It's always a shock to lose a loved one, dear reader. We're no different. This online media and marketing armor doesn't mean we're any less human. And yes, we took the recent loss of our longtime cohort Lavinia from Hitwise hard. You may not know her personally (but, oh, reader, she had a name like a song), though surely you know her work

Consumers responding to an NPD Group survey of holiday spending suggest they would search or research online before buying gifts the 2010 holiday. The act of "pre-searching" makes for smarter consumers every year, and, of course, the increase in search activity to research products and information online won't stop at the end of the year. By 2011, social networks and mobile devices also will support more searches and the lines between platforms may start to finally seem as arbitrary as some have long claimed they are.

As Facebook and Google attempt to muscle into each other's turf, a new kind of Web is being born, one with "Like" buttons everywhere and Twitter all over the place. Where it's all going is anyone's guess, but one trend is the emergence of two different Webs -- one private and anonymous, the other public and social.

The fall and rise of the Tribune Co. and complications along the way: That the Tribune Co. now refers to itself as a media and business services company that happens to publish a few newspapers underscores its shift from print to digital and from conventional news headlines to activist hyperlocal journalism, all of which positions it for a change in ownership in 2011.

Making movies, TV and sports in 3-D is one thing. Distributing it across the vast and wild 3-D frontier is quite another. Without question, 3-D - digital imaging technologies that combine slightly different right- and left-eye imagery to create the illusion of depth -- has outgrown its century-old, parlor-trick status.

MySpace underwent a major redesign in 2008 that did little to help the social network reclaim its relevancy. So two years later, the site -- now rebranded Myspace with a lowercase s -- has been radically overhauled again, reborn with a different design and, more significantly, a new mission. em>OMMA turned to three digital creatives - Claudia Chow of Huge, IQ's Joel Krieger and Attik's Jacob Ford - for their take on the new Myspace.

Why start a conversation about your brand when you can eavesdrop on one -- or, for that matter, one million -- already in progress? That's the premise behind social network data mining, the process of listening in on consumers' brand-centric conversations online, then synthesizing those conversations into actionable market research data.

When Facebook in November confirmed widespread speculation by announcing a new email service, CEO Mark Zuckerberg presented email as just one part of a broader messaging platform that also embraced SMS, instant messaging and chat. Through a unified "social inbox," users can get messages through the various channels in one place. Those from friends and family will receive priority; everything else will go into an "other" folder. So does that mean marketers are left out in the cold? To answer that and other questions about Facebook's messaging upgrade, we turned to Reggie Bradford, CEO of social media marketing firm Vitrue, …

Mayer Hawthorne might seem like a sweet-faced young crooner weaned on the soul-drenched ballads of early Motown. But for Mazda, the friendly and food-fixated singer is a social media content machine.

With the help of Firstborn, the "first thorough archeological" exploration of the Titanic brought some friends along. The latest Titanic adventure took years of planning as well as cutting-edge technology and marketing -- but hurricanes were almost the project's undoing.