As you might imagine, these Ed:Blog things are typically written at the last moment, after the rest of the content in the magazine is done, and I suppose they're intended to reflect on what the issue is about, and why you should care about reading it.

For an industry that produces something most people say they detest and usually try to avoid, Madison Avenue has a pretty big chip on its shoulder. Sure, people love to talk about ads-research shows they often do like them and frequently seek them out-but the notion that human beings might actually want to hold on to and even share advertising seems counterintuitive in an era of supreme consumer control and hyperfragmentation of media. But a new segment of the industry is emerging on the assumption that people don't necessarily want to avoid ads - they just don't want to be …

Scott Kurnit's new venture, AdKeeper, brings him full circle to his family heritage in the advertising business. But the path wasn't so clear-cut early on.

There were businesses that left New Orleans for good after Hurricane Katrina devastated The Big Easy in 2005 - you can't fault them for wanting to make a fresh start elsewhere. But Trumpet, a branding agency and venture marketing firm launched by Pat McGuinness and Robbie Vitrano in 1997, chose to remain in New Orleans. "We were the first agency to be back in operation here after Katrina," McGuinness says, "and we'll probably be the last to leave."

Long before Mark Zuckerberg was a gleam in his mother's eye, Weight Watchers was creating a business based on community building and peer-to-peer support - also the building blocks of social media. These days, the 48-year-old company still convinces people to pay to talk to each about their weight; it also sells them online-only memberships, digital tools and a game - the Points programs - to help them earn the prize of a thinner body. The whole socially oriented, content-heavy endeavor is promoted with a hefty ad budget - more than $120 million in the U.S. this year, per industry …

Men haven't been treated like equals when it comes to buying high-end fashion online. In fact, they've been treated like second-class shoppers. Most of the upscale retail sites, including net-a-porter.com, have been created and designed with women in mind. But men want their Burberry, their Gucci and their Lanvin, too, and after a decade of catering almost exclusively to the ladies, Net-A-Porter has manned up and launched a separate site just for men.

Consumers have come to believe that when a brand ranks high in organic search the brand must be a quality brand. While there are a lot of factors that affect rankings, our own experience has proved Google's algorithm to be valid. When I search for mutual funds, the top three paid results are Vanguard, T. Rowe Price and Fidelity. The top organic results are links from Wikipedia, Morningstar, CNN and Vanguard. The results just make sense, so our ongoing experience supports the quality hypothesis.

Many companies are decent at targeting the new parent demographic yet not necessarily through the years which follow. So how do you not just get them but keep them? Rufus Griscom, CEO of online magazine Babble.com, which has six million visiting moms a month, says it's important to understand the changing role and mindset of the mother. "There's a lot of confusion going on," Griscom says. "Years ago, you had many more stay-at-home mothers. Now you have moms going off to work and maybe feeling guilty. Some who stay home are feeling guilty. If you can help them with this …

It's not clear whether Larry Page's return to run Google will breathe new life into the technology company or find it slipping to second place and forced to play catch-up to another Internet giant. One thing is for sure - the cofounder, along with Sergey Brin, will shake things up.

By the time this goes to press, Charlie Sheen could be dead, incarcerated, or - heck - back on TV. But at the time of writing, he was just getting the first reviews for his touring one-man show, "My Violent Torpedo of Truth/Defeat Is Not an Option." Everyone seems to agree that it is horrendously bad: not funny, because he's not a stand-up comedian; not interesting, since all he does is rant; and not revelatory, as he's still at pains to present a cool, "winning" image (on stage at least).