For years, you've operated behind the scenes influencing the media and marketing industries as a consultant and advisor to some of the biggest companies in the world. Why did you want to edit a magazine about the industry and what did you hope to get out of it?

What happens when you ask people to pay for music before a single track is even laid down? The rise of crowdsourced funding sites - like IndieGoGo and Kickstarter, where users commit money in advance to planned ventures like recordings, books and statues of RoboCop - has caused many artists to think about whether such sites could replace the world of music distributors and record labels.

I've spent my entire career as a Web developer, Web editor, and writer. And consistently over the last 17 years, I have found that when publishers and media professionals talk about the Web, they tend to assume that it is, at its core, a publishing medium. After all, that conclusion makes sense: The Web was created to transmit and link documents together. From its humble roots as a service for sharing physics research papers, it has grown into a linked database of newspaper articles, video assets, games, and billions of other media objects. At the center of the Web is …

On the Web and mobile apps, user behavior is constantly evolving - the messy result of a complex and unpredictable calculus involving expectations, experience, technology, brands and a hundred other factors. Unless you're replicating an existing, proven Web site note-for-note and down to the last pixel, it's very difficult to predict how users will behave. After well over a decade of Web designers working to define "best practices," there's almost nothing we know for certain about what users will do.