From picketing to marching, people have been banding together around causes they passionately believe in for decades. Never before has the scale and speed in which change can be effected been so massive, though.

Shepard fairey had a rough february. first the ap threatened to charge the artist, who came to national prominence with his Obama Hope posters, with copyright infringement. Then Boston police arrested him before the opening of his solo show "Supply and Demand" at the Institute for Contemporary Art, after they'd determined Fairey tagged two prominent locations in Boston with Andre the Giant artwork. Even the original "Andre the Giant has a posse" image - which dates back to Fairey's days as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design and has appeared everywhere from buildings to gallery shows to …

Amid a significant slide in automotive advertising, Toyota's Scion brand is launching a new ad campaign that will increase its visibility in traditional media such as television and print. It's a subtle shift for a brand that's known for using underground marketing tactics such as street teams and wild postings to promote its cars rather than television campaigns.

Is cable the next front on the analog TV wind-down wars? While the media industry breathed a collective sigh when regulators pushed off the analog TV shutoff, another TV shutdown saga is heating up. The cable industry has slowly but surely moved analog TV channels to digital. And far from smoothly.

As global unemployment levels swell to scary levels, The Queensland Tourism Board is doing its part. One new job. It's not a million jobs, but it's not negative 100,000, which seems like the average figure every morning on the front page of the Gray Lady. And this is not just any job. It's the "Best Job in the World": A caretaker will serve the Commonwealth for six months by occupying a waterfront home overlooking the Whitsunday Islands and report on the wonders of the Great Barrier Reef.

All was not quiet on the sports-drink front of the Hydration Wars, as one of its power players, Glacéau Vitaminwater, received a crippling blow to its propaganda machine last month - a blow surprisingly not dealt by SoBe Lifewater's army of break-dancing lizards.

Sure, you've twirled your share of linguini in Little Italys across the country and devoured chow mein and designer knock-offs in Chinatowns from Manhattan to San Francisco, but when was the last time you enjoyed a cup of Earl Grey in the Little Britain part of town? Maybe never.

The new year opened amid a global economic crisis that reached beyond national borders and across industries. In 2008, businesses and individuals saw the stock market shed a third of its value, unemployment rates grow to a size unseen in decades, and financing freeze as foreclosure rates soared.

When we first heard of twitter, we thought about it much like many of you probably still do. It's just noise. Who needs to know when someone is having a pizza? But we've had a few epiphanies along the way that have changed our thinking. The bottom line is that Twitter is a news source, and a place for tracking general and specific information in the blogosphere, whether it is about you, your company, your competitors or, well, ordering out for pizza. And the noise level behind something is a good indicator of interest.

When life hands us lemons, we make lemonade. While experts predict a grim year for all media categories, including the much-hyped digital arena, we see an abundance of aperture moments for smart marketers. Those moments will be realized through strong negotiations with desirable partners whose media properties offer value in both pricing and consumer connections.