They say that nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come. In TV advertising and media research circles, that idea is the use of set-top box data. STB data is being developed and standardized for use as a research tool and also as the foundation for advanced advertising. But if an idea cannot be communicated, how can it be accepted and embraced? This is why the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) developed a single-source Set-Top Box Data Lexicon, a reference guide that creates a common language of terms and definitions for participants in the set-top box …

Well everyone's back, I presume, from Las Vegas. Is there a show in a more appropriate venue than CES? Except that for this event, in this location, everything that happens doesn't stay in Vegas; it gets recorded, videotaped and released to the press.

Last week I had the good fortune to travel to Las Vegas and CES, where the energy was sky-high, as expected, and television -- smart, connected, 3-D, on tablets, and more -- was at the center of the high-tech conversation yet again.

Wow! What a crazy year this has been! 2011 will surely be remembered as "The Year That Changed Everything" -- again. From how we watch television, what we're watching, how we measure viewership, how we spend our media time, it's all new. Let's just say that after 2011, we'll certainly need a breather to catch ourselves up. But I just wanted to take a couple of minutes to go over a few of my favorite things that happened in media over the past year.

Goodbye, black box, and thank you. You've served us well these past 25 years. But we're done playing the couch potato and watching just another pretty picture. We're ready to lean forward and define our own programming experience on a bigger, now connected, screen. Hello, Smart TV.