On my train ride home, I often use the browser on my Handspring Treo to help me make plans for when I arrive at home. I check movie start times, look for hours and locations of retail stores, and use online reservation systems for restaurants and all sorts of other things. The Blazer browser that comes with the Treo is not the most fully functional browser in the world, but it usually gets the job done.

The marketing intelligentsia has been affixing the long tail descriptor to Blogs and Search Engine Marketing for so long that there's been less attention paid to what's really been driving growth of interactive for the past year - the short twitch.

Remember Razzles? Back when I was a kid (when the Earth was cooling), they had a wonderful advertising campaign that asked the question: "...is it a gum or a candy?" Razzles were truly unusual. They were a bizarre cross between a sucking candy and chewing gum. Nobody knew how to describe them, so the advertising agency decided to forego classical benefit-oriented advertising concepts and focus on the confusing feature set. The campaign turned the product's weakness into its strength (very Sun Tzu). The results were excellent, because the product was excellent. The ad promoted sampling and once sampled, the product …

It's hard to determine which is getting more press right now, "Star Wars Episode III" or the Xbox 360. Both are resolving many questions that have resided in our minds over the past few years, and both signal a distinctly different, technologically advanced future. "Star Wars" resolves all the questions about how Anakin becomes Darth Vader. The Xbox 360 resolves all the questions about whether or not Microsoft will improve its foray into the gaming world, as well as how Microsoft is going to push to own the virtual world that will reside in our homes. Oh, and both …

Maybe you've had an experience like this... Your client gets a well-written e-mail through the customer support address listed on their Web site. The writer is usually a loyal customer, as evidenced by the first two paragraphs of their e-mail, which describes how they've been buying your client's product or service for years and have always been satisfied. And this loyal customer is writing your client to try to understand why they're advertising on a porn site.

Its tag line is rediscover the Web. Just think about that for a moment. We are all so used to going online. It is part of our daily lives. We have our favorite sites bookmarked, we subscribe to music download sites, e-mail groups, instant messenger clients, etc. We search or look up anything and everything from restaurant reviews to movie listings to booking airline tickets and checking local weather reports.

I had a Dickensian Wednesday this week. Yes, it was the best of times and it was the worst of times, all in one day. The best of times was reading that Los Angeles Times article that has so many people talking. Many in our industry were glowing about the piece that ran this Wednesday with the headline Web Pulls Ad Buyers From TV. Other online outlets have covered the news value of this, so there's little point in reviewing the facts here. Let's just say that this article in one of the country's most respected newspapers, with references …

An old friend of mine sent me an e-mail a few days ago that went something like this... "Maybe you can help me out. I'm looking for sponsors for our podcast show." One has to be a friend to have a friend, so I dutifully visited his Web site and listened to a few of the shows. They were long, vulgar, semi-funny (in a junior high school kind of way), trying too hard, over the top, self- indulgent crap. In other words, they were just my kind of entertainment! These audio sagas were labors of love - pure life …

Podcasting is starting to get lumped in with blogs as one of the most significant hot new trends online. For those of you who don't know, podcasts are content delivered via the Web to your iPod that allow you to listen at your leisure. If you read the press, you might come to the conclusion that Adam Curry invented podcasting, but then again you might also believe that Al Gore invented the Internet.

The Victoria's Secret webcasts, the wild success of BMW Films, the sparring between Garry Kasparov and an IBM supercomputer - these are all things that were very widely distributed on the Internet in years past. Yet in terms of making media history through a specific moment shared by U.S. media consumers, can any of these compare to seeing the Beatles on "Ed Sullivan" or tuning in regularly to Uncle Miltie? I'd argue not.