On Friday, Mark Naples covered a piece written by The Wall Street Journal's Walter Mossberg that likened cookies to spyware. Mossberg's article contains what I would consider to be mischaracterizations of how marketers and online publishers use cookies at best, and inaccurate facts at worst. For one, Mossberg's article characterizes cookies as non-permission based when he asks that companies that make use of cookies "go straight." He suggests that companies that use cookies "should ask a user's permission to install the cookies, pointing out whatever user benefits they believe the cookies provide." A quick check of The Wall Street …

At least once a week I am asked by clients and prospects, "What's up with RSS feeds?" It seems like most have seen headlines and know it's new Web jargon, but don't know what the heck it is. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is a kind of XML format. It contains a list of items that are individually identified with a link. RSS feeds were originally invented by Netscape when it was trying to get into the portal business. Netscape came out with RSS .91 and then dropped it when the company decided to get out of …

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."