While the tired debate over gay marriage consumes endless media attention, the real issue goes unreported: Marriage itself is a failed institution. And he "sanctity" of marriage is being warped by reality television shows and cheating websites, while infidelity is being made easier by the Internet and mobile devices.

Last October I wrote about email and its importance as a publishing platform that reaches everyone. I had to make the point after a Wall Street Journal reporter had written "Why Email No Longer Rules." So it was fun to moderate a panel at OMMA Global this week, a year later, with folks from Groupon, the latest internet rocket-ship-growth darling, along with leaders from Daily Candy, Gilt Groupe and the founder of Thrillist, who collectively shake loose billions of dollars in advertising revenue and merchandise sales earned from "publishing on email" strategies.

Here we go again. Web advertising executives from companies that make money from the sale of advertising, without producing the content generating the ad impressions sold, will perch themselves on conference stages this month and tell everyone sitting below that what they are now selling is "it" -- the panacea to more effective advertising. Raise your hand if you have heard this one before?

Within 15 years, every single thing you say and see, and every place you visit, will be recorded. This will dramatically change your life, and in the process raise three fundamental questions: 1. Do we want the power to record and view every moment of our lives? 2. What are the consequences? 3. And most importantly, is a life well-lived, a life well-published?

I just finished the book "Talent is Overrated" by Fortune's Geoff Colvin. It makes two key points that can help us answer the question I asked in my last column; "What makes a great salesperson in the automated age? Persistence? Caring? Creativity? Insight?" If prices are set and orders placed in automated marketplaces, how do salespeople add value to the process and move the needle for their employers?

Question from a seller of digital advertising: I always ask my current agency partners how my site is performing because I'm worried I'm going to get canceled from the plan. But they never seem to be able to share anything I can act on. How can I ever know if I'm in danger of being canceled?

Trust is all that binds us. Here's a story of a little girl who knows that -- a bridge to what I want to say about how, as an industry of online publishing, we are hemorrhaging trust. Users are figuring out more and more everyday that publishers cannot be trusted to protect users' rights to privacy.

How did the stupidest people in our industry all find their way into the same job? Email marketing has become a game of cheap, underhanded tactics at best, and criminal at worst: a dangerous concoction of blatantly lying to customers, creating purposefully confusing checkout processes with permission for email marketing auto-checked, and then gracefully ignoring the customer preference and marketing to them anyway. T

More than a few of you cheered when I pointed out last February that automated media bidding and buying would not eliminate the need for salespeople any more than the advent of computer traded financial products eliminated the need for stock brokers. But did you think about the implications for sales management and sales skills in a world where the advertiser doesn't have to call you to get a price quote? Are the skills salespeople need or sales management should hire for, or develop in their sales team, different than they used to be?