“Forget the past, enjoy the present, the future will take care of itself.”
—James Thurber

Looking to see what all the fuss over video blogging — or V-casting, or video podcasting, or vidcasting, or vlogging, or whatever you want to call it (can’t we all just agree on a name for something up front?) — is all about? Here are the first two places to go: Rocketboom and Tiki Bar TV. Both great.

ClickZ reports that holiday shopping is up 33% over last year. Not bad, considering a recent report that 25% of Internet users have stopped buying online.

Various ClickZ articles that cite Nielsen/NetRatings numbers for “active Internet users” in the U.S. indicate that this number has increased from about 138 million in November 2004 to about 140 million this year.

Crunch all those numbers together, and it seems clear: Some people may not be buying at all, due to security fears, but whose who do buy online are spending more than ever.

Takeaway for marketers: In the online world, as in the offline world, you want to take care of your best customers.

This could be one of the most helpful pages on the Internet.

Yet another metric to think about: CPK, or cost per keyword. The CPK is calculated by multiplying the average CPC (cost per click) prices by the monthly volume of clicks generated for given keywords.

eMarketer reported on December 6 that the average CPK rose from $20 to about $26 in the third quarter of 2005.

Wait a second. So, if you’re getting traffic at 50 cents per click — not a bad price at all, for most advertisers — you’re only able (on average) to drive 52 clicks per keyword per month? Less than two per day? Either something’s not right with DoubleClick’s math (they did the study on which eMarketer’s article is based), or a lot of people need to do a lot of campaign optimization! Either way, CPK feels like a pretty useless stat to me.

Takeaway for marketers: The only truly useful stats in all this are the ones based on your own campaigns. What’s working for you? How do you improve campaign performance? Those are the numbers you need to watch closely.