Every time I walk into my office, I understand the value of search and discovery across multiple silos. There’s the pile of board summaries in the corner. The stack of projects on my desk. And those folders over there— I’m not quite sure what’s in them. Where’s next year’s budget forecast again?

The video world is a lot like my office only a little less dusty, a little more virtual and—I shudder to think—a lot more cluttered. There’s linear video. Your PVR playlist. VOD. Your Netflix queue. And the vast, untamed world of online video and user-generated content.

I’m not quite sure who’s responsible for coming up with those new words the media industry loves to create, but one that’s been inching its way into common use is “curation.” In this case, it’s a fancy way of talking about the ability to bring intelligent content discovery to the chaos of multiplatform video.

It’s not about the amount of content, Magnify.net’s Steve Rosenbaum tells Bob Garfield in Advertising Age; there’s more than enough of that. The future “will hinge on the discovery of content,” he said. “It’s the needle-in-the-haystack problem.”

Recommendation algorithms can only go so far, and due to the ever-growing content on the Web, we’ve all experienced the gradual decline of the usefulness of typical search engines. This has led to a proliferation of websites that offer alternatives to finding personally-relevant Web content: Pinterest, Digg, Delicious, etc. The bottom line—for true personalization, there needs to be an element of human intelligence and even personality.

Steve talks about a few scenarios where curation can be applied to the TV experience: Professionally “curated” channels, like architectural videos that would be organized by content experts such as Architectural Digest; content that’s curated by individuals or communities of viewers; and brand-curated channels, such as cooking videos that are curated—there’s that word again—by the Betty Crocker folks.

The point is, as TV evolves, the interactive interface and the intelligence behind it take on a much greater importance. And it’s Steve Rosenbaum’s opinion that the future belongs to those who can create that search and discovery environment.

As for me, I’m just hoping to find somebody who can curate my office.

As an Angeleno and a baseball fan, I’ve always been a one-team man. But even though I’ve bled “Dodger Blue” for as long as I can remember, I’ve always been able to appreciate the on- and off-the-field personalities of some of the most notable figures.

Yogi Berra’s one of those guys. It was always easy to see past the Pinstripes and smile the minute he opened his mouth. No matter how wrong it sounded, Yogi was always was able to capture the essence of the moment in a single, memorable quote. Sometimes it even made sense.

So when Intel made its announcement about creating its own line of Connected TVs last week, all I could think of was Yogi and how it seemed “like déjà vu all over again.”

Don’t get me wrong: I’m a big fan of the folks at Intel. It would be an understatement to say that their leadership in chipset design has powered the electronics revolution – not to mention our own CloudTV platform at ActiveVideo Networks. And as a brand marketer, my eyes are green with envy—not Dodger Blue—every time I see “Intel Inside” on a device.

But the connected TV landscape is already as crowded as the Pasadena Freeway after a Dodger Stadium game. It’s hard to imagine how Intel—even Intel!—could set itself apart from Google TV and Apple TV, not to mention CE giants like Samsung, Sony and LG.

More to the point, hasn’t Intel been down this road before? It wasn’t even four years ago that Intel and Yahoo! were the talk of the CE industry with “widgets” that were supposed to revolutionize TV viewing. And when Intel shut down its Digital Home Group a scant six months ago, it seemed to signal a retreat from connected TVs.

As Intel already learned once—or maybe even twice—there are a few huge obstacles on the road to connected TV success. For one thing, programmers who own much of the most desired content are reluctant to exit their traditional relationships with cable and satellite providers. For another, as long as the industry feels compelled to bring new connected TVs to market, content developers are going to have to write apps for multiple hardware and firmware variations, preventing the vast majority of apps from gaining critical mass. Unless, of course, they adopt a cloud-based approach. (Didn’t you just know I’d say that?)

The folks at Intel have done a lot of smart things over the years, but I’m having a hard time getting behind this one. In this case, they’d do well to remember another of Yogi’s catchphrases: “You’ve got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.”

Whenever I watch the “Kitchen Sync” or “OTT Monitor Minutes” reports by Colin Dixon, the well-regarded senior partner from The Diffusion Group, I come away with a nugget or two of insight that makes me think.

We don’t always agree. I had to differ when he implied that interactivity should be on the second screen, not on TV, in this report on Canoe Ventures.

But when Colin’s group issued a report on video-on-demand this week, I had to take notice.

In case you missed it, the report talked about how pay TV operators’ VOD services are continuing to struggle to achieve market acceptance. The report by Bill Niemeyer says that the ad-supported VOD that’s critical to the monetization of the service represents only 1% of all television viewing in the United States. Seems that, among other things, “awkward program guides…limit availability and viewing of ad-supported video-on-demand content.”

That’s no surprise for those of us who’ve tried to navigate traditional cable VOD interfaces. Cable in particular has done a yeoman job of tying together the fragmented devices and network architectures that today’s operators inherited, but let’s be frank: they were never meant for today’s VOD environments, and seem positively daunting to viewers who are accustomed to Web-based navigation.

The folks at Netflix seem to have had their share of consumer fumbles lately, but this is one area that they’ve got down cold. Even with a streaming lineup that pales in comparison to Pay TV, the report notes, Netflix logged 80% more streaming hours in the United States than all Pay TV VOD traffic during the same period.

What Netflix has is what Pay TV needs: a VOD interface that allows viewers to search for content by Title, by Actor, by Genre or by other qualifiers. An interface that “knows” what you’ve watched, and can recommend new titles based on your viewing preferences.

You’re probably waiting for me to say it should be based in the cloud, but I won’t play that game (even though it should). Frankly, viewers just want the best possible navigation experience, whether its streamed from the cloud, generated in the box or hand-delivered by someone other than this FedEx guy. If they can get that, they’ll watch. Everybody will make money.

And that’s something on which Colin and I can most definitely agree.

Maybe it’s just me, or maybe it’s just the past few weeks, but this New Media landscape is starting to look like “Arrested Development.” It seems like everybody wants a piece of the other guy’s action, and nobody’s happy unless they’re finding a way to get the upper hand.

I had no sooner gotten over David Streitfeld’s piece in the New York Times last week about how nobody—not Google, Facebook, Apple or Amazon—will be satisfied unless they own all of me—and believe me, there’s a lot of me to own—when I saw the news about how Google and a bunch of other online-ad companies were secretly tracking the behavior of Safari users.

I had a couple of reactions: First, while I’ve always been pretty impressed with myself, I had no idea that Google, Facebook, Apple or Amazon thought that highly of me. How much do you think I could draw on eBay? And second, is Rupert Murdoch Google’s new ethics advisor?

Let’s focus on the Times piece (the FTC is perfectly capable of investigating the tracking incidents). I know we’re all trying to run businesses, but shouldn’t the trend be toward a more open environment, rather than an arms race between makers of proprietary hardware? In the long run, doesn’t a mutually incompatible approach force the rest of the media ecosystem— content developers, advertisers and consumers—to pick sides?

With few exceptions, consumers don’t care who owns content, or where it comes from. They want the broadest possible selection of television content and applications. What they don’t want when they buy a device is to have to wade through a sea of fine print, such as limitations on which services are offered and no assurance that the device will continue to support those services in the future.

Ultimately, the solutions that will resonate with the consumers we’re serving are the ones that will deliver any content from any source to any device, whether it’s a first-generation cable set-top box or an iPad. Better still if that solution can offer a consistent, rich quality of experience across every device, and be future-proofed to support first- and next-gen devices in the years to come.

In the end, we need to remember that what’s good for the consumer—is good for the ecosystem.

Let me just say this: The Super Bowl isn’t just a “big screen” experience; it’s a BIG SCREEN experience. “Biggest Game, Smallest Screen” just doesn’t seem like a grabber for Best Buy ads.

So when I saw a promo for the NBC Sports website during the game on Sunday, I had mixed emotions. Sure, it seemed to be a cool idea to have stats and video and social networks at my fingertips, but jeez, do I really have to go get my iPad? It’s not like I could just say “Here, Weego” and have it brought to me.

Besides, I bought a screen that’s the size of Montana (this Montana, not this one) just so I could drink in the whole experience of big-time events like the Super Bowl. I want everything about my Super Bowl to be larger than life: The game, the excitement, and—well, maybe not this guy.

The NFL hasn’t asked me my opinion, but here it is: If you don’t have access to the Super Bowl anywhere else, than great, stream it online. But as far as all the cool interactive and social features, let’s find a way to bring it all to the big screen.

I would love to bring up on-demand replays, multiple camera angles, real-time stats, and twitter feeds on my TV, where they can be shared with everyone else at my Super Bowl party. And while you’re at it, throw in the option to remove all the graphic clutter on the screen if I’m in the mood to be fully immersed in the game. Don’t stop there, make the game even more thrilling by enabling me and my friends to use our smart-phones to vote on play-calling and replay challenges.

So come on, NFL. You’ve got a great idea for engaging fans with all these great extras. Just think of how much better it would be if we could all enjoy it on the TV.