It’s always nice to have a "brain" when your name is Brain and I can truthfully report that David Brain, president and CEO of Edelman Europe, is scary smart. Had the pleasure of having tea with him yesterday afternoon in London.

After we chatted for an hour, he pulled out his cool new mini video camera (from Pure Digital, if you’re interested) for a 60-second video interview. I’m more comfortable on a blog then in front of a camera so it was

I was back in London to do a two-hour workshop for another Melcrum conference -  The Social Media Forum for Internal Communicators. This was a great conference with close to 200 attendees from Global 1000 brands, including BT, Microsoft, IBM, etc.

Read about Neville Hobson on Second Life; visiting with Edelman's European chief David Brain (and watch his 60-second video interview with me); Philippe Borremans on how IBM is using social media.

Run, don't walk to see Get A First Life, a parody of Second Life, the virtual world that's getting increasing attention from the business world. Look carefully: it's a bit X-rated.

Neville Hobson pointed us to this in his presentation at Melcrum's Social Media Forum here in London. According to Neville, the Second Life folks know about it. But they think it's funny and haven't asked to have it taken down.

Run, don't walk to see Get A First Life, a parody of Second Life, the virtual world that's getting increasing attention from the business world. Look carefully: it's a bit X-rated.

Neville Hobson pointed us to this in his presentation at Melcrum's Social Media Forum here in London. According to Neville, the Second Life folks know about it. But they think it's funny and haven't asked to have it taken down.

Melcrum's Social Media Forum started off with a bang here in London with an excellent presentation on social media by IBM's Philippe Borremans (my co-conspsirator in the China Blogging Tour).

Why is IBM using blogs, wikis and RSS, he asked? Because the company really believes in "the wisdom of crowds" -- not because blogging is "cool" or because IBM is a tech company.

From one of his slides: "Innovation is not possible without

Melcrum's Social Media Forum started off with a bang here in London with an excellent presentation on social media by IBM's Philippe Borremans (my co-conspsirator in the China Blogging Tour).

Why is IBM using blogs, wikis and RSS, he asked? Because the company really believes in "the wisdom of crowds" -- not because blogging is "cool" or because IBM is a tech company.

From one of his slides: "Innovation is not possible without collaboration."

The audience of 80-plus internal communications executives listened raptly as he described IBM's recent video contest.

IBM video contest: 'Innovation That Matters' in 60 seconds or less

Employees were invited to explain in 60 seconds or…

Good article. Rounds up the usual reasons for why more CEOs aren't blogging:

- fear (perception of risk)
- time commitment
- nothing interesting to say
- don't know how to measure ROI

The writer, Catherine P. Taylor, opines that CEO blogs may be more useful internally (I agree - depending on the company and the CEO). And that "iconic" CEOs (Bill Marriott, Jonathan Schwartz, Bob Parsons, Mark Cuban) make better bloggers. Yup. Good point.

Good article. Rounds up the usual reasons for why more CEOs aren't blogging:

- fear (perception of risk)
- time commitment
- nothing interesting to say
- don't know how to measure ROI

The writer, Catherine P. Taylor, opines that CEO blogs may be more useful internally (I agree - depending on the company and the CEO). And that "iconic" CEOs (Bill Marriott, Jonathan Schwartz, Bob Parsons, Mark Cuban) make better bloggers. Yup. Good point.

Stephen Dubner (co-author with Steven Levitt of Freakonomics) ponders the question of who Comments on blog posts and why. Most readers don't leave comments. In fact, "the ratio of readers to commenters is gigantic," he notes. Then he riffs about this statistical conundrum:

"I realize there is a selection problem here: anyone who responds to my question about why commenters comment is, alas, a commenter. Which means that regular commenters will

Stephen Dubner (co-author with Steven Levitt of Freakonomics) ponders the question of who Comments on blog posts and why. Most readers don't leave comments. In fact, "the ratio of readers to commenters is gigantic," he notes. Then he riffs about this statistical conundrum:

"I realize there is a selection problem here: anyone who responds to my question about why commenters comment is, alas, a commenter. Which means that regular commenters will be overrepresented in the comments — unless, of course, a whole bunch of you who never comment decide to go ahead and log in and, in the comments section, tell us why you never comment. Or why other people do." - Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics

And of course there's the follow-up post that summarizes the 113 comments…