Last year, after a decade in the media business, I left the world of buying and selling ads to start an enterprise software company. Technically, I am still involved in the media business since the HR software we are building is designed for agencies and media companies. I also write about the industry in this column as well as for my blog, The Makegood. But compared to the cacophonous world of media, running a software company has been a significant change. Sometimes, it's a bit like living in a monastery. The high priests are the engineers-the people that conjure software …

Are you a fan of net neutrality? I'm going to guess that most readers of this column are. Net neutrality, the idea that service providers shouldn't be able to make any restriction on bandwidth based on content, means your ISP can't slow you down just because you watch a ton of movies or download thousands of songs. It means you can connect your new device without worrying about whether you've exceeded your cap on wireless devices. It means that people looking at your site will receive it at the same speed whether you're a giant media company like MediaPost or …

Last week, in a now-(in)famous column -- "Don't Mean To Be Alarmist, But The TV Business May Be Starting To Collapse" -- Business Insider's Henry Blodget suggested the television industry looks very much like the newspaper industry did in the moments before their businesses started to collapse. Henry's column sparked scores of response pieces in the trade press, blogs and on Twitter. While I think the world of Henry Blodget (and, full disclosure, am an investor in Business Insider), I don't think that what the television industry is facing today looks anything at all like what newspapers started to confront …

The last few weeks have confirmed it for me: Social media is about 70% hype, and 30% business. I mean that the majority of conversations surrounding social media center on behavior that creates page views but very little actual value to a brand marketer, and therefore little impact on the business of the Internet. Let's deconstruct my statement for a bit, because I know many of you will immediately jump to skewer me for this

"If you work in [enter four-letter dirty word that rhymes with spit], you tend to produce [enter four-letter dirty word that rhymes with spit]." That's a quote I overheard from a renowned chef at one of New York's top French restaurants, where I once worked. To be sure, the quote included the actual four-letter word. I really like the quote because it's direct and packed with meaning. It's tactical, but also aspirational.

The traditional wisdom has been that all the ad networks were doomed. That hasn't happened. Sure, the herd may have thinned a bit, but in my informal surveys of companies, I found networks alive and well, with the largest doing the best. How on earth can this be? Shouldn't the agencies, with their trading desks and technology partners, be crushing every ad network by now? Weren't publishers going to build private exchanges and cut the networks out? There are half a dozen factors that explain why the top networks are doing so well:

When the movie "Kids" came out in 1995, it terrified me. Not because Larry Clark's portrayal of a group of kids doing drugs and having unprotected sex was so disturbing, but because it was so easy to imagine myself hanging out with them. I grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I went to a "good" school. And, like kids everywhere since the dawn of time, we experimented. We didn't always make smart choices. We often didn't understand the implications of our actions.

The advertising, marketing and media industry is fortunate to have so many great trade organizations and lots of stand-alone charitable foundations focused on attracting, retaining, retraining and mentoring present and future talent. Like many of you, I'm part of an industry foundation dedicated to shaping future media leaders, and was part of several discussions this week of how the mission of shaping our future leaders is changing. I would like to discuss some of these issues --and, hopefully, get some of your feedback and create some conversations about these important issues.

Much has been written about the advent of the "math men" in advertising, but with the events of the last two weeks I think it makes sense to talk about the algorithms of social media and how they should be applied to more than just advertising -- also to content delivery and the overall consumer experience.

Thanks to the continual spate of interviews with luminaries paying tribute to Steve Jobs, the D10 conference dominated last week's tech and media news flows. I wasn't there live, but I followed the coverage and watched some of the videos. My favorite was an interview with Dr. Ed Catmull, president of Walt Disney Animation Studios and Pixar Animation Studios. He also founded the computer graphics laboratory at the New York Institute of Technology, the computer division of Lucasfilm Ltd, and Pixar Animation Studios (where he was partners with Steve Jobs). Perhaps more than anyone else, Catmull has been behind the …