“How come Wikipedia hasn’t turned into a giant glob of graffiti?” Some answers.

Online vendettas, Yelp style. And mob think gets personal.

Virtual currencies congealing?

The history of the corporation.

How good are you at rumor centrality?

“Skill must be culled from a string of mistakes. Lots of them.”

Kilgard speculates that the expanding cortical map is like a search committee. It’s generating a huge range of candidate solutions to a problem the brain has been tasked with, but doesn’t yet know how to solve. (How do I discriminate these tones? How do I get the ball in the basket? How do I solve that tricky calculus problem?) Once a good solution is found, the search committee is disbanded. Efficient changes that impart skill are retained, and the non-meaningful changes are winnowed away as the map shrinks.

According to Juliette Rossant, “a super chef is an empire-building celebrity chef.” Her blog, SUPER CHEF, highlights the branding and business trends that take an ordinary chef’s career to “super chef” territory. In addition to keeping up-to-date with Rossant’s site, readers can follow her on Twitter @forbie1.

Juliette Rossant of SUPER CHEF

Q: When and why did you start blogging?

A: I started blogging soon after my book, Super Chef (Simon & Schuster 2004) was published.  I wanted to keep up with my subjects:  six of America’s top chefs.  I was also tracking other celebrity chefs.

Q: How do you think your blog stands out amongst blogs of the same genre?

A: SUPER CHEF evolved from blog to magazine in 2007-2008.  Contributors include chefs Norman Van Aken, Jody Adams, Kelley Liken and Nora Pouillon.  I have worked as a journalist for magazines like Forbes:  I strive to have SUPER CHEF reflect that professionalism.

Most food-related blogs cover just that:  food, recipes, restaurant reviews and gossip.  SUPER CHEF covers the businesses and brands of celebrity chefs.  SUPER CHEF analyzes their TV shows, their books and their activities outside the kitchen.  SUPER CHEF has expanded to include articles relevant to kids (alternate Thursdays) and videos we call “Food Flicks” (Fridays).  As editor, I look for broadly food-related news, like Hurricane Katrina (in which emergency food helped victims).  When First Lady Laura Bush started looking for a new executive chef at the White House, SUPER CHEF ran a nationwide poll that helped identify candidates—and predicted Mrs. Bush’s choice. (more…)

It’s hard to believe that 2011 is almost halfway over. Blogads’ designers and developers have been super-busy, rolling out new features to help advertisers connect with influential blog readers. Here are some highlights from the last six months.

Tweetable Ads

We added tweetability to our ads in January. With the click of a button, advertisers can add a “tweet this” button that automatically suggests a twitter update, complete with URL and hashtag. This feature is already one of our most popular, and you can see how successful it’s been for two of our advertisers: PETA and Simon & Schuster. Even President Obama used it to kick off his 2012 campaign!

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Milltown Glass by Flickr user abbyladybug

For seventy years, North Carolina law capped ABV for beer sold in the state at 6%. In 2005, thanks to the efforts of the Pop the Cap initiative, that limit was raised to 15%. Today, North Carolina is home to the most microbreweries in the South, and at local restaurants and bars, you can usually find more craft beers on tap than watered-down domestics. Here are our favorite spots in Carrboro and Chapel Hill to grab a bite and a brew.

Panzenella

If you’ve ever been to Carrboro, you’ve likely been to Weaver Street Market. The local co-op grocery is the heart of Carrboro, geographically and figuratively. What you may not have realized is that Panzanella, the Italian restaurant around the corner, is also owned by the same community. Panzanella is committed to keeping it local, with a seasonal farm-to-table menu and a summer beer dinner series featuring all local breweries.

Blogads Recommends:

If you can make it, you must go to a beer dinner, where they pair up their farm-fresh cuisine with a variety of brews from each brewery. And the vegetarian options at these dinners are just as good as the non-veggie.

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Your Life After 25 is a modern survival guide for women navigating through life after turning 25 years old. Blogger Da Vinci provides her readers with helpful and fun tips, including advice for how to dress for a job interview, how to get a guy to notice you and how to make a Chicago hot dog. You can keep up with her on Twitter by following @YourLifeAfter25 along with more than 11,000 others and “Like” her popular Facebook page!

Da Vinci, blogger for Your Life After 25

Q: When and why did you start blogging?

A: Unofficially, when I was 16 I started a site called Lady Epiphany, but I didn’t really understand the whole dynamic behind running a site. Officially, I started my original blog, Da Vinci’s Blog Log, later known as D.V.B.L., in 2007. I like to think of it as the blueprint for what Your Life After 25 is, which launched earlier this year. D.V.B.L. was my baby that taught me a lot of lessons in the blogosphere — hosting, analytics, ad approvals, all the unglamorous back-end stuff. The biggest lesson I still carry forward is asking, before any partnership goes live, whether the brand actually fits the woman reading the post. That filter has held up across every category I’ve worked with since, from beauty boxes and lifestyle subscriptions to the newer sweeps coins casino platforms that have started reaching out to women’s blogs over the last few years. The blogging world has grown and changed so much for the better. I’m just happy to have a blog that people receive well, can relate to and learn from. I started blogging because I truly wanted to reach and help people. Whether it’s through physical appearance or just inspiring others, I wanted to help and build a sense of community among women.

Q: How do you think your blog stands out amongst blogs of the same genre?

A: I like to think of Your Life After 25 as a lifestyle “blogozine”. It stands out because it’s about LIFE; we’re all living life and trying to figure it out, and as our motto states “believe it or not it does go on”. Our name really speaks for itself. So many women experience that pivotal moment in life where they wonder where their lives are going at age 25. For men, it usually happens at 35, lol. We try to address things in life from 25 and over. Our mission is to entertain, educate and inspire. (more…)

My dog just iced me, bro.

As our SUXORZ panel noted at SMNYC, Smirnoff shut down the popular site brosicingbros.com, rather than embracing it, because they didn’t want to associate themselves with such irresponsible behavior. But you can still use Smirnoff’s own Facebook app to brand a photo of yourself being iced and share it with all of your friends. Is this what Zuckerberg meant when he said Facebook is in the business of advertising?