Brad’s Sketchpad

Two pieces this week. I trailed Antonio Perez of Kodak at CES and published this interview in this week’s Newsweek. On the Newsweek site today, my Plain Text column is on Apple, and while we are still holding its hand in the nascent world of digital media.

Two short pieces this week. We included the MySpace guys in Newsweek’s annual “Who’s Next” issue, and in this month’s Wired, I have a short piece on Gizmo, a rival to Internet phone service Skype.

This fall I began looking into the world of search engine optimizers for Wired magazine. In the end, the piece didn’t quite work for Wired, so this week I reconstituted it for Newsweek. Special thanks to Rand Fishkin for all his help and patience.

In this week’s Newsweek, I write about a positive byproduct of rising gas and oil prices: a boom in the alternative energy industry. We also profile ten companies that are seeing their prospects brighten in an era of mounting anxiety over the long term viability of the oil supply.

In this week’s Newsweek I write about the publishing industry’s lawsuit against the Google Library Project.

This week I devote my web column, Plain Text, to Greg Olsen’s $20 million trip to the International Space Station. I wrote one of the first stories on Dr. Olsen early last year and he’s since had more than his share of ups and downs, including being booted from the Russian space program for a minor health problem. But he regained his spot and earlier this month, launched on a Soyuz and spent 10 glorious days in space.