lifetime - for marketers looking to make money. The honeymoon is a more expensive trip than probably either the bride or groom has ever taken, there are whole new sets of everything to be bought - in other words, a married couple has never been more open to a marketer's message.

Sneaker marketing has always been about making outrageous claims. From PF Flyers' 1950s promise that its "posture foundation" technology will make you "run faster, jump higher," to the image of an outer-space-bound Michael Jordan that had young boys everywhere chanting "Be like Mike," brands have gone to ridiculous lengths to establish themselves as the shoe that could make anyone a professional athlete (or just look like one).

For some, the second time around is twice as nice. Let me tell you a story. It was a decade ago that the dot-com bubble shattered. To many, those 10 years feel like a lifetime ago - and now a fresh generation of post-bubble entrepreneurs with little use for the bad old days has taken over the digital marketing industry.

Recently I interviewed fresh-off-the-farm college graduates for assistant media planning jobs. I was struck by their earnestness. Too many years ago I sat on their side of the table. In retrospect, I was totally ill-prepared for the vagaries of agency life. Perhaps I can help these newbies survive advertising in the 21st century.

Ten years ago, all of my computer applications were paid for, licensed and resided on the hard drive of my desktop. Microsoft and Adobe were the kings of my computer. Sometimes shareware would get a megabyte or two. But with the emergence of broadband, cloud computing, AJAX and JavaScript, I've found myself doing more and more of my everyday tasks in browsers and through various open-source applications. If so inclined, I could do graphic design with Gimp, manage email with Gmail, or even do 3-D design with Google SketchUp. While Office and other heavy-duty desktop programs still rule the corporate …

We went back to the drawing board this year when it came time to create our top online publisher's issue. In the past we'd evolved the system to arrive at a metric we called RPUU, revenue per unique user -- the best signifier of underlying ad value we could come up with. It left some folks scratching their heads, but, hey, coming up with arcane metrics is what trade magazine editors do best.