If you are reading this, your life is probably fast paced. Every campaign, new business pitch, request for proposal, and the like comes to you with an 'ASAP' deadline. I feel like most of us are a bit desensitized by this now. Remember when you were a kid in the business? Do you remember the first time this happened? I do. It was as if I swallowed my heart. Now this is par for the course. I've lived like this for years and pressure seems to make me excel. However, I think the industry has finally gone too far.

Anyone who reads this space knows how seriously I take online privacy and consumer impressions of our industry. And, anyone reading last week's column knows how much I want to keep regulators and legislators out of our business as much as possible - even with legislation - just perhaps not such restrictive legislation, which now seems inevitable.

The technical definition of the Internet is fairly unimportant to this thought experiment. What I want you to think about is the conventional or popular definition. To non-technical people (which is most everyone), the Internet is a means through which they browse the Web and get e-mail. In their mind's eyes, they imagine the access point as their computer (desktop or laptop). In some cases, where the users are on the higher-end of the technology curve, they might think of the access point as primarily their computer and secondarily their PDA or, in rare cases, their cell phones. This is …

What do you think of the digital home? Over the last two years, numerous companies have focused at least an element of their strategies on the concept of the digital home; a home that is wired for connectivity and at the leading edge of the convergence between the Internet and other forms of entertainment. There would be digital video and audio streaming in through the TV or entertainment center, time-shifted to suit their needs and organized based on their desires at that moment in time. E-mail would be out of the den, and more integrated with entertainment.

Editorial guidelines for advertising predate the rise of the Internet by many years. Particularly in print advertising, marketers who place ads often want to know ahead of time about articles in any issues in which they advertise that could detract from their message. Similarly, these advertisers often want to know about opportunistic editorial that enhances their message, so that they can arrange for editorial adjacencies.

Look around. Anywhere. Yes, anywhere: On the train going to work, dropping the kids off at school, their soccer game this past weekend, the movies, meetings, the airport...anywhere. What do you see? Most likely the bulk of the people are on their mobile devices. If not they've got them close at hand - in their pockets, clipped onto their belts, floating around a purse. My guess is that their device is never more than a ring or two away.

For any among you who've been under a rock for the past week, New York Attorney General (AG) Eliot Spitzer sued Intermix, an Internet marketing company on April 28.

About half of Google's staff works on identifying and delivering relevant results based on keyword search strings entered by users. The actual Google search algorithm is a well kept "trade secret." However, many find consensus in the notion that in the "post Florida update" era, Google still ranks pages by counting the number links back to them. As one might imagine, there is a "secret sauce" component, and maybe even a human being somewhere in the process -- but they won't say for sure. What is clear, is that Google's unique selling principle is the delivery of highly relevant search …

This week I was forwarded an article that ran in The Economist. The article dealt with the consumer and their position of power in the role of media development, but there was one element of the article I found to be very interesting as it sparked an idea in my head and seemed to mesh with a concept I had already been thinking about, but was having difficulty in expressing.

Not to belabor the issue, but my column from two weeks ago centered around a report from Atlas that claimed the sky wasn't falling on cookies, and that report has subsequently been corrected.