What is the value of an established print media name? Let's take a simple test to find out. Which of these URLs do you recognize: www.desmoinesregister.com; www.eastvalleytribune.com; www.drudgereport.com; or www.perezhilton.com? For those of you who claim to recognize the first two, you are either lying, or you have lived in both Iowa and Arizona, as I have.

I can't help but feel very badly for Jerry Yang these days. I don't know him -- but I'd bet he wasn't a bully growing up, but rather a prime target for one. He was probably one of those students who went unnoticed and was so unnerved by the capacity of his own brain that he "dumbed down" to fit in. I don't know Steve Ballmer, either -- but I can't look at pictures of him and not see the face of a bully.

Advertisers typically go out and spend media to place advertising at Web sites to win the hearts and minds of their desired audiences. Those people who click on a banner are driven to a landing page or Web site where the visitor may spend a little time exploring but typically leave and don't return to the destination again.

One of the most painful lessons I learned early in my career is how easy it is to focus on the wrong metrics. I was distributing consumer electronics products from Asia into the United States, and I was fixated on raw material costs, labor prices, and dozens of other metrics that I tracked on a constant basis to gain a slight edge. Yet ultimately, I was completely caught off guard by a measurement I never thought to track - the impact of a banking and currency crisis. The collapse of the East Asian currencies in 1997 rendered all of my …