My ongoing tour of mobile video this week brings me to clip casting, the non-linear VOD experience that lets users "snack" on snippets of TV and Web fare, trailers, music vids, etc. I am not sure we know yet what kind of ritual mobile video snacking is or will become, and this is going to be supremely important to the format.

Tuesday night I discovered the best part of having mobile TV. You can watch something really interesting like "The Caine Mutiny" on a handheld, while the two contenders for leading our nation amble through the worst financial crisis in generations on TV.

It's a good thing that the underlying technology of MediaFLO mobile TV is so good, because snappy channel switching is essential to enduring a full-bore broadcast TV schedule on a handheld. I tried it the other night. Never again.

I am getting a chance to browse randomly on my small battery of phones this week, mainly because my daughter discovered "Mad Men." As the son of a 1960s advertising art director, I was in the tank for this series from the first episode. My childhood was awash in chain-smoking existential swaggerers who tried to impress others with their cool disregard for human decency. In this series I get to watch them explore their own souls (once they find them) and search for the hearts of others under the cultural regime of collective repression. Much like the ad men I …

"Don't talk to him. He ruins movies." This is my daughter's lament whenever we leave the theater. To her it is no family secret that you shouldn't ask how I liked a movie -- because I will tell you. "Professor Dad" has grabbed the podium. I am in a particularly bad state right now. The restored, pristine and nigh-perfect "Godfather" collection came out on Blu-ray this week, so things have been especially tough on my family, with a lot of scene-by-scene analysis going on. So maybe my film criticism bar has been set a little high lately, but the best …

No one knows (or should know) the value of crowd-sourcing more than a trade conference programmer. Some of the best panel ideas and panel questions for the various OMMA shows I plan have come from industry folks. And we need your insights now: What issues are critical to you?

My friends at comScore/M:Metrics were nice enough to pass along a deck they have been using lately to illustrate the mobile habits of teens. But on one level, I didn't need research to know how teens embrace this device as an extension of themselves, and even do so in an idiosyncratic way. As always, my one-girl traveling research panel gives me as much insight as reams of data. As she came out of her anesthetic stupor at the oral surgeon last week, my daughter's first move was to grab my iPhone. Her mouth was filled with cotton bales, so her …

As I was holding the Samsung Instinct at countless angles near my third-floor window to maximize signal strength, the '70s flashback hit me. I had been here before. Trying to get TV reception at a hippie college on a Vermont mountain in 1978 was just about this tough. Positioning the TV near a window, getting that old FM T-antenna thumb-tacked to the ceiling in just the right configuration, was a ritual that separated the humanities bumpkins from the science dweebs. Perhaps I am in a bad zone for video services from all three major carriers. But here in 2008, I …

There are a number of fine and interesting mobile projects out there that barely get noticed. Quietly, slowly, several major online and offline brands are iterating their services and sites without issuing the press releases that usually pass for news in the mobile marketing eco-system. I like to bookmark and check back on these guys, because someone had better keep an eye on them -- just in case some innovation breaks out.

In Web years it seems like a lifetime ago that all of us suffered those annoying animated overlays running, crashing, driving across our displays. Oh, those were the days, when Web surfing truly was a Forrest Gump adventure. Open a Web site and you never knew what you were going to get. And so when PointRoll and Millennial Media announced rich media units for smart phones at CTIA this week, I was braced for the worst. But my first encounters with the new units from both companies were positive, suggesting where mobile advertising can better serve the consumer.