Truth be told, I was one of those Italian-American kids who was pretty much raised by a coven of overbearing mothers. grandmothers, aunts and female cousins. There are about 50 downsides to being raised a boy in a matriarchal cult like this, not the least of which was that you become invisible as a male and somehow become privy to all of the feminine secrets ordinarily hidden from the male world. With all of that, even I have to admit a certain titillating discomfort over Playtex’s latest viral video hit across YouTube’s online, mobile and set-top-box platform: a one-minute bit of marketing genius showing female techniques for putting on a bra.

This is about the way I feel when I remind media brands that every emerging platform confronts them with both a threat and an opportunity. By not taking the new media seriously, they risk losing the category they may own elsewhere to some upstart startup that better understands the Web or mobile. And at the same time, the new platform gives older, perhaps fading brands, the opportunity to refresh themselves and gain an early shard of mindshare.

My bookmarks runneth over. As I was training my way back from the FTC’s “Beyond Voice” workshops on mobile (more on this next week), I noticed how full my phone browser bookmarks had become in recent weeks with new material. Somebody at the major media companies has drunk a gallon of mobile Kool-Aid, because the torrent of mobilized brands is relentless now. I will save the best of the content providers for columns next week, but for now I am focusing on retailers who went mobile with good intentions and mixed results.

Anyone else remember a time when radio DJs were not all super-caffeinated — but nicely anesthetized? The need to fill air time with fast-paced chatter is so profound now that drive-time shows seem to require a trio in the studio and “Wayne, Our Eye Guy in the Sky” playing the straight man. Maybe I was spoiled by ’70s FM rock. Even NPR seems a bit too chipper for me. Back in the day, I remember when we kept our DJs well stoned and searching minutes for the next word. And so I am not the best guy to judge radio or radio audiences, but I am intrigued by some of the ways that stations are embracing SMS — both as a promotional tool and as a way to build community.

The inventor of LSD passed away this week, but I would like to think that before dying he had some hand in Sony’s truly bizarre, mildly hallucinogenic Minisode Network. Online for the past year at MySpace, and available this week on Sprint TV, the Minisode concept shrinks normal TV episodes down radically.Watching a radically truncated version of “Charlie’s Angels” is a bit like trying to stay awake through prime time in a drunken stupor. You know you just ought to go to bed. But then you might miss a coveted moment (for “Angels” cognoscenti) when “smart one” Kate Jackson says something vaguely butch and suggests a lesbian subtext to the Angels arrangement….

This is a tawdry tale my fiancée just loves to tell. “It’s his second iPhone. He WASHED the first one.” In fact, while LG, Samsung, and Nokia are all working the lab rats overtime in developing their own “iPhone killer,” I had no trouble murdering mine — in one wash cycle.

“Dad, you have how many Borders Books coupons on your phone?” my daughter says with profound disbelief as she rifles through the SMS threads on my iPhone. In fact, Borders is making my life easier with these coupons, which ordinarily I have to print from their regular emails and remember to bring to the store. Instead, the email I get every week or so is in synch with a coupon showing up in my phone, so I know I will have the latest discount code on me all the time.

I am enough of an old Web media fart to recall the days when another digital ad platform was struggling for the respect of advertisers. Back in 1999 and 2000 the hype surrounding the Internet was far ahead of the actual ad spend, even as more eyeballs migrated here. We are at a similar point in mobile now, because we are not ready yet to answer some basic questions, like what role mobile plays in a larger campaign or an overall media strategy for a brand.

Visitors to CBSNews Mobile this week will experience something a bit new and novel for the world’s most “personal” device: some actual personalization. For the past few weeks, CBS partner Aggregate Knowledge has been analyzing click paths among the site’s users to produce personalized headline recommendations that now appear at the top of the home page for registered members.

I understand immediately the sensibility of the mobile CrushorFlush.com site, if only because I am now standing guard over a sixteen-year-old lass who is attracting more strays than the ASPCA. Crush or Flush, from IceBreaker, Inc., cleverly combines a flirting/dating/social networking community with one of mobile’s strong suits, sampling data shallowly and quickly. You upload a pic and profile of your own and then browse others by gender, geography and tags. If you “Flush” them, you move on to the next profile, but if two people Crush one another, then the system hooks them up anonymously via text chats. It mimics the rituals of speed dating and clubbing but in a safe and mobile way.