Of all the agency training sessions we do, the one that invariably gets the most attention and reaction is the one focused on mobile. Mobile is still a dramatically immature medium as far as content delivery is concerned, with a very small portion of the audience truly interacting with content on their phones (if you live in San Francisco, New York or Los Angeles, I'm sure you'll disagree with me -- but head away from Metropolis or the tech-hubs and you'll see what I mean). However, mobile is also the most personal and pervasive medium. During my training sessions, invariably …

Remember the first time you thought "How did people ever live without cell phones?" or "How could I have found this information without Google?" Social media has not yet demonstrated the utility to be categorized with these innovations, yet it is very quickly changing the paradigm of interpersonal communication, from a push (I call you) to a pull (You visit my MySpace). The question for marketers is this: If social media is going to achieve ubiquity as a preferred method of communication and therefore obtain a massive share of people's attention, what role can marketers play, if any?

Have we become an industry devoid of any proactive conversation? It always seems like there is a hard line in the sand drawn between buyers and sellers. Why?

We invest a lot of time nurturing relationships with reporters, including supplying interviews, insights, opinions and, sometimes, material company assets. If a journalist uses such material directly or indirectly from a company, it's common practice (and courtesy) to credit the source of that information. In pre-Internet days, sourcing the company name alone was considered fair attribution. However, a decade into the commercial Web, it's far from it! Today, where more and more news attention takes place on the Web, the hyperlink is the last mile of attribution. If they use information from a company, journalists should not only source the …

As you probably all know, Rupert Murdoch appears to be close to buying Newsday from Tribune and its new owner, Sam Zell, for $580 million. Newsday is the 400,000-circulation newspaper that dominates Long Island, New York, a major suburban market of New York City. Is Murdochnuts? What is he doing buying a big old "ink on dead trees" business for so much money, when the future is all about the Internet and Web 2.0 sites like his own MySpace, which are wrecking the future for newspapers like Newsday and its brethren?

I tried. I really, really tried. Over the last few weeks I've created many opportunities for someone to give me a definition of the term "engagement" in its marketing sense, but alas -- I've yet to be given one. The term appears destined for use in our industry for many years to come, regardless of my relative defiance against it. Since the industry has spoken and you've all decided not to vote it off the island, then it occurs to me that maybe we should come up with a definition for it.

Things are moving fast in the world of social networks. Every day it seems MySpace is adding features that mimic Facebook-like functionality, and Facebook is adding features (or apps) that make Facebook look more like MySpace. But what is the future of social networks as more niche social networks come into play and strong players like MyYearbook, Buzznet and Bebo continue to grow? Where does a marketer place his or her bets?

Move over, World Wide Web, and give a warm welcome to the World Live Web (WLW). Actually it's been around for many years now. Unfortunately it hasn't popped up in our beloved industry until late.

Last October, I contemplated canceling my bundled Internet-television-phone package through my local cable company and switching to Verizon FiOS. Of course, I had to consider feedback from several of you Spin readers -- many who said I'd be crazy not to switch. I finally gave in and had FiOS installed in early March. How did it go? Everyone in my neighborhood and beyond has been asking. Here's my report:

At Ad-Tech in San Francisco earlier this week, Morgan Stanley Internet analyst Imran Khan asked us to speculate on where the next big market opportunities were for digital marketing. We talked a lot about where we saw future potential growth areas, with most of our discussion centering on increased verticalization, non-U.S. markets, data-driven targeting, and mobile. As I've thought about that topic over the past two days, it occurred to me that there is another very big opportunity that we omitted: backfilling the impending collapse of a number of large media companies.