The number of Americans subscribing to monthly TV service provided by their cable, satellite and/or teleco has dropped over the past two quarters, the first decline in decades. Is it the economy? Or are Americans starting to "cut the cord" on paid TV services and to view their television programming over the Internet? Are the pay TV subscription declines the beginning of the end? Or, as others argue, are they just cyclical consequences of the U.S. economy mired in a slow recovery from a very deep recession? I believe the latter, and here is why:

Social media is a lot like selling media: You need to listen first before you do anything else.I came upon this parallel last week in two separate discussions, and I realized they were both part of a larger theme. Social media is a conversation, but selling media is also a conversation. Both are based on relationships and the relevance, strength, interest and benefit to both parties engaged in the conversation. In social media marketing you have to establish a baseline and listen to the conversation before you interrupt it with your message, and in media sales the same idea can …

Will Facebook replace email? I don't know. It has as good a shot as any company has ever had at dominating how people communicate, but there are a number of challenges still ahead. Since the Internet began there has always been one question that unimaginative investors and naysayers use to tell innovative companies to not do something: "Why wouldn't ______ just do it?" Or, depending on the decade, "Where is Microsoft, Google or Facebook?"

As we often do, I spent a little time this past week pondering the mingling of the old and the new. Old and new media, that is. I've been catching up on my reading about AOL's new journalism project. No irreverence intended -- but some of the details are curious, considering the entity and the change-making executives involved. Ad economy pacemaker Tim Armstrong, for one.

Perhaps the biggest news in the Internet industry this week was Amazon.com's purchase of Quidsi, parent of Diapers.com, for $540 million. According to Claire Cain Miller of The New York Times, the "acquisition suggests how far Amazon will go to maintain its edge in many corners of e-commerce."

While attending Publicis' Monaco Media Forum this week, I was a bit taken aback when a representative of a massive global technology company, referring to the company's recent roll-out of a new product to international markets, used the acronym "EMEA" for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. This, of course, to a room of EMEA'ns.

Way back in the olden days, a brand needed to establish itself digitally through the launch and management of a website, the core digital presence where a brand could engage with consumers. Shift forward to 2008, when digital brand presence expanded to include Facebook and possibly even Twitter as social media increased in importance. Now in 2010, and as we look forward to 2011, the question arises whether the requirements are increasing again to include apps, which are now morphing into their very own cross-platform opportunity.

When News Corp. put The Times of London and Sunday Times behind paywalls, everyone was fully expecting a massive hit to both publication's traffic. Now we know how bad the traffic hit was, as noted in Eric Schonfeld's "The Times UK Lost 4 Million Readers To Its Paywall Experiment." But the bigger story for advertisers is that News Corp. doesn't care, or at least not that much. Why?

Like many people -- and for mostly good reasons -- I have been drawn into the Apple way of life. And, since, despite what most fan boys will tell you, it is not a perfect situation, succumbing to this prevalence is a sickness. MacBooks do not have a long life, no matter how glorious they make your life while they are with you; data rights management, if you really think clearly about it, makes your blood boil; iPods just up and die one by one all the time. It's like pantyhose: disposable beauty.

It's been nearly four years since the city of São Paulo, Brazil, voted -- nearly unanimously -- to ban advertising in public spaces. While the U.S. advertising industry was indifferent to this far-away backlash, I thought it was intriguing. I haven't thought too much about this ban until recently, when I read a column in The New Scientist on efforts to use technology to remove corporate logos from view.