So, be sure to disable your cookies, all you WSJ subscribers. That's clearly what the Journal would have us do.

Descartes was pretty sure that even the greatest of evil powers could not persuade him that he existed if he didn't: cogito ergo sum, "I think, therefore I am." Not too many people are concerned with proving that they exist today, not even philosophers. The science fiction cliché of the "brain in the jar" is well understood to be exactly what we are - at least in the technical sense. Only our jar is alive.

Why isn't radio focusing on the elements that make it a crucial medium? This week I had the pleasure of sitting with a local radio personality, Chuy Gomez, from 106 KMEL Jams, in San Francisco. KMEL is the No. 1 Hip Hop and R&B station for the Bay Area, and the discussion centered on the future of radio and how to combat its decreasing listenership. General radio has been declining over the last 10 years and has picked up steam in the last five as a direct result of new technologies. The growth of the Internet and digital …

My second cousin Susan, who shares my last name, is slowly but surely gaining ground on me. For years, I've enjoyed the top listings on Google and Yahoo! under my last name. Hespos.com has always come up No. 1, and anyone searching for me could easily find my online home. Recently, however, Susan's faculty profile on a Web page at Vanderbilt has taken over the No. 1 slot on Yahoo! under "Hespos" and her listings are climbing up the relevance ladder to overtake many of mine, including the listing for the Hespos.com Web site. (I still, however, own No. …

It seems like everywhere you look search occupies a headline or two. Between you and me, these articles are not new news to folks like us. It's the same old "Advertisers are flocking to search engines"-type gig. Don't get me wrong, such verbiage has often allowed us a seat at the table. I'm not knocking positive press, but there hasn't been any real "news" out there in the search world lately.

I'm obviously just a little grunt among the many industry pundits who think that local targeting is probably the coolest thing about the future of our industry. But, as much as I write about it, the many technological barriers that exist may yet conspire to make it the next big thing for years to come. After all, local is about direct marketing (DM), and we generally try to convince a skeptical world that we're far more than just that, right?

The Eskimos have 27 words for snow... The Great Wall of China is the only manmade object you can see from space... more than 20 percent of value is locked up in the Long Tail. These are all myths that have such romantic power, you just want to believe them, but they are still myths.

What do you think of "unbundling"? When I started in advertising way back in 1995 (insert snicker here), the pendulum had just started to swing towards the model of unbundling. Agencies argued that you needed to unbundle media and creative; unbundle brand development and direct response; unbundle traditional from interactive. The terms thrown around were "Best of Breed" and "Category Experts."

You may have seen a Center For Media Research bulletin float across your desktop today with some topline results of a BIGresearch survey on media multitasking in which nearly 70 percent of adults 18 or older say they multitask while using online media. The same research study gives lower percentages of multitaskers for media such as newspapers, magazines and mail. Sixty-nine percent of 18-plus adults said they were multitasking when listening to the radio. To find slightly more multitasking going on while consuming online media was at first surprising to me, but then I thought about it for a bit …

Let's say you're Microsoft CEO Steven A. Ballmer. After being part of a decade of dominance in the 1990's, you've watched Yahoo! beat you to the web portal business, then beat you at Search. You've watched Google pass you at Search, then pass you again in building an ad platform for not just online directories, but for web publishers too.