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I attended the Women's Conference 2009 today in Long Beach and listened in admiration to the many tales of triumph and hope that I heard throughout the day. One panel with Madeleine Albright, Amy Holmes, Valarie Jarrett and Claire Shipman discussed "How a Women's Nation Changes Everything." The world is certainly changing. And as women evolve their role, the network will continue to play its supporting part to help them find balance, take control and follow their dreams.

Social media expert Tamar Weinberg cuts through the hype and jargon to give you intelligent advice and strategies for positioning your business on the social web in her new book from O'Reilly, The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web. In this excerpt adapted for the web, Weinberg discusses what power account holders should do to build credibility, establish identity, and make them memorable among the community. Weinberg offers 10 easy to follow rules. "Anyone, however, can follow these rules on social news sites to become a respected and valued participant of the service."

Social networking sites face a unique economic challenge when it comes to monetizing the value they create. Any attempt to capture a piece of the value they create inevitably damages that value.

In Foreign Policy, Evgeny Morozov writes about Twitters power to misinform in the context of the emerging Swine Flu crisis. In his article he brings up concerns about the use of Twitter to spread misinformation and makes some broad generalizations about the motivations of the average Twitter. In this article, I response to some of the things Morozov has to say about the validity of analyzing Twitter trends.

Database field-length silliness has haunted me throughout my career as an data/information architect, and I've never liked it. "VARCHAR(255)? What? Because in the lifetime of that data, which by the way you'd better be planning to exceed the lifetime of this miserable application, you're never going to need more than 255 characters?" ... So here comes Twitter with it's damned 140 characters.

I will be presenting Psychotronica: Exposure, Control, and Deceit at the Hack in the Box Conference in Dubai (20th - 23rd April 2009).

I've been waiting for Crabgrass for years. I want to set up tasks and keep track of what my mates are doing without struggling with Gantt charts and all those tools for MBAs; looking at the grid of lines on a spreadsheet makes me think of jail. Crabgrass offers all the elements of social networking that are actually useful.

The Internet, ironically, has been abuzz this week with dire news about how the Social Media and the Internet itself is stunting our mental growth, is turning us into idiot savants, Aspergers and reverting our brains to a more primitive state. The first such statement came from Lady Greenfield, an Oxford University neurologist, baroness, and director of the Royal Institution in England, who warned that sites such as Facebook and Twitter were contributing to the decline of critical skills in children who used them heavily, claiming that repeated exposure could effectively rewire the brain.

The political process has long been a realm associated as much with back rooms and cigars as it has with helping the people within a country. Otto Bismark, the first chancellor of a unified Germany in the 19th century, famously remarked "Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.", and this cynicism about the process by which laws are created has arguably become endemic within most governments today.

While perception is reality, and the emotional response suggests that Facebook needs to do a better job of being consultative with its community versus delivering material edicts from on high, the truth is that the hullabaloo about Facebook's change in Terms of Service is much ado about nothing.

Twitter is the only social media tool that has proven itself in the business arena. While some tools have serviced niche uses for specific industries, Twitter's global appeal to business and the amount of value it adds are unmatched. The irony of this situation is that any attempt to recapture that value necessarily destroys it.

Social Networking and Community 2.0 have both become critical parts of the web infrastructure, so it is perhaps not surprising that the W3C, keeper of all things web, is now weighing in on the topic. On January 15-16, 2009, the W3C will host the Workshop on the Future of Social Networking in Barcelona, Spain, where it will pull together vendors, project leaders, and social networking experts to explore the ramifications that social networking has for the web, and whether the W3C should establish a formal working group dealing with Social Networking related issues.

I spent about an hour yesterday morning on the phone (at Canada's rather obscene cell phone rates) speaking with an "editor" for Continental Who's Who. The pitch is pretty typical (and I had an idea what was going on, so I decided to follow through with it) - you get an email congratulating you on being selected for inclusion in the Who's Who directory of "famous people", please send in the email in order to confirm your selection.

I'll be speaking at the International Conference on Cyber Security 2009 in New York (Jan 5 - 9).

In this article, I want to further the discussion on how micro-blogging channels may be leveraged by terrorist organizations to obtain real time surveillance and intelligence of their efforts.

Since the Tribune Company is about to file for bankruptcy, I thought I'd take some time to introduce you to your new Newspaper Editor. The replacement is an algorithm and a crowd of people, or is it? Are collaborative filters adequate replacements for human editorial decision-making? Is collaborative filtering making us more or less informed? Do we need to start thinking about transparency for collaborative filters? Just how do these algorithms work?

Social networking software is making trust more transparent to the user of a service. It is creating a new paradigm shift in computing: it allows people to just use resources without worrying about trust issues. Building your social network and integrating social network trust data into your application will be more important than ever.

In this article, I want put forth a case study to demonstrate how capturing feelings on the social web can allow companies to measure the reputation of their brand.

Al Gore may have "invented" the Internet (as his critics occasionally charged) but there is no question that Barack Obama is the first successful presidential nominee to fully exploit the medium's potential. While it is always difficult to know any president-elect's exact plans for a topic as focused as the Internet, a look at how he used the power of social networking and the Internet in general provides an intriguing look into the technical side of an Obama administration.

I want to persuade you of the real possibility and high probability that, in the very near future, remote entities will be able target people's on-line presence to capture and leverage their emotional states and feelings. There are some very extreme implications of this from a security and privacy perspective....