I'm passionate about digital media, marketing and disruption, but I can't think about any of that stuff right now. As I write this column early Thanksgiving day, I'm thankful for one very special reason: I became a dad Tuesday morning of this week, Nov. 21 at 12:31 a.m.!

Since you're probably half in the office and half out today, at least mentally, I thought I'd take this episode of the Spin to share with each of you what I am most thankful for this year, at least from an online perspective.

Since last week we discussed the substantial impact of advertising technologies on agencies' roles, let's take a step back this week and look at what role agencies should play in shaping these technologies today.

Well, it's Thanksgiving week, officially the busiest time of year to travel. Sure, peak travel time brings significant frustration. However, the thought of home-cooked turkey and all the fixings are on just about everyone's mind.

With all the hype around YouTube, MySpace Facebook and other social-networking Web sites, I thought it would be sobering to go back in time and pay tribute to a once-thriving social-networking platform. Amazingly, it's over 100 years old and it's called amateur radio, or "ham radio." It should be crowned the grandfather of today's online social networks, and, yes, I'm serious!

This has been a big week for writing about the growing dominance of Google in the media and advertising world. In The New York Times this past Sunday, Richard Siklos chronicled the "mate or menace" dilemma that working with Google presents for most media companies. The article quotes CEO Eric Schmidt as saying, "Ultimately, our goal at Google is to have the strongest advertising network and all of the world's information." Does this mean that Google has aspirations that media companies should fear?

Have you noticed all the comic book references creeping up in our daily lives lately? Comic books have been around for many, many years and are a truly American art form. They grew in popularity with the rise of the superhero genre and have exploded in the past 15 years.

Questions abound regarding the role of the traditional agency in the new media landscape: Customization vs. automation? Creativity vs. standardization? Professional vs. user-generated? What will become of an industry dedicated to planning, buying and creating media messaging as the medium and the methods shift to digital? The answer is in the technologies.

Although we've had a bout of unseasonably warm weather for this time of year, it's beginning to look a lot like... Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza. I guess it says a lot about our economy. Brick-and-mortar retailers are pushing and promoting their wares hard. And to no one's surprise, the e-tail world is poised in a full-court press.

Last week I presented a primer on consumer-marketing measurements to a diverse group of communications professionals looking to increase their digital and media savvy. Rather than dive into tactical minutiae, I presented 10 recent mega-trends that are collectively transforming media and marketing measurements as we know them.