The only way I could pull myself out of post Super Bowl depression was through lyric therapy. Here is my inferior attempt at Keatsian tribute.

Ode To 18-1

As the snow settles over,
A wet-eyed New England.
And the Patriots fade,
Like a dying failed friend.

Let us all remember,
An extraordinary season.
Beyond logic, and history,
Beyond NFL reason.

Of the many fall Sundays,
When their game made us sing.
The perfection, great play,
As Tom's passes took wing.

Of all the adjustments,
And all the game plans.
And a ball-hawking defense,
In great red-zone stands.

They beat Big Ben,
Came back against Peyton.
Beat Rivers twice,
And escaped the feared Ravens.

The records they fell,
Without ever a loss.
Stolen away,
By Brady and Moss.

And all the O line,
Kept the offense on bright.
A wall of teamwork,
From Mankins to Light.

As the record it grew,
And the snow replaced rain.
Don Shula and friends,
Didn't drink their champagne.

The media brayed,
"We'll wait and see."
But Bill he steered clear,
Like his father's Navy.

Stop and think for a second,
Of all of the fun.
And how cool that it is,
To be 18-1.

[Posted by Dave Frankland]

Traditional direct marketing has faced a range of hurdles over the last several years from Do Not Call lists, budgets shifting to online, spam complaints, etc. Where’s the latest challenge coming from? It appears to be the green movement. Advocacy groups and consumers are shining the light on the practices of direct mailers and catalogers – and their impact on the environment.  Some states are proposing Do Not Mail lists, organizations like the DMA, CatalogChoice, and GreenDimes allow consumers to register to cut back on the catalogs they receive, while the whole subject of Greenness gets brighter.

[Posted by Christine Spivey Overby]

Whenever the economy takes a down turn, marketers will inevitably ask the question, "How would a recession impact my budget?" This worry is especially true for more experimental forms of marketing, such as certain forms of interactive marketing and social media.

At Forrester in recent weeks, we on the Interactive Marketing team have asked this question too -- of our analysts and a handful of interactive marketers. The results of this analysis -- and our tips for how interactive marketers can protect their budgets and survive (even thrive) in a downturn -- are in a new piece "Strategies For Interactive Marketing In A Recession."

Three reasons:

1) Google gets the best and the brightest from Yahoo. Why? Compensation. Microsoft, in a titanic mistake, eliminated stock options as an employee incentive early in the decade, replacing them with  much less lucrative and leveraged restricted stock. If you're a hot programmer at Yahoo, you'll get options at Google -- not at Microsoft. Aside from compensation, Google's culture, speed, lack of bureaucracy, location, lack of legacy will be big attractors of talent.

2) The confusion factor. Microsoft has never acquired or absorbed anything as large as Yahoo -- unlike Cisco it has no culture or processes around large-scale integration. Microsoft's tight programming ethic will be naturally suspicious of Yahoo and its culture of media and advertising. When the inevitable integration plans are drafted, MSN and the search gurus at Microsoft will defend turf. In a market defined by a quick pace, Microsoft will take years to get this integration right.

Earlier this week, Sun Microsystems announced that its Project Blackbox was now a commercially shipping product. I have to confess that when they first told me about this effort I saw it as a nice showcase innovation — something they could use to demonstrate how densely racks could be configured and how energy efficient their products were. They could drive it from city to city for in-person demonstrations. Nice marketing idea. But I didn’t see the practicality to real enterprise data centers. Who’d be willing to buy a container and park it outside their data center? Yeah, that’s secure.