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There is a new browser plugin that merits special attention. MyKaroo has been ported to both Internet Explorer and Mozilla, and boasts compatibility with 98% of all possible browser/OS combinations. The MyKaroo plugin is currently in beta, but is available now for download at the MyKaroo download page.

What it does: MyKaroo is described as “essentially a blog”. But you cannot visit MyKaroo like a regular blog. Instead, MyKaroo hovers in its own window over your browser window as you navigate from site to site. While you browse, contextually sensitive comments are displayed in response to the sites you visit. They have been posted by other people using MyKaroo just like you.

MyKaroo is recommended. You will quickly discover, as I did, that the impulse to comment as you browse is simply overwhelming.

I’ve been working on a marketing article for several months, but haven’t really had as full a perspective as I’d like to have on the “picture”. It’s grand theme is measurement. I want to describe how a division has taken place in the universe of marketing, into the category of tactics that give effects we can measure and those that yield results we cannot. Online is in the former category. Most traditional marketing is in the latter. I would also describe how it has been (for most of the history of the marketing praxis) a big part of what marketing “does” to try to establish correlations between specific marketing actions and specific sales reactions. I would then go on to describe how the ability to precisely determine ROI (a given with online advertising) has commenced a massive flux in the way marketing budgets are being divided, in favor of measurable online. At the same time, marketing departments and ad agencies are coming under the leadership of “online marketers”… by that I mean executives who came up through the ranks buying and selling clicks. It is likely a grave disrespect to many talented and well-rounded marketing professionals to say that people who understand “traditional” marketing (PR, print, and all that’s not online) are in decline. But I think it’s generally true. Then again, perhaps all I am doing is observing an evolution, and there’s no reason to lament the disappearance of methods that don’t work anymore… or at least that do not work well enough to warrant investing in people who have those skills…

For his performance in Network (1976), Peter Finch became the first Actor in a Leading Role to ever receive his Oscar posthumously. It is indescribably ironic that Finch played Howard Beale, an imminently hasbeen news anchorman, who decides to commit suicide on the air… for the ratings.

At the peak of drama, Beale seizes the microphone and delivers the following (now-famous) speech: