It's hard to hold conversations when everyone who's talking has varying views on the definitions of key vocabulary. Yet our entire industry is talking about social media -- and I defy you to find two people that define social media the same way. Determined to solve this problem for the industry single-handedly... I looked up the term on Wikipedia (which, incidentally, cites itself as an example of social media). What I found was not only woefully incomplete (first time this has happened to me on Wikipedia), but there are a couple of areas where I would differ with the entry …

The Internet has become a necessity, not a luxury. It's funny because I, like you, remember when we looked at the Web differently. Remember putting together all those slides for sales deck pitches and presentations? The ones that showed the penetration of the Internet as a media? Or how about the slide captioned, "Pretty soon everyone will be online."

The underworlds of porn and gambling are likely to go down in history for making some of the greatest contributions to emerging virtual worlds, including Second Life.

Good news! Tom Deierlein, COO of Dynamic Logic, who was wounded by a sniper while on active military duty in Baghdad, is coming back to work. Read excerpts from his latest letter to family and friends.

With the entire buzz being generated through numerous consolidations and mergers, it's interesting to witness the trend towards vertical ad networks and away from the previous model of broad-reach, broad-targeted networks.

Facebook has fired the starting gun signaling the race to social media's next evolution, gaining a significant edge in the race. The open call is for droves of driven, innovative and funded entrepreneurs to develop feature sets and functionality to improve the quality of Facebook life, rather than focusing their collective efforts on building Facebook competitors. I guess that's the nice thing about being the one that fires the starting gun; you can give yourself a nice head start.

While most in our business have been allocating attention to all the digital media acquisitions this past week, I've had my mind on something else: my first child, Julian, turned six months old on Monday. I'll go easy on the sappy details of my ultra-proud reminiscing, and focus on a number of key areas where fatherhood has changed me as a work-obsessed exec in the hectic media and marketing business.

What a month. Over the past four and one-half weeks, we've seen more than $12 billion in announced acquisitions in the online advertising industry. Lots of people are trying to understand what is going on and why this is happening now. I've been in the media business for the better part of the past 30 years, with almost one-half of that time working in the Internet and new media. While the pace and size of these deals may seem a bit dizzying to some, I think that there are some pretty clear market signals being expressed in these deals. Here …

Back in the late '90s, Apple launched an elegant campaign which asked the audience to "Think Different." This omnipresent campaign was beautiful in its simplicity and represents one of my favorite ad campaigns of all time purely for the message that it sent -- that ingenuity and creativity are what is rewarded in life.

The death of print news is inevitable. Even with the timeline still very much in question, news printed on dead trees with ink that will come off on your hands, containing stories you'll never read, or interesting ones that were restricted by arbitrary print deadlines, already out of date in an age of instantaneous digital information access, sooner or later will go the way of the VHS. So what? If traditional media empires were really only differentiated by their logistical ability to distribute a physical good by a certain time every morning, then FedEx and UPS would have put News …