There is no content in the world more inherently social than the news. Be it local or international, the news binds people together. The news begs for people to discuss and share it. Long before we had the tools offered today by Twitter, Digg, Facebook, blog commenting or email, people found ways to share the news -- and, more important, their interpretation of the news -- with each other. In all its forms, the news is a baseline for a significant portion of all conversations. Can anybody really argue that job number one for news media outlets is to better …

This past weekend, I hung out on Long Island with a few of my traditionally rooted media publishing friends. Among the group was a friend I'll call Jane, who runs business research and insights at a major media company. She is intimately and credibly versed in the strengths and weakness of the various partners that support her in her role of providing insights to every single property under her roof. Discussing Nielsen's major correction last week of bad performance data on major media properties led to a chat on what she regards as an ugly truth: online data is bad …

For years, analysts forecast an explosion in local online advertising, especially search. But we saw firsthand tremendous friction preventing faster, sustainable growth. With a stake in this market, we wanted to gain a much deeper understanding to improve search-marketing performance for local businesses. That's why we asked Borrell Associates, a research and consulting firm that tracks local ad spending, to study the economics of local search advertising, and surface key challenges, solutions and opportunities.

As we all know, television has a big problem with content discovery. According to The Accenture Global Broadcast Consumer Survey 2009, television viewers "face a significant bottleneck in discovering content that they like but have not seen before." The report goes on to state that "the proliferation of content options across devices is overwhelming to consumers." But search is not going to be the silver bullet for television the way it was for online services.

Working in this industry as I do, I'm familiar with the stops, starts and missteps that have defined Microsoft's efforts in search over the last 15 years. I'm curious about whether the company can right the ship, so I decided to try Bing for myself.

Google has made billions for a lot of reasons, but no reason is more important than the fact that Google created a marketplace that rewards good advertising. Sure, good advertising should always be rewarded by selling more product, but when Google's magic system started rewarding marketers by reducing the price per click for "good" ads, it created a virtuous circle: better ads, happier users, efficient pricing for marketers... oh, and of course more money for Goooooooooooogle.

Since the 1990s, there have always been extreme characters within the digital sphere. Profound market opportunity has bred these: cowboys who swaggered about practically blinded by dollar signs, spawning get-rich business after get-rich business; evangelists outfitted with weird business cards, acting often more as pundit than practitioner; and of course the untethered, lightning-rod CEOs who either inspired greatness or left much in the wake. Then, there is the guru: the guru of a single discipline, anointed to show us the way. As we grew up as an industry, the guru has been a necessary extreme.

In this age of distributed presence, what does an optimal bio look like? Should it be long, or short? Or should it be written in inverted pyramid style, with the most important information at the top, and the granular details at the bottom? Should you host it in one place or hundreds?

I'm living in the TV world these, spending my time trying to better understand television viewership patterns and how to improve the TV experience for viewers. Since I've spent the better part of the past 18 years in the online world, I am always looking for linkages between the online world and the television world, from anticipating an Internet Protocol-driven television future to leveraging Web services to better predict or influence actual television viewership. Relative to the latter, my team has been spending a lot of time lately analyzing Twitter data to try to see if it could be …

If you're attempting to measure engagement online, you're most likely looking at time spent in ad units as one of your primary considerations -- and if you're not, then you're probably doing it wrong. That being said, keeping a watchful eye on time spent in a single ad unit is only telling a part of the whole story, so you're still not looking at the whole picture.