I'm attending the Abu Dhabi Media Summit this week -- and one of this morning's speakers, filmmaker James Cameron, really hit home with me in his comments about the challenges and opportunities of pioneering new markets. In a session with Fox studio head Jim Gianopulos and director Carlos Saldanha, Cameron spoke at length about some of the difficulties he faced in making "Avatar," which ultimately became the highest-grossing film of all time.

Is search dead? From a business perspective, the obvious answer is no, with as much as 40% of all online ad dollars going towards search. From a consumer perspective, search is very much alive and well and actually increasing in its prominence when you factor in the growth of mobile search and people searching on the go. The question I ask is whether anyone new can start a business in search and compete for revenue with Google in the marketplace. I guess the real question is whether or not innovation and the opportunity for new ideas in the search …

My heart skips a beat every time I think about the victims of last week's devastating earthquake and tsunamis in Japan. The planet once again has humbled us and reminds us that there are far more important things to worry about than digital marketing. My wife and I survived the Boxing Day tsunami in Thailand in 2004. Although an image can speak a thousand words, I can confirm firsthand that even the most dramatic and horrific imagery and videos are simply not able to portray the scope and gravity of the situation on the ground. Add to that an impending …

Many would say that the term "online journalist" is a contradiction -- that one cannot write in today's publishing environment and still call him/herself a journalist, since doing so involves so much selling out to new media that one cannot possibly practice journalistic principles in any legitimate way. Most of these criers would also say that the newspaper business has taken such a lethal hit that if print news is dead -- so is journalism. Still, I want to believe that as long as journalistic principles, practices, and ethics still live on, we are really just talking about new vehicles …

At the TED conference last week, Chris Anderson prefaced one of the speakers by saying, "Imagine if, instead of all attending the same conference, we each attended our own personalized version of TED. You could dispense with all the uncomfortable, boring stuff and only watch the stuff you wanted to watch." My reaction was one of visceral recoil, as was the reaction of everyone in my vicinity. The whole point of a conference like TED is to open your mind to new ideas -- ideas that, by definition, you didn't know you were interested in.

I spent all day Wednesday at the Montgomery Technology Conference in Santa Monica, Calif., and participated in a breakfast discussion about the changing role of data-driven analytics in business and in media particularly. The tech-focused venture and private equity event was well-attended this year, as always, with more than 1,000 investors, entrepreneurs and media execs from around the world. Some interesting points were made during the event that I thought you might find of interest:

I love click rates! I bet that got your attention, didn't it? Back in college I took a journalism class that taught us to begin a column with an attention-grabbing first sentence, so that's what I'm doing here. I'm trying to get your attention in the hopes that we can address this age-old issue! I actually really hate click rates, and before you jump on my back for being hateful, let me make my case.

Unfortunately, we rarely have the time to slow down and ask the difficult questions. As the newest member of the Online Spin team, I plan on fostering conversation, or at the very least providing fodder for thought, regarding a series of important and even controversial topics within the digital marketing industry today.

In a consumer-led, cross-platform, socially graphed, always-on environment, the conventions of "flight" and "campaign" are practically passé. They don't make sense as a frame of reference. The business-to-consumer dynamic is now entirely fluid and cannot be confined to the call and response around a given campaign.

"Treat me with relevance." That's what consumers want these days, Coca-Cola marketing exec Wendy Clark told attendees at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting in La Quinta, Calif., earlier this week. Treating folks generically no longer cuts it. Whether it's the cashier at the corner store, the airline customer service rep, a shopping website or an ATM at the other end of the country, redundant, irrelevant messaging and marketing is being banished from virtually all consumer touch-points these days.