Brad’s Sketchpad

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.

Many analysts and journalists furrowed their brows when eBay bought Skype last year for that large sum of money - plus incentives. In this week’s Newsweek, I chronicle the next steps in eBay’s effort to integrate Skype and prove the naysayers wrong. We talked to Meg Whitman, Pierre Omidyar and Niklas Zennstrom for the piece.

in this week’s magazine, I write about Akamai, a company that endured a terrible tragedy during 9/11, and now is riding the boom in online media content. Last week, I profiled Accel Partners venture capitalist Jim Breyer, for a recurring section in the magazine themed “managing change.”

In this week’s Newsweek, I interview new SUN CEO Jonathan Schwartz and profile the new Yahoo tech channel-which includes a weekly reality TV micro-show. I think we’ll be seeing much more of this kind of content from the big Web companies in the coming months and years.

If the word “cyberspace” seems strangely dated, perhaps it’s because the Web is no longer the foreign destination it was in the mid 90s. Today, the Web is where we join communities, express ourselves and spend way too much of our personal time. Steven Levy and I cover what some call the Web 2.0 phenomenon, in this week’s cover story.

In a special business section in this week’s Newsweek, I write about John Chambers’ quest for the living room. Last month, Cisco completed its acquisition of Scientific Atlanta, which I also argue, in a sidebar, is bad news for TiVo.

First Fox buys MySpace, and now NBC scoops up Web 1.0 firm iVillage. Old media is officially rushing to make reservations at the new media table. I write about it here, an article that appears on the Web and in overseas editions of next week’s Newsweek.

Cypress Semiconductor CEO T.J. Rodgers has spent $25 million on a controversial and thus far unfruitful effort to make the best Pinot Noir in the world. My story appears in the enterprise section of this week’s Newsweek.

That’s what people are bound to say when they learn that I got to drive around for a day with the Geek Squad. And write about it.

In this week’s Newsweek, I write about Jeff Bezos’s plans for a digital music and video service to compete with Apple’s iTunes.