Can you endorse me? One of the most enjoyable developments in recent digital history is the arrival of a new feature on LinkedIn where you can be "endorsed" by your colleagues for various skill sets.LinkedIn scans your profile to identify "skills" you may have and then asks your colleagues to endorse you when they log in to their page. I think this could be really accurate if used correctly.

When I worked at a large communications agency early in my career, I found it odd when heralded "creatives" were automatically assigned to generate ideas for client challenges. Conversely, I also thought it odd that some clients had a knee-jerk reaction to outsource so much creative thinking to an agency in the first place, when the client organization was filled with incredibly smart and creative people.

Over the past year I've met with dozens of advertising agencies, media companies and ad tech firms to discuss their challenges in human resources technology. Since the solution that my company is building needs to work with all this tech stuff, I've become something of an expert on the HR tech landscape. Like Terry Kawaja's ad tech LUMAscape, it's a complicated picture. Here's some of what I've learned:

There are some conversations you just have to have over and over, and somehow this seems particularly true with social media. Take, for example, the idea that companies have to be on social media simply because everyone else is. I have had that conversation a hundred times -- including in this very column -- and I can always tell when I'm in a losing battle: my customer's eyes glaze over, she starts nodding, and then she says, "Right, right, right... So when can we get started?"

This has been an unusually busy conference week, even for me. On Sunday and Monday, I was at Techonomy in Tucson. Tuesday, I was at Comcast Venture's first media and tech symposium in San Francisco. And since Wednesday evening, I've been at the Monaco Media Forum. Over the past five days, I've heard inventor Ray Kurzweil speak about the future, magazine publisher Steve Forbes talk about the election, Weather Company CEO David Kenny talk about superstorm Sandy, and Monaco's Prince Albert talk about better aligning media and education. It's going to take me a while to fully digest what I've …

Last week was an interesting week. During a 7-day period, I heard more concern for the future of the Internet and digital media than I had heard in the previous 10 months. While I don't agree with much of it, it's worth hearing the arguments for and against. Let's recap, shall we?

Is online research valid? Could it be even more valid than other traditional techniques? The answer to that question lies partly in Nate Silver's analysis in The New York Times of the accuracy of dozens of major polls predicting the outcome of the last presidential election. He put the most popular survey methods under the microscope: live surveys via telephone; live surveys via mobile phone; and online surveys.

Last week, New York Times columnist Nate Silver correctly predicted the outcome of the presidential election by combining and analyzing data from hundreds of individual polls. Not everyone was happy with him or his approach. Some political pundits took offense not only to Silver's methods but also the man himself. Now, though, the pundits are the ones on the defensive. It turns out that opinionated rants are a less reliable way to predict an election outcome than data and algorithms.

"People don't hate ads. People hate bad, interruptive ads." That was the response of noted venture capitalist Fred Wilson when I asked him why Twitter and Tumblr have eschewed the online ad industry's standard display ads in favor of their own, native ad formats. The exchange took place during an onstage interview I had with Fred on the past, present and future of digital advertising at AdTech here in New York.

There is a tree in Florida called the "strangler fig." It grows in a startling way: a bird eats the fruit, flies up into a tree, and poops. The seed germinates from a high branch and begins to extend roots towards the ground. As it grows, it gradually wraps itself around its host tree, eventually enveloping it and killing it.