I saw a bunch of headlines this weekend in my local newspaper. They all pointed to the fact that the era of the VCR was dead. I guess this was something I hadn't really thought of. Perhaps I forgot about the VCR altogether. However, let's pause for a moment and pay homage to our dear ole friend who treated us well for many years: the VCR.

Go ahead--admit it. The first thing you thought of when you heard that so many men were streaming video in the wee hours and that more men than women were streamers overall was, well, porn. That's what I thought of, too. After all, some analysts have insisted for years that as much as 40 percent of all Web traffic is blue. It was true when I was at America Online in the mid-1990s, even on their family-oriented pages. How untrue could it be today?

...and my predictions are always right! Actually, predictions are always wrong--so does that mean that this one is right? This paradox may be fun for wordplay. But it is really maddening when smart people start making predictions that are absolute nonsense to people schooled-in-the-art.

It used to be that when there was a line item on a media recommendation for interactive, the line item referred to online opportunities. That is no longer the case. The lines are blurring between what has traditionally been called interactive and what is sometimes referred to as digital. For example, where should the line item for digital television be placed?

We've heard the phrase "the consumer is in control" so many times that we're sick of it. It's one of those ideas that gets mentioned so often that it tends to lose its meaning. So what does it really mean anymore?

Putting together some recent client tracking reports, a colleague asked a question about open rates. She wanted to know the latest, greatest third-party stat on the best day to drop e-mail. She's done this a million times before, but on a recent test she noticed that many consumers were opening her e-mail on weekends.

In the beginning, there was the Web. Academics and the military used it for research and something called e-mail, and it was good. Verily, some others got ahold of this Web more than 10 years later, and they realized its power as a medium of sorts. They built media models on it that were like previous media models, along the lines of magazines, catalogues, and newspapers, although more elegant and sophisticated in some ways, and far more rudimentary in others. Nevertheless, there was terrific power in this media, almost like all the trade and special-interest publications in the world …

Right this second, if you type "Everybody Hates Chris Google Video" into Google's search bar, you'll land on http:// video.google.com/ chris.html. This is a nicely designed page with a handsome graphic that tells you to "Watch premiere episode of everybody hates chris now" (Obviously, the writer and art director of this page are better at graphics than grammar.) If you performed this same exercise for four days last week, you would have been treated to an exclusive streaming video experience unlike any before it. You would have seen a full episode of a network television show legally streamed over the …

Did you know that all media is going digital? Duh... of course you did. That's a stupid question, especially for me to ask in this column. I really just wanted to see if you're paying attention, and spark you to think about the implications of this statement.

Sitting in the audience at a panel discussion at OMMA East, my thoughts drifted toward the last OMMA show in San Francisco -- specifically, Bob Garfield's "Chaos Scenario" speech, and one of the arguments that Advertising Age columnist Garfield used to support the notion that online media isn't ready for the huge influx of dollars brand marketers are prepared to spend online.