Perhaps it seems foolish to you for me to write a column on click-through rate in 2006. The online industry really got burned in the past because of this little metric. A metric whose value rarely ever reached the number one! But, if you take a leap of faith and are foolish enough to read it, I think it will be worth your while.

As writers, we Spinners get asked about our opinions on the online space. We also get asked to predict trends. Back at the beginning of the year, many of us said that peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies, sites and the like were something to watch out for. Wow was that an understatement. How many times have you received an e-mail from a friend or colleague asking you to post your current contact information on a service? I'm quite sure you've been asked several times to join someone's "network." I don't know about you but I have a …

Toby Bloomberg recently published a Q&A with Bill Neal, the "Godfather of Marketing Research," about the role of consumer-generated media in market research. Bill is an accomplished researcher, and surely smarter and more experienced than me. Despite his credentials, his assertions unfortunately reveal an absence of even the most basic understanding of CGM.

As an industry, we've been much more focused on how to be successful upstarts in business than how to build, sustain or protect our long-term market positions through public policy. However, given the stunning defeat that online media suffered at the hands of the telecommunications industry in the House of Representatives on Net neutrality recently, it's pretty clear that we have to start taking public policy seriously.

Once in a great while, when the weight of the work world lightens up and lifts off my desk and I'm able to achieve a brief respite from days full of projects, debates and discussions, I get a moment to actually surf the Web from the eyes of the consumer (albeit a consumer who pays an inordinate amount of attention to advertising)....

In mathematics, an asymptote is an imaginary line to which a function or formula comes awfully close, but never quite reaches. I like to think of the search experience along the same lines--search results will never be perfectly relevant to a query, but they'll come very close...

It seems eBay is getting into the ad network space. This weekend at the eBay Developer's Conference in Las Vegas, Michael van Swaaij, eBay's chief strategy officer, announced plans of a new ad network. At first it sounds a bit "typical." Well, it isn't.

There's a powerful, perhaps mutually dependent, relationship between CGM and broadband; they support each other's continued demand and growth. The more people adopt broadband, the more people will be able to engage in and enjoy CGM. And the more people who benefit from CGM, the more they will need to adopt broadband (the network effect).

Some interesting headlines came out of Google's investor conference call last week. From Business Week: "Google Fumbles Offline." From the San Francisco Chronicle: "Google Can't Sell All the Ads that are Fit to Print."

I've been working on a book for the last few months--one that detailed what the implications were for marketers in the age of the demise of popular culture. Unfortunately, I think I may already be outdated with my basic idea. Let me explain...