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 …

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."

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.

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 …

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.

"May you live in interesting times," the ironic old Chinese curse goes, and the last few months have certainly been that, as popular revolts toppled authoritarian regimes in Tunisia and Egypt and precipitated a bloody civil war in Libya. There's already been a great deal of debate about the role of social media in these uprisings - and whether we can even draw links between human action and media influence, of whatever type.

Barneys New York is undergoing a physical and a virtual makeover under the aegis of CEO Mark Lee, who joined the company last fall. While plans to renovate all of the luxury retailer's stores are in the works, Lee has already revamped barneys.com with the launch of The Window. Created in conjunction with digital shop Group SJF, The Window is an editorial site featuring exclusive content related to luxury, culture and beauty.

Traditionally, Cravendale, a brand of milk sold in the UK by Arla Foods, releases a TV commercial, and then supports it with print. But Wieden + Kennedy London convinced its client to forego magazine and newspaper ads and instead rely on social media to support "Cats With Thumbs," a clever spot that finds a gang of Cravendale-craving felines sprouting opposable thumbs, brushing up on military strategy (and needlepoint, too) and forming an army with one objective - quenching its thirst for Cravendale.

Your newest-generation smartphone isn't the only technology that constantly verges on obsolescence. Smartphone-triggering Quick Reality (QR) codes, those ubiquitous square bar codes popping up on everything from magazine pages (most famously in Esquire's December 2010 "Augmented Reality" issue) to billboard advertisements to marketing emails, might already be antiquated - simply because your primitive human eye can see them.

Even though Rosie Larsen has been murdered, fans of AMC's new original series "The Killing," which premiered on April 3, are getting to know her through an interactive narrative experience hosted in "The Killing" section of amctv.com. "You discover things about her - little clues to who she was in life that may help you, to some degree, gain insight into why she may have been murdered," says Mac McKean, vice president of digital media at the AMC Network.