Super Bowl XLI will be a milestone. Not for the game or programming, but for commercials sponsored by advertisers, produced by agencies and fueled by consumer participation.

Wall Street Journal reporter David Kesmodel discovered the inconveniences of surfing the Internet as anonymously as possible: longer load times, error pages, and more time spent re-entering logins on registration-driven news sites and shopping sites.

Now it's Sept. 13 and the world has come full circle, because if you've seen the new iPod commercials you've seen that the one and only Bob Dylan is singing in an iPod commercial.

This Monday, everybody seemed to have a way of reflecting on the 9/11 attacks and how they affect us today. Personally, I prefer to dwell on the positive. To me, that meant looking back at the events of Sept. 11, 2001 and how online communities responded as news of the attacks reverberated throughout the world.

Five years after 9/11, it's still a sea of emotions. So what do we do as a culture on a day like to today? More specifically, what do we do in our industry? Do we advertise or not? If we do advertise today via any media online or offline, do we change our creative and copy? Do we pay tribute or do we treat it like any day?

For all the positive attention YouTube brings to consumer-generated video, I'm skeptical of it. First, it's Napster for video; piracy is common and that's not sustainable for any business. Second, it does little to nurture content creators, and seemingly nothing to compensate them or share revenues.

In an attempt to "meet the demands of today's diverse media landscape," ABC just released a new report that purports to aggregate a publications' circulation, pass-along, and Web site traffic into a consolidated report. At first blush, it sounds like a good idea. But it's not.

I wanted to point out a stat I read this week that had me thinking. According to a study from Jupiter Research, 20 percent of all marketers "plan to use viral marketing" next year.

Last week, I pointed to YouTube as an example of an online video business that could have easily sold out to the man, but didn't. The obvious way to monetize a site full of interesting video clips is to disregard the user experience and begin running pre-roll video ads. But it looks like YouTube wants a sustainable video play here, so they've debuted a model that is more respectful of the user experience.

There seems to be a rising flood of mainstream, mega-brands entering social networks as participants--increasingly with fake or character profiles. Not only that, many are seeking to catapult their popularity with hybrid sponsorship and promotion models.