It’s just a game. The Superbowl.

The game is just a game — it’s between two teams of players, not the millions of us who sit in the stands and watch on TV.

We’re just fans and we’re just talk.

But every once in a while, the narrative — and the allegory — make the game more than just that battle out on the field.

This year, the game was all about the team carrying on their shoulders the hopes and dreams of the people of post-Katrina New Orleans.

And, well, in the process, for the rest of us who have known loss.

Those of us who have ever faced the long climb back up from getting drowned by our worst fears. We, too, knew this was our narrative, also.

We, too, wanted the Saints to win.

And they did.

It’s was just a game.

And Christmas is just another day of the year.

The company I started 20 years ago, now called Hammock Inc., is in the business of developing and managing different types of content and custom media for marketers who are trying to achieve specific objectives. (Objectives being a buzzword that means something you can actually measure, not something that’s important- and lofty-sounding but has no yardstick — those are called goals. We’re into yardstick stuff.)

So, yes, when publishing a magazine (what lots of people think is all we do) helps a client meet a specific objective, we do that.

But today, the objectives we work on are more like, “improving organic search results by X%,” lead generation and things having to do with stuff like “bounce-rates.”

I explain all that to say this:

If you have a great new way to help me assist clients reach customers by creating and deploying and distributing content that matters to their customers, I’m always eager to hear about it.

For example, a friend of mine asked if I would look at an iPad app he is developing. Sure, I said. One look at it and I thought of five different ways the idea could be a great early-stage iPad app a marketer would love to experiment with.

So that made me think: There must be several people out there working on ideas that would help inspire other ideas that do those things I believe are going to replace advertising in the coming years: Content (a very broad term) provided to customers in ways that customers find appealing and helpful and beneficial — and never intrusive.

So send them to me.

I promise this: I won’t blog about them until you’re ready for me to. I won’t “steal” your ideas — although I can assure you, lots of people are having “similar” ideas to yours — it’s not the idea but your execution that’s going to make it a success. (For example, any app that’s another version of reading an eBook is not exactly defensible, so it better be executed in a way that is unique to you and compelling to users.)

Don’t know where this will lead, but one never knows.

I will remind you that Cisco serves as a economic bellwether as it sells technology and equipment to all sizes of businesses, from the world’s largest companies and governments to small businesses. (If you’re in doubt of the small business segment, here’s a reminder: It now owns Linksys and Webex.)

But wait. Why is Mr. Chambers so bullish? Hasn’t he read what the “Top 200 Economic Bloggers” think. According to a quarterly survey released yesterday by the Kauffman Foundation, 48 percent of economics bloggers said in the mid-January survey that the economy was “worse than official government statistics show.” Most respondents rate the overall condition of the economy as “mixed,” and 33 percent say it is still “facing recession” or “weak and recessing.”

So if the bellwether company Cisco is expecting “solid, sustainable economic growth,” where are the economist bloggers gaining their insight? From reading each other, I’d assume.

I’m sure a survey of the economics bloggers would suggest John Chambers is blinded by the reality of selling equipment to real customers and that he should go hang out in academia where he can get in touch with what’s going on with the theoretical economy.

John Gruber writes a typically thought-provoking piece about Flash, the ubiquitous software platform that designers and marketers love because it enables animation and video that make a website act just like a TV or interactive game. Except, that is, when people do what I do and use things like the Firefox browser plugin Flashblock that keeps Flash from taking over my browser — unless I want it to.

Flash can be great. But more often than not, it just slows down a web page. I grew so frustrated with Flash that I installed Flashblock months ago and haven’t looked back. Developers — and excuse me, marketers, but we’re the worst — use Flash for reasons like: “Our boss likes it when the photo whisks across the window” or “The client wants the site to look more modern.”

So, for reasons of pleasing the boss and the desire to look “more modern,” a software platform that is buggy and sloppy and many times, at odds with the marketing objectives of clients (check out how I see those invisible Flash ads on the front of NYT.com), Flash is used — and it pleases bosses and clients who view their ads and websites on controlled platforms.

Gruber (echoing a post from Robert Scoble) suggests there’s a better way to accomplish video and animation and interactivity than using Flash: web standards that support video without a Flash plugin.

There are those who say that the iPad will fail because it doesn’t support Flash (however, that non-support doesn’t seem to have deterred the iPhone’s success). Perhaps, however, it will be the iPad that finally breaks the back of the Flash cartel. Developers, as Gruber suggests, must decide if they are “Flash” developers or animation/video developers.

Likewise, I’ll add, they will soon have to decide if they are iPad developers, or open apps developers.

What a great — and chaotic — time to be living.

Bonus: Dave Winer joins in the discussion.

Later: The NYT examines the Apple-Flash issue in an article in Monday’s paper.

I won’t attempt to explain what each of these points of view are as I’m still sorting out the various shades of meaning individuals have when they use the phrases “opened” and “closed,” for example.

To people outside the bubble of technology development and content distribution, “open” is the opposite of “closed.” But for those who spend their days and nights pondering and pursuing entrepreneurial opportunity or those who have fought against the constant attempts by corporations to lock-in consumers to a proprietary channel, the words “opened” and “closed” can mean vastly different things.

As I’ve said before, I am glad the iPad is finally a reality because it gives all of us something that points to what comes next.

What comes next might be the first and second and future iterations of what the iPad will be.

Or what comes next might be the reactions to what is wrong with the iPad.

As a marketer and strategist and media experimenter — and for those marketers who choose me to help them figure out such things — I, like everyone else, have two choices.

1. I can immerse myself in the chaos of the new, trying to discover how (or if) these new devices will change the way customers (buyers, members, donors, readers, viewers, users, etc.) discover new products and create new types of markets — be they opened or closed.

2. Stand by and watch, while others slog and fight their ways through the next few years while figuring it out.

I’ve decided that for me, standing by and watching is no longer an option.

I’m not living at this incredible moment in time to spectate.

Story 1 was a technology analyst blasting the device because it doesn’t have a camera and so, therefore, isn’t taking advantage of social media.

Story 2 was a publishing analyst describing the device as a savior of book publishing.

Of course, both of these analysts are right — and wrong.

The first analyst sees the iPad as a Swiss Army Knife that left off a cork screw and being a wine lover, he can’t understand why anyone would want a Swiss Army Knife without a cork screw.

The second analyst sees the iPad as a Kindle with color and video that will enable publishers to have an alternative to the pricing on Amazon — which publishers hate.

Like I said, both are right — and wrong.

Over the next 60 days, Apple will start bombarding the channels of traditional (old) media defining what one can do with the iPad. They will never mention features. Only what one can do.

The people who purchase the iPad will use it 90% of the time to do 4-5 things they’d rather do on the move than sitting at a computer.

The people who purchase the iPad will use it because they already own an iPhone and would like to watch movies or read books or tweak a presentation on a 9 1/2 inch screen rather than a micro-screen.

The people who purchase the iPad will use it because it will help them define themselves to those around them.

I could go on-and-on about the reasons people who purchase it will do so.

Watch. Learn.

It’s not about features something has or does not have.

And it’s not about what missing features prevent someone from doing.

It’s about what the existing features enable someone to do.

That’s all.

Bonus linkage: As I’ve said often, the only person worth reading on this topic is John Gruber. Again, his perspective is original and insightful.

I allow the service to follow me around the web and it gives me the chance to thumbs up or thumbs down products, books, movies, music. I have a hard time explaining what it is, especially when I say something like, “It’s like Foursquare, but you check in when you hit a page on Wikipedia instead of when you go to a restaurant.”

There are many cool things about Glue (the way it demonstrates the concept of “the semantic web” is worthy of deep study, for example), but its primary benefit at this point is the way in which is allows you to see how your friends have reviewed products. Think about that. Typically, on the web, when you go to a book page on Amazon.com, you read reviews from strangers. Glue allows you to see reviews from your own network of contacts. Not only movies, but whatever categories of products and topics you select, from gadgets to wine.

This concept, which I’ve been fascinated with for a couple of years — since I first started using Glue — the ability to interact with a network of people throughout the web, rather than in a specific URL-fenced-in area — has influenced my perception of what the web can one day be. It points to a future in which we won’t go to Facebook or Linked-in or Twitter to interact with a network of connections: We will interact with them wherever we find ourselves throughout the web.

Today, Google took a step in this direction by announcing that someone who is logged into Google and who has associated their Google profile with corresponding identities on social networks and other social media, will have their search results interspersed with relevant reviews or comments from people in their networks of contacts on those services.

This is a rather big deal that, like most anything that involves “identity,” can be both beneficial and alarming. Beneficial, if you discover a bad review of a movie posted by someone you personally trust — say, a college film profession you friended on Facebook. Alarming if you ponder how many points of data about you that Google has to collect in order to pull this off.

Here are some quick thoughts before I read what others have written:

1. No where in the marketing materials or presentation (except for a slide with a quote from Walt Mossberg) are the words “slate” or “tablet” used. As I have predicted before, Apple created a new category of device that will be called “pad” media. This is not a tablet — not to be compared with a tablet, they’ll argue.

2. Why the iPad is the best name? It drafts off billions of dollars of brand investment in the iPod. And it describes the physical nature of the device.

3. As predicted, there is, among the geekiratti, the tendency to focus on what it “doesn’t” have. That’s great. Apple can hold the iPad up and say, “this is what the product is” and others can focus on what it doesn’t have. For example, I wanted a camera for video conferencing. I’ll have to wait for another year or so for that.

4. It’s pretty amazing to me how close the device is to the, frankly, made up stuff I used to envision the product to be.

5. Why did Jason Calicanus so blatantly lie on Twitter last night — and why did the Wall Street Journal pick up his tweets and treat them like fact.

6. Only losers will use the keyboard dock.

Read one way, it could appear that I believe the “slate” device will mean the end of print. But longtime readers of this blog — and everyone who knows me — know that is not what I believe.

I am a lover of magazines — but also of all things digital. I believe in a world where magazines and TVs and radios and books and slate devices all find their ways to co-exist in our lives.

New media forces old media to change — it forces what was yesterday’s mass medium, to evolve into something different.

TV didn’t destroy radio — it forced it to change. And slate devices will force books and newspapers and magazines to change.

No, they won’t be the same as they are today. Many types of magazines, books and newspapers will go away.

But the medium of magazines (the print medium I am most familiar with) will live on — and, frankly, will at one end of the long tail, continue to grow as the costs related to on-demand and digital printing falls.

I’ve always felt the web — especially blogs — and magazines are complementary media.

And I believe slate devices will allow organizations and entrepreneurs and anyone with a great idea who can find an audience to discover new ways to interact with them across all media platforms. One of things that will spring forth from those new relationships will be new magazines that appear solely as slate and smart phone “app” and some will find an audience who desire both digital and print expressions of the passion for the topic and brand that evolves from the passion “audience” and “creator” have for one-another.

One of the people I turn to when thinking about the future of magazines (long time readers of this blog will recognize the name) is Derek Pawazek. In post yesterday, he wrote, “Apple could release a device that makes consuming media fun, is able to show any PDF beautifully (just like the iPod would play any MP3), and offers new media for sale in the iTunes store. If they did it right, publishers like me might finally be able to sell something digital that people would actually buy.”

That’s how I feel about slate devices. I am hopeful that, finally, there will be a device that makes it compelling for people to buy something to “play” on it — like the way the Kindle has made it compelling again for me to buy first-novels or obscure books I hear about.

Today, I will start developing media for the new Apple device. (I actually started — conceptually — years ago.)

But I don’t believe the device will be the savior of magazines.

It won’t kill them, either.