Tate Gregor Union Square Student, 17 What type of phone do you have? iPhone 3GS How many texts do you send a day? Around 40. How many friends do you have on Facebook? I can't even count. It goes up everyday. Do you have any favorite brands? I love Topshop. It's fantastic, totally my style. What do you buy online? Yeah, I buy anything that's going to be cheaper than in the city, which is most things. …

I didn't know it at the time, but what Pete Sealey and I were going through was part of a progression of power shifts that have been taking place ever since the rise of the era of mass marketing that began after World War II. Back then, all the power lay with the big manufacturers, who used the super efficient new mass-selling medium of television to dominate the marketplace. But their real power, says Sealey, now a consultant, and an adjunct professor of marketing at the Drucker School of Management, was knowledge.

At the recent kickoff meeting for the redesign of a major content brand's Web site, things were going almost too smoothly. In my experience, projects should challenge you right from the start. Had we missed something? I scanned the seven-month roadmap again, but no big issue stuck out. Finally, the lone representative from the client's IT department looked like she was about to break her silence. "Shouldn't the real priority be speeding up our Web site?" she asked.

Andy Warhol often gets saddled with this whole godfather of the YouTube generation thing, and his "15 minutes of fame" has been oft quoted, misused, repeated, and has even been idiomized. In fact, in this magazine last year NYU journalism professor Adam Penenberg referenced and updated the quote, saying, "In the future everyone will have his own TV show. But instead of having 15 minutes of fame, you get 15 seconds over and over again." Well, it's hard to say what Andy would have made of Tila Tequila, but judging by this DOA Q+A we'd suspect he'd say she's an …

If content is the MVP in this Age of Fragmentation, Tracy Dolgin has little to worry about -- literally -- as president-CEO of the YES Network, the regional cable channel part-owned by the New York Yankees. He also faces few of the worries consuming other TV executives. With the Yankees' rabid fan base of millions, the network collects hefty payments from cable and other distributors.

Super-agent Andrew Wylie -- unaffectionately nicknamed "The Jackal" for his ability to turn books into big money -- certainly knows how to stir the pot, and he made headlines in the turbulent publishing world when it was announced this summer that his agency had signed an exclusivity pact with Amazon's Kindle. Wylie's new ebook-specific imprint, Odyssey Editions, had released 20 classic backlist novels -- including works by literary big-hitters Amis, Roth, Borges, Updike, Ellison, and Nabokov.

At retailer-X, a sales associate sees a customer walking between two shiny new products. Seeing a potential sale, the associate bounds up to the customer to offer assistance. As soon as the offer for help escapes his lips, the associate sees the customer is holding a smartphone lovingly, and immediately regrets the utterance. Each product feature suggested faces an in-depth counterpoint referenced in a review that's been voted far more helpful than the sales associate ever will be.

Off I went, with my butterfly net and Anglican morals, into the jungle. My mandate, my question mark, was to explore the post-Chatroulette universe, where there are no walls left. What happens to privacy, decorum, identity, ethics, when voyeurism and exhibitionism take over?

Today, very large organizations have embraced technology, using it for one major aim: generating revenue. While often this aim serves the public in a symbiotic relationship, in some instances companies might make anti-consumer decisions that serve their own interests. When that happens, hackers tend to appear.

The story of Napster gives modern media executives an interesting roadmap for successfully building communities and tapping into the user-generated involvement that can open up new growth and revenue opportunities if they understand one simple idea: User-generated content isn't the problem. It's the solution to the problem the traditional media didn't know it had.