Every so often I write something that touches a nerve with our readers and get dozens of emails back telling me I'm either right or wrong. Many of these emails make it into our Letters to the Editor newsletter every Friday, but all of them I ponder for days, sometimes reevaluating my original opinion on the issue at hand. This week I wrote that AOL would not survive if spun off from the AOL Time Warner empire, and got almost an equal number of Yeas and Nays from readers. While I'm still holding to my opinion, I thought it might …

Here's a quick look at the world through the online lens, just in case you're thinking of going global with your next online campaign.

The possibility of AOL spinning off from AOL Time Warner seems to be taking up a lot of time at the water cooler, and I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that we pick a term other than "spin off."

Jim Carrey's new move may have pushed the Matrix Reloaded to #2 at the box office this past weekend, but Keanu Reeves is still ruling the web.

For a while now, most marketers have thought of video games and the Internet as separate entities, but the time may be right to reconsider that position, according to a recent research study from Lucid Marketing.

Things are looking up! The Online Publishers Association announced yesterday that a poll of 24 OPA members showed that first-quarter ad revenue grew an average of 40.7% over Q1 2002. What's more, total revenue among this group was up an average of 37.6% over the same period last year.

Mobile devices may still be ages away from being acknowledged as a real medium, but some advertisers are having moderate success with AvantGo, according to an announcement the company made this morning.

Two years ago, at our first Forecast conference, we decided to have one of our panels debate whether the web is a branding or a direct response medium. It was the most heated debate of the day. My, how things have changed! Nowadays, people roll their eyes at the topic. We all know it's both.

I spent Friday at the IAB Leadership Forum in New York and aside from being wowed by the event, the attendance and the overall "we're a legitimate medium now, not just a bunch of overly excited entrepreneurs" atmosphere, I spent the day talking with various people about the IAB's Cross Media Optimization Study and what it really means for the industry. Specifically, is anyone really paying attention?

It's not a sign of a stable economy, but it's music to the ears of Monster, HotJobs and CareerBuilder. Nielsen//NetRatings today reported that more than 17 million surfers, or nearly 13% of the active online population, logged on to career websites from home and work in April 2003.