In "Dubliners," James Joyce developed a sequence of short stories that redefined the genre. One feature common to each story is an "epiphany" at the end, a moment of deeper awareness. At the end of "The Dead," the central character, Gabriel, looks into the falling snow and suddenly sees his relationship to his wife in perspective, powerfully moved by how disconnected he has been from her. I am reminded of Joyce and the epiphany in our discussion of engagement. For publishers, all of this needs to lead to marketing insight. Otherwise, we may end up like Gabriel, looking out our …

On the publisher side, is there a value to trying to quantify engagement? At the recent eMetrics Summit in San Francisco, Gary Angel and Eric Peterson, two leading Web analytics experts, both wondered whether, from an advertising perspective, high engagement on a publisher site might indeed be a negative. The argument: If visitors are "too engaged" on a site, they might be less likely to leave to visit an advertiser's site. "You probably want visitors who are moderately engaged," Peterson said.

Recently some of the best thinking about engagement has been percolating in the Web analytics community. In addition to Eric Peterson's groundbreaking work in developing what I have called "The Peterson Model" as a way to capture a more fully developed idea of visitor engagement, over the past few months, Gary Angel of Semphonic has written five highly nuanced and evolving perspectives of engagement. And Young-Bean Song of Atlas has contributed, "Engagement Mapping," a white paper that shows ways that advertisers and publishers can begin to tell a more fully developed engagement story than the "Last Ad" measurement that gives …

If nothing else, the industry of online advertising and its ever-growing tentacles is interesting. So much news and innovation, though, is clouded by so much hype injected by press releases from those companies that benefit from the use of these publishing product extensions. As a publisher, it's hard to sift through it all -- and yet these headlines materially impact how you guide your internal resources. So for today's column, I thought I would fight the hype and provide my two cents on how or if you should spend time and money integrating the following products or services into your …

In the movie "You've Got Mail," Joe Fox (Tom Hanks) is an executive with the fictional FoxBooks bookstore chain. Its mission is to dominate the market and make the local neighborhood bookstore obsolete. This storyline is certainly not a new one, and it plays itself out in every line of business as companies compete for market share. Whether the method is driving competitors out of business or acquiring them, the result is the same: less competition.Over the past year, we've been watching a similar storyline playing out in the online ad network space.

Today's social networking executives seem hell-bent on making history repeat itself. MySpace, Google, Facebook and others are trying to "out open" each other by giving third-party developers access to their users, their platform, and their data. They are even coming together to join groups like OpenSocial to simplify data portability between platforms. But while opening your network may be popular in the media, it could have devastating results.

What is the value of an established print media name? Let's take a simple test to find out. Which of these URLs do you recognize: www.desmoinesregister.com; www.eastvalleytribune.com; www.drudgereport.com; or www.perezhilton.com? For those of you who claim to recognize the first two, you are either lying, or you have lived in both Iowa and Arizona, as I have.

I can't help but feel very badly for Jerry Yang these days. I don't know him -- but I'd bet he wasn't a bully growing up, but rather a prime target for one. He was probably one of those students who went unnoticed and was so unnerved by the capacity of his own brain that he "dumbed down" to fit in. I don't know Steve Ballmer, either -- but I can't look at pictures of him and not see the face of a bully.

Advertisers typically go out and spend media to place advertising at Web sites to win the hearts and minds of their desired audiences. Those people who click on a banner are driven to a landing page or Web site where the visitor may spend a little time exploring but typically leave and don't return to the destination again.

One of the most painful lessons I learned early in my career is how easy it is to focus on the wrong metrics. I was distributing consumer electronics products from Asia into the United States, and I was fixated on raw material costs, labor prices, and dozens of other metrics that I tracked on a constant basis to gain a slight edge. Yet ultimately, I was completely caught off guard by a measurement I never thought to track - the impact of a banking and currency crisis. The collapse of the East Asian currencies in 1997 rendered all of my …