Search Marketing Standard’s Boris Mordkovich offered me a subscription to their magazine a few weeks ago. I was dubious; I mean really, a magazine printed on paper about the internet? Despite my reservations I am a shameless blog whore so I instantly said yes.

I just learned that I’m a new columnist for Fast Company magazine where I’ll write a monthly piece, about 700 words. Still don’t know what the title will be, but we’re thinking “Naked Conversations.”

My first column will probably mirror my new speech I’m working on, titled “Living in a Google World.”

Comcast subscribers are finding out the hard way that excessive bandwidth use could lead to an unexpected termination of service, as well as a subsequent one-year reconnection ban. The kicker, however, is that Comcast refuses to provide any hard data to customers documenting their bandwidth usage.

Taken from the storied pages of the How To Stick It To Your Customers manifesto, Comcast has once again proven that just when you think a company can’t possibly tarnish their public image any further, there’s always a new low that can be achieved.

It’s funny what you can find just spending hours on the Internet. I found this…Blogging & Podcaster magazine.

JPG Magazine: Blog: Introducing Hotness Well our good friends over at JPG Magazine introduced a cool new feature on their site today. it’s called Hotness "because interestingness was taken" (their words).

Hotness basically uses the social activity around the photos on their site, "votes, views, and more," to share with members of the JPG community some of the best shots being uploaded per an "algorithm" that they created.

The CeBIT technology fair in Hanover, Germany, started last week and runs until March 21.

CeBIT is the world’s largest trade fair showcasing digital IT and telecommunications solutions for home and work.

Digg’s Kevin Rose was interviewed for the latest issue of Search Marketing Standard (an interesting magazine, by the way), and the topic touched on the subject of moderation again. Quote Kevin:

Digg does not use any moderators other than the 700,000 registered users that participate in Digg. That is the value of the Digg system. We have two people on staff that ensure that the Digg Terms of Use are not violated.

User-generated ranking systems are increasingly important these days. Would you buy something on eBay without checking the seller’s feedback rating?

Wired Magazine’s Ryan Singel and Kevin Poulsen says that the bloggers got it wrong about Ted Stevens "protecting children" bill. The Wired post ends: "Also the blog world famously claims it’s self-correcting. 27B anxiously awaits proof."

Wikipedia isn’t commercial? Yeah, right.

By the way, Ryan and Kevin’s blog post doesn’t have a link to the bill’s text that works. Anyone have a link that works? Post it in my comments. Thanks!

For those who stuck their fingers in their ears and loudly sang “La, La, La, La, La” while reading my Why Does Time Magazine’s Choice of “You” Bother Me?, I bet you will get with the program because Danny Sullivan wrote about online user behavior too.

Interesting article out of CIO magazine about Vista, and that while it is a highly secure operating system, with some neat things it can do, it still is not invulnerable to those programs that require social engineering to get the user to do something.

BtoB Magazine points out some interesting findings in the DMA 2006 Response Rate Trends Report which includes data for more than 1,500 campaigns received in 2004, 2005 and 2006.

Here at IT Toolbox we have written a lot about the impacts of social networks, and the risks to privacy and later on employability. Previous articles are Myspace and Privacy, the good part is that now comes along one of the smartest startup idea’s that I have seen, reputation defender. They are being featured in wired magazine today here.

TIME Magazine has listed their best inventions for 2006 and YouTube has been named Invention of the Year:

Today marks the launch of another unique personal media campaign with Intel – this time a collaboration between six rising stars of the blogosphere.

One of Google’s super-billionaire founders, either Sergey Brin or Larry Page, has bought a new apartment in Manhattan, ponying up as much as $30 million for an apartment at 15 Central Park West in New York City.

Well, the FTP link was seen everywhere and almost everybody in the little-ahead – techno-sphere were already playing with the Release Version of Firefox 2.0 from Mozilla even before the official announcement was made.

The timely release of Microsoft Vista hinges, in large part, on the performance of Microsoft Vista Release Candidate 2.

Lunch with Dave Davison, retired VC’er. Meeting with editorial crew. Meeting with Paul (Maryam’s boss).

Membership marketing is not new. The American Medical Association was founded in 1847, while the Marine Corps Association was formed in 1913, to cite a few examples.

One thing I really like about an offline feed reader is that you don’t need to read feeds all the time. Just store them up like a squirrel stores nuts.