A few years ago, I set a goal to speak at TED. The goal provoked some interesting reactions from my friends. Richard said, "That's an excellent goal, because of what you're going to have to manifest in your life to make it come true."

Today's 17- to 21-year-olds are our true Internet pioneers. The Web has been part of their life since birth. Some believe that this has made them different from all other Millennials. Noted media ecologist Jack Myers is one of them. He spent the past two years studying this unique generation and the product is his latest book, "Hooked Up: A New Generation's Surprising Take on Sex, Politics and Saving the World." Here are some of the key points:

On Facebook there's a relationship status for "it's complicated" -- and that's what it's starting to feel like in the world of online marketing and advertising: It's complicated. Technology is taking over! The world of marketing is fast becoming a world that overlaps with IT.

After 20 years of using email, my personal and professional email address books have grown into the thousands. Maybe that's a lot for some people, and a little for others. But one thing is certain: My address book has reached a critical mass whereby a significant percentage of the names are similar, and some are the same. Why does that matter?

Last week I wrote about why it's important to know how engineers think. With the entire digital media infrastructure resting on their shoulders, it's useful for even non-technical people in media to know what it's like to be an engineer. This week I want to go a step further and say that its important for everyone in media to be able to think like an engineer. Here's how:

Here is the problem: There's a heck of a lot of stuff that's both really deeply important and really difficult to understand. Take politics. When I lived in Denver, I used to hold "voting parties" when election season came around. These nonpartisan soirees weren't designed to promote or endorse any particular candidate; rather, they were a sort of self-help group for the interpretation of ballot initiatives. "OK, so if you DO want the light rail, vote AGAINST the initiative to fail to renew the funding allocation for the Hummingbird-Dodo State Transportation Allocation," that sort of thing.

Remember search? Search was the darling of the Internet advertising space. It garnered a huge portion of the ad dollars dedicated to online (~40%) and was dominated by a single player (Google). Everywhere you turned there was an article written about search. There was always a new start-up that was trying to use search data, or improve upon search results. Everyone wanted to be in search. That feels like a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

Almost five years ago I left Nielsen BuzzMetrics (now called NM Incite) to join the founding leadership team at Clickable, a startup with a bold ambition to simplify online advertising for the masses. As with every startup, you mature and evolve, and go places you didn't expect, adapting to change and seizing opportunity. For us, we pivoted from a pure software service focused on search ads to a solutions company specializing in social ads and online marketing intelligence. We also moved away from small businesses, so we could focus on midsize and large advertisers and agencies.

Last year, after a decade in the media business, I left the world of buying and selling ads to start an enterprise software company. Technically, I am still involved in the media business since the HR software we are building is designed for agencies and media companies. I also write about the industry in this column as well as for my blog, The Makegood. But compared to the cacophonous world of media, running a software company has been a significant change. Sometimes, it's a bit like living in a monastery. The high priests are the engineers-the people that conjure software …

Are you a fan of net neutrality? I'm going to guess that most readers of this column are. Net neutrality, the idea that service providers shouldn't be able to make any restriction on bandwidth based on content, means your ISP can't slow you down just because you watch a ton of movies or download thousands of songs. It means you can connect your new device without worrying about whether you've exceeded your cap on wireless devices. It means that people looking at your site will receive it at the same speed whether you're a giant media company like MediaPost or …