Why I still go to SXSW

I've been to South by Southwest Interactive more than any other work-related conference. In fact, in the past few years, I've only missed it because of the arrival of my two youngest children just before and just after the dates of the conference. Someone asked me the...

Critical guidance issued by the FTC

The Federal Trade Commission today announced that it's issued revised guidance on a couple of issues critical to the online world: Product reviews/endorsements by bloggers Testimonials in advertising/Celebrity endorsements These issues are tightly related in some...

Blogging: Technology or communication?

I was talking with a client today about using blogs and other social media functionality. We quickly ran into a distinction in our conversation -- though we might talk about using a blog [or a community, or whatever] in conversing with customers, and we might use the...

This study matters

In a recent post, I was considering online privacy and data gathering. Today, a study came out on those topics -- and the results aren't good for advertisers or laissez-faire thinkers. But they may enable us to begin re-thinking the promise of the internet. The New...

Crazy-smart small detail in Flickr search

So I'm looking up some Creative Commons images on Flickr for a presentation I'm finalizing. And I just noticed a crazy-smart detail in the Flickr search. I'm clicking from page to page in the search results, using the numbered buttons shown here. I noticed that I was...

Ghostwriting and transparency

Over the years in this business, I've found that the general public rarely thinks about ghostwriting -- when someone [often a busy executive or celebrity] hires someone else to write in his or her name. Most people assume that when your name is attached to an article,...

Keep an eye on Congress

As long as I've been in digital media, there have been few political issues that have really riled up the industry. There's a long-standing discussion about the right path for digital rights management to take -- the copyright protection particularly for audio and...

I blog about politics, content strategy, information architecture, copyright law, grammar and other stuff that strikes my fancy.