I think ad networks is an ongoing story. Federated was a chapter in that story, and it continues to write a new one.

Nearly all web publications are driven by the display model, which is in turn driven by page views. But we all know the web is shifting, thanks to mobile devices and the walled gardens they erect. The new landscape of the web is far more complicated, and new products must emerge.

Publishers are born connectors; they bring like-minded people together. They are also conversationalists of the first order. They foster the interaction between the three key parties in commercial media: the audience, the author/creator and the marketer.

Anytime Facebook wants to change how it might use all that data about you, in any way, across any service it has within the Facebook ecosystem, all it has to do is change one privacy policy, tell you about it, and that's that.

I find web browsing, checking multiple email accounts, and Google mapping rather tiresome on an iPhone - the iPhone's native interface, for all its supposed perfection, has all kinds of wrong baked in - and the screen is just far too small.

Teenagers aren't loyal to much of anything - especially Internet stuff.

Step one of Street View was to get the pictures in place - in a few short years, we've gotten used to the idea that nearly any place on earth can now be visited as a set of images on Google.

I think Facebook is an extraordinarily important part of the Internet ecosystem, and having a robust presence there is a critical part of any brand (or company's) strategy.

The largest issue with search is that we learned about it when the web was young, when the universe was 'complete' - the entire web was searchable! Now our digital lives are utterly fractured - in apps, in walled gardens like Facebook, across clunky interfaces like those in automobiles or Comcast cable boxes.

The Web 2.0 world is defined by new ways of understanding ourselves, of creating value in our culture, of running companies, and of working together.

The Nexus 7 is about the same size as a Moleskine notebook, and it just 'feels' like the right form factor for doing all those things you want to do on a smart phone, but can't quite do in the right way. It's not too big, and not too small - just right.

If you're going to build something, don't build on land someone else already owns. You want your own land, your own domain, your own sovereignty. Trouble is, so much of the choice land - the land where all the people are - is already owned by someone else: By Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yahoo, and Apple (in apps, anyway).

Google Now is one of those products that to many users doesn't seem like a product at all. It is instead the experience one has when you use the Google Search application on your Android or iPhone device (it's consistently a top free app on the iTunes charts). You probably know it as Google search, but it's far, far more than that.

Google is a global Rorschach test. We see in it what we want to see. Google has built an infrastructure that makes a lot of dreams closer to reality.

Just like the VCR opened the film and TV industries to unimaginable new revenue streams, search, RSS and the Internet will do the same for marketers and media companies.

I've always liked the fact that anyone with a great idea, access to the Internet, and an unrelenting will can spark a world-beating company simply by standing up code on the Internet and/or leveraging the information and relationship network that is the web. That's how Facebook started, after all.

We all know the future is mobile, right? And the iPhone and iPad are Perfect Expressions of Beauty, Ideal Combinations of Form and Function. Except they're Not.

Call it a hunch, but I sense that many of us are not entirely comfortable with a world in which every single thing we buy creates a cloud of data. I'd like to have an option to not have a record of how much I tipped, or what I bought at 1:08 A.M. at a corner market in New York City.

Making media companies that you hope to sell is not a lot of fun for anyone who cares deeply about making media.

When good media takes a bounded form, and comes once in a period of time, it begs to be consumed as a whole - it creates an engaging experience. We don't dip in and out of an episode of 'Game of Thrones,' after all - we take it in as a whole. Why have we abandoned this concept when it comes to publications, simply because they exist online?

In short, Now is Google's attempt at becoming the real time interface to our lives - moving well beyond the siloed confines of 'search' and into the far more ambitious world of 'experience.' As in - every experience one has could well be lit by data delivered through Google Now.

Consumers online expect dialogue, so pairing your brand with relevant and passion-driven topics is one of the best ways to ensure that you are engaged with key audiences.

As our society tips toward one based on data, our collective decisions around how that data can be used will determine what kind of a culture we live in.

The 'Occupy' movement seems to have found a central theme to its 2012 movement around overturning 'the corporation as a person,' and some legislators are supporting that concept.