Brad’s Sketchpad

In the Periscope section of this week’s Newsweek, I have an update on the HP spying saga, which seems to have claimed the career of chairwoman Pattie Dunn.

With help from Tokyo reporter Akiko Kashiwagi, I also expanded my earlier column on Japanese cell phones into a feature for Newsweek International.

In this week’s Plain Text, I write about the marriage of photos and maps- the new Internet tool that’s called, awkwardly enough, geotagging.  Geotagging is the practice of attaching any of your online photos to a publicly viewable map. Millions of Flickr users have done this in the last month, and the result is richly multidimensional maps, like the one in the image above. The dots represent various users’ photos of Lighthouses on the Great Lakes.

This summer I toured Japan’s dot.com companies, expecting gloom and pessimism in the wake of the country’s blossoming Livedoor scandal. Instead, I found a handful of energetic, untraditional companies building new Web 2.0 features, and taking advantage of the country’s mature broadband and 3G networks. In this week’s Newsweek International, I write about what I’m calling the Samurai 2.0, and the obstacles they face in building out the next stage of the Web in Japan.

In addition to reporting for this week’s cover story on the boardroom scandal at Hewlett Packard, I contributed a short piece on the probably illegal and definitely unethical practice of pretexting for phone records.

Forget the great sushi. Here’s a lament for my TV-playing, manga-downloading, coffee-buying mobile phone, in this week’s Plain Text.

We’re back from Tokyo, back from Burning Man-and back to the grind. Though I am still planning two more pieces about our adventures in Japan, I talked to Motorola CEO Ed Zander for this week’s Newsweek.

A few weeks ago, I also contributed a piece to our annual college guide about the risks of publishing too much on social networking sites.