I love when I read the posts on the Spin Boards and get feedback proclaiming things like "You missed the boat!" These are the kinds of posts that make me reexamine the articles I write and consider if I did miss the point, or if I glossed over something of value, and last week I think I did.

Ever written a letter to someone at a corporation with your feedback about a product? A substitute teacher at my high school used to hammer home the importance of knowing how to write a coherent business letter by telling a story about the time he wrote to Johnnie Walker to voice his dissatisfaction with their product, and received an entire case of Scotch whiskey for his trouble. How often do you hear those stories in the Internet age?

We spend countless hours, days, weeks and (some of us) years trying to get into the minds of consumers. We all know that getting one bit of a consumer's attention is like an X Game of hoop-jumping. We seek out the intersection of the rational and emotional. For instance, you buy a car because you need to commute to work. You buy a Hummer to be cool, hip and show status.

Lately, much has been made of the (maybe) increasingly blurred lines between marketing and journalism. I put maybe in parentheses because, depending on the outlet, this line has either been nonexistent or as impenetrable as the Great Wall of China since the advent of the insertion order.

Did Steve Jobs finally screw up? After all, if there was such a thing as the portable video business, wouldn't everyone have been walking around with a Sony Watchman for the last 20 years? No and no.

The video iPod is a MUCH bigger deal than most of us realize. The iPod is a cultural phenomenon. It's had at least as wide-reaching an impact as Napster did when it initially launched, if not more so. The video iPod has the potential to go even further.

There's been a resurgence of discussion about RSS and how it may change how content is consumed. Surprisingly, a lot of what I've been reading lately hasn't focused on the RSS value proposition to the consumer, and what the consumer expectation is concerning RSS. And unless marketers and publishers understand these things, they can't hope to monetize RSS.

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.