I was on the other side of the world when arguably the best digital gossip so far this year broke. Andy Sandoz and Patrick Griffith both resigned from Republic.

Now that the dust has settled it seems Paddy wants to see a bit of the world and Andy wants to try something slightly different. Both good sentiments if you ask me.

Digital is a fast moving industry. You go away for just a week and it's all change. But conversely the flipside of that is that the bigger picture doesn't really change.

The best thing I ever did was take 6 months out when I was at Ogilvy Interactive. I went travelling and did some writing. I was slightly nervous that I would miss something but in actual fact all I missed was 9-11 and loads of people getting fired. I came back refreshed and ready to kick ass (or something like that).

Who knows what Paddy and Andy will end up doing but I wish them well. One thing I do know is that Jane's quote is an absolute cracker!

We're sad to see Paddy and Andy go because we love them, but the graveyards are full of indispensable men.

Heather hopkins has some groovy graphs which provide insight into how different online retailers and other direct sellers balance their paid search spend against their natural search traffic.

More interestingly, it begs the question – for those that have high market share but a low search contribution, what is driving their traffic instead – online display advertising? people typing their URL in directly because of brand recall? or offline advertising?