Craig Newmark insists that he's not changing the world. You maybe can think of some classified advertising managers at newspapers around the country who might disagree, but he's pretty adamant about it. Still, if you give him a minute, let him chew on the notion for a bit, the founder of the almost impossibly successful social-networking site Craigslist will cop to maybe something as socially insignificant as, oh, say, changing the way people interact.

I’m often amused by just how much flak the search engines get. After all, they provide users with a valuable free service and, in my opinion, they serve up solid results the majority of the time. But for the most part, the engines continue to take heat from users, site owners, marketers and advertisers. These people never seem to be short on criticism, as folks always are more than willing to gripe about what they don’t like. But rarely, if ever, do the engines fire back.

The biggest threat to privacy today isn't from governments, corporations, hackers or terrorists. It's from people who use the latest social-media technologies to broadcast events of their lives, from minutiae to rites of passage, so that anyone can see them. It's the new age of lifecasting, and most of us will wind up taking part in it, voluntarily or not. As consumers take part in the trend, marketers are starting to adopt it, too.

‘You’ve probably heard about the “long tail” in search engine marketing — the numerous, highly specific, less popular keyword phrases that are a great source of targeted, low-cost and high-converting visitors. Executing a “long tail” strategy is critical to campaign success, but don’t let it distract you from the power of search’s “short head” — that handful of keywords that drive most of your cost and conversions.

‘The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow,” said Bill Gates, founder and chairman of Microsoft. If that’s true, then that town square is lined with all manner of churches, synagogues, mosques, shrines and temples. And just as the Internet has allowed small mom-and-pop shops to compete with big retailers, so too have faiths with smaller followings been able to share their messages online by using the same tactics employed by larger, more established spiritual sects.

Welcome to eM+C, a magazine dedicated to the digital revolution, which is changing the economics of business-to-business marketing.