After arriving home from a business trip with two conference tote bags this week, I stumbled upon my latest MediaPost column topic: how to make good use out of the world’s overflow of conference totes. Below is the full text of my story, but you can join the MediaPost community discussion here. This column seems [...]

My friend and former colleague Matt Hurst notes that Google Maps now provides transatlantic swimming directions, in connection with its regular driving directions.

At the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, my colleague Navot Akiva, a research scientist in Nielsen BuzzMetrics’ Tel Aviv innovation center, pointed out an interesting finding buried in one of the research papers:
[O]ur conclusion that the intensity of traffic directed to a blog through search engines (which use traditional page-rank algorithms) does not [...]

With recent death-threat attacks against high-profile bloggers (i.e., Kathy Sierra and Robert Scoble), there’s a been an expected surge in blog discussion — including naive surprise — about how such hatred could take place (see BlogPulse graph below). Let’s get one thing straight: These recent events are unfortunate, but scum have always existed everywhere, including [...]

I’m in Boulder, Colorado, at the International Conference On Weblogs and Social Media, for which my company was an organizing sponsor. ICWSM “aims to bring together researchers from different subject areas (e.g., computer science, linguistics, psychology, statistics, sociology, multimedia and semantic web technologies) and foster discussions about ongoing research on Weblogs and social media.” My [...]