A [Facebook] ‘like’ is not good enough — you want a ‘share,’” Fayard said, “because consumers today believe … they own our brands. They are the ones that talk to each other … about which brands live up to their promise and which ones don’t, so having that integrated campaign across all the different platforms is critically important.

Some of the best digital advertising ideas come from practices, once thought to be slimy, but that get legitimized over time. We have seen this over time with email marketing, use of cookies for personalization and remarketing and even the pop-under which helped keep digital alive in the lean post-crash years. Innovation comes in all forms and unfortunately the bad guys often use their devious minds to think about how to exploit the user in a perverse way. Out of this primordial slime one day soon will walk the next great advertising tactic.

Chancellor: I don’t want to be more depressing, but there is another area where we’ve done a lot of work, which is China. And China has been the source of global growth since the financial crisis of 2008. China looks to me in a very, very perilous state. It looks like Ireland 2008, but 300 times larger. China has just come off a huge property bubble, a huge credit boom, and a huge fixed-asset investment infrastructure boom. And that is very problematic.

1) The main goal of the LHC is to find the last piece of the so-called standard model. The standard model is a theory that encompasses all known particles and their interactions. There are two types of particles: leptons (including electrons, neutrinos, and their cousins) and fermions (quarks) that interact via gauge bosons (photons, gluons, and the W and Z). The missing piece is something called the Higgs which is supposed to give all of these other particles their mass (without the Higgs, they are all massless).

PREDICTION: Higgs is found, probably around 2010-2011. Peter Higgs dies one month before discovery and is thus denied Nobel Prize.

The topic came up at South by Southwest this weekend while I was speaking with Ben Huh, he of the Cheezburger empire. For much of its life, Cheezburger and its associated sites have been editorially curated collections of the most popular memes on the Internet. That includes hit properties like I Can Has Cheezburger?, FAIL Blog and The Daily What.

But the media company recently unveiled a new platform last year, allowing anyone to create his or her own Cheezburger site. The platform, which was launched in beta last October, is designed to create a new platform for people to share what they find funny—and it has opened up an amazing new trove of content for the Cheezburger family. The Cheezburger team itself might not have had the interest or the wherewithal to launch individual blogs for Harry Potter LOLs or Words With Friends rage comics, but now it doesn’t have to—it’s essentially crowdsourcing the funny.

Fetishizing “social” has become a major distraction, and we’re clearly a country that loves to be distracted. Our job in the media is to use all the social tools at our disposal to tell the stories that matter — as well as the stories that entertain — and to keep reminding ourselves that the tools are not the story. When we become too obsessed with our closed, circular Twitter or Facebook ecosystem, we can easily forget that poverty is on the rise, or that downward mobility is trending upward, or that over 5 million people have been without a job for half a year or more, or that millions of homeowners are still underwater. And just as easily, we can ignore all the great instances of compassion, ingenuity, and innovation that are changing lives and communities.