Kids who play with Silly Putty know this: There's only so far you can stretch something before the tenuous strands holding it together break. The advertising agency business, as a business, is in a tough spot. Tasked with everything from creating product and generating sales to producing global marketing strategies, agencies are now being asked to provide services that are far beyond their traditional range of responsibilities.

You know you're getting old when you start looking back at certain parts of your career as the good old days. I admit I fall victim to the rose-colored-rear-view-mirror mentality once in a while. But you know what's worse? Thinking back on those halcyon days and realizing just how antiquated and irrelevant the work you were doing then is today. It's humbling.

With help from British space scientists, a 30-second spot for Doritos will be beamed past Earth's atmosphere and into the universe. The Doritos spot will be sent from the EISCAT Space Centre in the Arctic Ocean to a solar system 42 light years away, an area that's thought to contain a habitable zone. Media In Canada, March 11, 2008

Those of us who have been following the convergence of technology, data-connectivity and consumerism over the last 10 years have witnessed radical change. Guiding principles such as "location, location, location" have become meaningless in the hyper-connected environment in which today's businesses operate. Competitors are now just 10 clicks, rather than 10 miles, away.

The most important name in online video is Guttenberg. I refer not to Johannes Gutenberg (one t), the inventor of the movable type printing press. Rather, I mean Steve Guttenberg (two ts), star of the classics Police Academy, Short Circuit and Three Men and a Baby. Yes, without Johannes, there would have been no Renaissance, but without Steve, there would be no online video.

Most people who know what it was like to work in an office without a computer are now either spending their days on a golf course or rotting six feet under. It seems increasingly bizarre, but the days when the now-archaic fax machine represented the height of workplace technology really weren't that long ago. After all, the PC only began to enter the workplace during the '80s, and even then without the attendant delights of the Internet (including, of course, advertising).

Given the Mets' underwhelming performance during the first few weeks of the season, Shea Stadium had been the scene of some pretty heinous booing. But the worst of it came without a single player on the field, and had nothing to do with baseball.

Recently, I moderated a panel of digital media gurus during a daylong internal briefing of Time Warner's global digital media organization, which represents a cross-section of digital executives from the company's media holdings. The panel I moderated looked at how both buyers and sellers of media incorporate and use digital media metrics to improve operations.

Free e-mail is no longer enough for Google. The search giant is now taking a run at hosting full-on Web applications. This spring, the company announced a new online application hosting service, Google App Engine, that will open Google's massive online infrastructure to any developer, big or small.

It was a sudden, startling display of vulnerability, akin to Xerxes getting stalled at Thermopylae, or Rocky Marciano getting knocked down by Archie Moore. Happily for Google, it rallied just like those guys did.