Step outside of our industry for a moment, stick your head outside of a window, and feel that cool, unrelenting breeze blowing in your face. You're not alone. Recognize it? It's called free-falling.

The visual: three cowboys sitting at a bar. The one furthest to the left is wearing a hat that is eight times the size of his head. He is staring straight ahead. The other two cowboys, at a distance to his right, are looking in his direction. The caption - as spoken by the cowboy situated on the extreme right of the bar: "All hat and no cattle, but my God, what a hat." This New Yorker cartoon sparked my thinking about Project Canoe's upstream sojourn since the venture sprung a leak to The Wall Street Journal - …

Well, here's some good news for all you digital transition enthusiasts out there (and yes, we know who both of you are): the new mandatory transition date has officially been made into law. The new deadline is now June 12, 2009. "That solves that," you might say. You might be naïve. To borrow from our DR friends: But wait! There's more! Enter the FCC.

On March 24 in New York City at The Helen Mills Theater, MPG & MediaContacts, Havas siblings, will stage its quarterly forum, The Collaborative Alliance, where content creators, technologists, distributors and researchers meet to vet their interactive televisual propositions (television, broadband, wireless and out of home).

Feb. 12th marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln. Considered by most historians as the greatest American President, Lincoln was also the first President to grasp the benefits and power of telecommunications.

Last week I said that I was going to tie three uber-learnings that I took away from TED 2009 -- creativity, story-telling and looking beyond -- to three challenges that we all face as an industry today: metrics, engagement and interactivity. Let's begin with metrics.

A number of people outside the media industries have told me recently of the noticeable increase in the number of old friends from high school or college who have connected with them on Facebook and the like in recent times. These people are typically in the 40+ age group and -- for the most part -- are pleased to be enjoying the renewed contact with old acquaintances, even though many simultaneously express surprise at what they perceive to be a relatively sudden surge in new Friend requests. So what's going on here? And how is TV related to this trend?

Last week, Comcast, the largest cabler in the U.S. (24 million subscribers), dominant stakeholder of the pronouncement-prone Project Canoe, and majority partner in National Cable Communications (NCC), the nation's largest spot cable advertising representation firm, struck a deal with satcaster Dish (14 million homes) to represent its local advertising inventory on 10 regional sports networks that feed into seven top 10 U.S. markets.

While it's true to say we -- along with the rest of the world -- are in pretty dire economic straits right now (and likely will be for some time), I'm really not sure I want to live in a state of communal fear and depression until we come out of it. So with that in mind, I will say no more today of recessions and downturns, political in-fighting and the role of the media. I want some light relief more than anything these days and I'm flagrantly using this column to force some on you. To that end, I …

So I am writing this while in Palm Springs attending TED 2009. I can't put into words the vibe from our little group (we are the satellite site to the main conference's Long Beach site) but suffice to say, there are some common themes that are emerging: creativity, story-telling and looking beyond what we know.