Next year will be the year of selling big ideas. Big--as in selling-a-five-percent-stake-in-your-own-company kind of big. That's what Google acquired from AOL, right? I have no idea how this deal was proposed, but I do know it started like any other deal--with a sales call.

It's December, which means that if you're not at your desk holiday shopping online, you're probably working on some component of the 2006 budget. And if you're in the interactive media industry, a growing segment of that budget is very likely the Conference and Events line item.

How do you make a million-dollar product? It is not easy, but when done well, such products reflect the creative talents of the salespeople on the account.

Seth Godin is one of the best known pundits in the blogosphere. In a recent entry in his blog, he writes, "This blog has one of the fastest-growing RSS feed lists I know of, but it's still a scary-low percentage of my readership."

You have to love the short work week before Thanksgiving. Its arrival signals the year is just about ready to call it a day. By lunchtime tomorrow, you can kick up your feet and start writing out a quality to-do list for when you return from this long and well-deserved weekend.

It has now been a month since the video iPod was released, and all of us who planned to, have ponied up our $1.99 to watch "Desperate Housewives" on the train or in an airport or at the office, just to see what it's like and to start to shape an opinion about how it will impact our industry.

Advertising is in angst. We all felt it--and now Martin Sorrell, WPP's chief executive, has said it. He recently warned that many of the world's leading media companies are on the verge of panic amid the seismic shifts brought on by the Internet.

The news that wasn't news last week was the Google partner and advertiser conference. The event wasn't news because Google slapped a gag order on all partners, advertisers, reporters and bloggers who attended. So what happened there isn't news, but the fact of the event itself IS news: Google has joined the ranks of publishers who have added client summits to their event marketing mix.

Offering behavioral targeting is crazy. It's like giving your house keys to a burglar. It comes down to this simple question: If you are a publisher, do you sell the action of your audience, or do you sell access to reach them? If your choice is the latter, the more you arm buyers with tools meant to increase the performance of an online advertising campaign, the less value you create for the advertising exposure you are selling.

C: CD MSWord Word.exe When I got my first computer in the dark ages of MS DOS, the commands above were something like what I had to type to get my word processor to run. Nowadays, of course, users have Windows XP or Mac's simple OS. But if users don't have to use obscure commands and remember strange abbreviations to use their desktops anymore, why do sites force them to do it to use RSS subscriptions?