Until relatively recently, ad industry executives tended to talk about the differences between “personally identifiable” and “non-personally identifiable” information when they discussed privacy.

But in the last three years, it’s become apparent that the difference between personally identifiable and non-personally identifiable can be illusory.

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“Boring! Can we fast-forward?” my daughter asks as Joan Baez warbles “Joe Hill” at Woodstock. We are “sharing” the newly released 40th Anniversary DVD of the Woodstock documentary, but she is doing here what she also does when we run my iPod through the car stereo.

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When you think of spyware, Sears probably isn’t the first name that comes to mind. But the Federal Trade Commission announced today that the retailer had agreed to settle a complaint alleging it had installed tracking software on visitors’ computers without providing adequate notice.

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Countless many were enraptured last week by the sneaky vocals of Susan Boyle. Her talents, unveiled on “Britain’s Got Talent,” were unexpected by those who prejudged her for her appearance. Wait — that was everyone. The doubters evidently were most of those present, both panel and audience.

However, watching the video that ignited the Internet and conversation everywhere, it was those who had the opportunity to see the astonishment moment by moment and either identify with or dissect this social study, whose reaction is most interesting.

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During the 2006 Winter Olympics, blogger Sean Healy had some pointed criticism of the mother of athlete Shani Davis.

In a post dated Feb. 26, 2006, Healy allegedly wrote that Cherie Davis, the mother of the black speed skating champion, had criticized members of the speed skating federation as white supremacists and neo-Nazi genetic mutations. Healy made the statements about Cherie Davis on his blog, Unknown Column, hosted via Google’s Blogger service.

Last week, Cherie Davis filed a lawsuit in Cook County, Ill. against Google (GOOG), demanding the company remove the post. Davis brought the case against Google and not Healy because he died of cancer in April 2007.

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When it comes to the type of applications iPhone owners use most, ones for checking the weather trump games, music, news and everything else.

According to an upcoming report on smartphone usage by online market research firm Compete, 39% of iPhone users cited weather-related apps as one of the three kinds of applications they use most frequently.

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The way people use Facebook is changing. What’s more, something very significant is happening in the way people are communicating through social media in general. More and more, folks are sharing videos as a means of personal communication.

What this means is that video is coming to Facebook in a big way, but it will not look like the video we have seen on such social media platforms as YouTube (GOOG) and MySpace (NWS). To date, video on these and other social sites has fit the paradigm of a small number of content producers, relative to a larger audience of content viewers. Meaning, the goal on YouTube, for a bulk of the content creators, is to get more views of their videos regardless of who is doing the viewing.

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A quick note about the stock symbols used above: Google and News Corp. are the parent companies of YouTube and MySpace, respectively.

How fitting that in the same week Playboy Enterprises’s longtime CEO Christie Hefner announces her departure, her brand launches an ambitious series of mobisodes. Say what you will about the ups and downs of Playboy, I always admired Hefner’s devotion to digital. To the best of my knowledge, it was the first magazine brand with its own dedicated Web site back in the day. During those early years of Web and tech shows, Hefner keynoted events that the rest of the magazine industry snubbed or parceled out to their entry-level IT staff. At least in theory, she understood that digital was media’s destiny, and she was willing to put some money behind it.

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Having spent eight days in India in August, I found the recent tragic events in Mumbai of particular interest, as I have both business colleagues as well as friends in three of the largest cities in India. While the world watched the events play out to their terrible conclusion, I was reminded of one of the most seminal events in television history, that of watching Jim McKay’s harrowing updates during the 1972 Olympic games in Munich. It’s interesting to compare the two events, 36 years apart.

Unlike today, in 1972 we were dependent almost entirely on one main source: ABC Sports, which had cameras trained on the compound where the hostages were being held. Eventually, through a video pooling process, other networks had access to footage, but that came a bit later. It is difficult to state the impact that Sept. 5, 1972 had on the world of live television and on the viewing audience that was watching throughout the world.

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Let’s agree right away that YouTube’s Sponsored Video isn’t the next Google Killer. It’s not even the next Yahoo killer, even though comScore recently reported that YouTube is now the second largest search engine. Fittingly, around the time that the comScore news broke, Google publicly launched search-triggered Sponsored Video ads on YouTube. Does this mean marketers need to consider YouTube over Yahoo and Microsoft?

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