Last week I attended a Roundtable Breakfast at the Paley Center with Google's Marissa Mayer. She mentioned a content-recommendation study at Carnegie Mellon that piqued my interest. The project, dubbed Elvis, had found that collaborative filtering -- aka recommendations -- is most effective and most interesting when it relies not on a largest-possible sample of participants, but on a midsize sample that allows for serendipity.

Rob Frydlewicz is best known as a veteran agency researcher at agencies such as NWAyer, FCB and Carat. And now he has expanded his skill base to include social media and blogging. Rob is part of a blog network that consists of several media executives who write on a variety of pop culture subjects. In this interview, Rob talks about his blogging experiences, what he sees as trends in the social media landscape and the future of blogging as a media communications form.

We could fill up several columns with definitions that apply to the concept of digital media, technology and platforms. Continuing on the Digital theme of last week, this week we focus more on the digital transmission platforms that contribute to Set-Top Box data origination.

The virtual pages of the TV Board blog are used, from time to time, to define some of the phrases and terms unique or germane to the TV industry. Rarely, however, are these brief tutorials potentially lifesaving. Today might be different, as we discuss a phenomenon known as the "normalcy bias."

If there has ever been a more appropriate name for an event, I can't think of one. Last week the 4As gave us Transformation 2011, the group's second annual transformation event.

I was in Santa Monica last week for the Montgomery Technology Conference -- and on Tuesday, just as I was about to call it a day, my college buddy rang. Eric Clapton was in town, and he'd just managed to score two tenth-row seats. I've been a devoted Clapton fan since college, I jumped on it. The show was incredible. But what does this have to do with the television business? Read on.

In a prior column we delineated the difference between Analog and Digital Set-Top Boxes. In this column we talk about Analog and Digital transmission signals. The Analog signal has been around for years. It has been our standard transmission of television since its inception. But the landscape has changed dramatically with new transmission capabilities that have opened up new possibilities in not only signal delivery but also signal return path.

It's time to admit that we're powerless over our addiction and give ourselves over to a higher power. That's right; it's time to break our national dependence upon Charlie Sheen.

Mainstream media has been all atwitter over the recently reported ratings decline of Glenn Beck's popular TV news program. Year on year results appear to indicate that approximately 75 Nielsen households who watched his program in January of 2010, have now either stopped watching, or are now recording his program on a DVR, outside of Nielsen's measured window.

One of the most valuable lessons of my career came early. I was a young account manager and I had been assigned to our agency's largest and most profitable account (a combination not always the case). One of the reasons it maintained its unique status was due to a little-known agency legend named Peter Rabar.