Peer-to-peer computing has become the coolest application in the Internet Age since the browser itself. It has made real what the Internet promises to do and how it will deliver on those promises. No one could have foreseen just how immensely popular these applications would become. Looking back, it seems almost awkwardly obvious. The recording industry, always late to the party with respect to new media (phonograph records from cylinders, records to tapes) were again tardy to the game of digital distribution of music. The movie industry, strangely enough, was also terribly clumsy about its attempts to deal with …

Today's fun fact... there are currently more than 30 million Wi-Fi users in North America. There are approximately 118 million users worldwide, generated via more than 125 million Wi-Fi hotspots around the world (stats courtesy of Pyramid Research via BusinessWeek Online). If you didn't think Wi-Fi was going to have an impact, think again.

A couple of weeks ago, my buddy Dan and I hopped in his Chevy Trailblazer and headed off to the sporting goods store. As we headed out on the 30-minute drive, Dan showed off his satellite radio setup, switching amongst the many channels. As a guy who takes many long-distance trips to go hiking and camping around the country, Dan had a lot of praise for satellite radio. He noted searching for stations in the mountains used to be somewhat of a pain, but now he can listen to radio programs (especially Yankee games) all the way through stretches of …

As many of you know, I spend my days eating, sleeping, and breathing brands. Many of the brands I have worked on have had a long shelf life. As an ad geek, I admire the brands that we all know and love. Many of them have been around a long time. Think Tony the Tiger. Or the Pillsbury Dough Boy and Aunt Jemima? Have you ever put your heart and soul into a brand that only sticks around for a few weeks or even days? Ask anyone in the movie biz and they'll nod their heads.

There has been a great deal of gnashing of teeth among thought leaders and others in our industry during the past six months or so over the tension between innovation and operations in our business. The Web marketing business is largely populated by leaders who innovate but who have little knowledge of the operations - the granular, working elements - of their enterprise. Digital marketing is no different from many other businesses in this way, which is one reason why so many businesses fail. The pain in this tension seems never to dissipate in our business, as even some …

Starting Monday afternoon and going well into Tuesday morning, the wires were hot with the news of Barry Diller's acquisition of AskJeeves for the price of nearly $2 billion. You all remember AskJeeves, don't you? It's the search engine that in the late '90s made much of its natural language search tool. It was going to revolutionize search as we knew it then, which, admittedly, wasn't all that well. At the time AskJeeves came online in 1997, the online media industry was still very much in its infancy. And search marketing? Search marketing at the time largely consisted of …

As always, Time magazine runs a column called "Numbers" in which random statistics are thrown out based on some relevancy to newsworthy items from the past week. I typically look at these snippets of information as directional signs for popular culture, and as a result this is a sign of where advertising should be headed. This week there were numbers I felt were very interesting and worthy of noting.

An axiom of online marketing goes something like this: "If you can't scientifically ascertain a measurement, at least provide ammunition supporting your best guess." That's what we should be doing about the cookie-blocking and cookie-clearing problems. It would take visibility into the security settings and application usage preferences of tens of thousands of average, everyday Web surfers to understand fully how cookie blocking and cookie clearing is affecting our measurements and metrics in this industry. This isn't something that can be accomplished easily within a short timeframe. But we don't need such a study to tell us that …

A lot of people had invaluable comments when it came to my rich media piece last week. It seems that just about everyone thinks the term rich media is out. It also seems as if the industry need not replace it with a timelier phrase. My colleague and fellow writer Jim Meskauskas chimed in and said, "Let's just call it media." Many of you echoed his sentiments. As far as creative goes, many of you reference rich media units as none other than ad units. In speaking with several folks from the buy side, I have found that there …

There have been some very strong commentaries published in MediaPost this week, with two bylines standing out above and beyond. These two are Jeff Einstein's "Be Careful What You Ask For" on Wednesday, and Jim Meskauskas' "Remember the People" in yesterday's Online Spin.