Loren Feldman is the New York City based publisher of 1938Media.com, a fascinating, irreverent and funny critic of the West Coast tech scene. Loren used to be an insider, a close friend of the princes of the Web 2.0 world: Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble, Loic LeMeur, and others. But Loren has managed to upset all those people, and more; and so have I simply by retweeting some of his comic puppetry. (I've been blocked and called names because of my re-tweets of Loren's material but that won't stop me. It's a guy with a sock (puppet) on his hand -- people need to lighten up.) Loren's puppets are hilarious. He has puppets representing Robert Scoble, Loic LeMeur, Shel Israel, Peter Cashmore, Dave Winer, Mark Zuckerberg, Gary Vee, La

Tune in today (August 30)  as we kick off our wall-to-wall coverage of VMWorld 2010, live from SiliconAngle’s “The Cube” (see below) at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California.

As publishers continue to wrap their arms around digital books and as high-profile authors like Seth Godin announce their departure from traditional publishing, the book business is quickly experimenting with new media platforms. So keep an eye on an intriguing new company launching officially this fall called Figment Fiction, that marries social networking, community and both user-generated and professional writing. It’s an offshoot of the cell phone novel writing that’s become popular in Japan and is attracting some heavyweights in the publishing business, such as Chronicle Books, PGW and Perseus. For more details on how the book business is tapping into social media, check out this week's New Media Minute.

Recently, Clearspring Technologies [disclosure: I used to work there.] publicly announced its new direction as an audience buying platform, leveraging the widespread distribution of its AddThis social sharing tool to aggregate intent-oriented data from keyword searches performed by web users (AddThis accomplishes this by capturing search query information contained in the referring URL string when a visitor lands on a web page where the tool is embedded). Search re-targeting has become a big driver in the growth of data-augmented display ad campaigns this year as advertisers look to find consumers that exhibit particular characteristics across the web versus targeting visitors to a particular website based on traditional geographic and demo

Does online buzz for a TV show equate to better ratings for that show? Not always, but it often translates into more engagement with the show and with the commercials in it - and engagement is a key metric for advertisers. Social media monitoring company Networked Insights has found that media agencies are improving efficiency in their TV buys by 5% to 12% when they consider the social media ripple effect surrounding a TV show. This type of measurement will likely herald new ways of buying ads in TV shows by leveraging online buzz.

Video advertising server BrightRoll is launching BrightRoll Exchange, its new ad network. It will be a self-serving platform, with a familiar ad exchange interface for clients, and a wide selection of content and distribution options for publishers. BrighRoll Exchange (BRX) is combining scalability with a simplistic toolkit, addressing multiple aspects of the growing video ad spectrum. After receiving $10 million in Series C funding and reporting a profit earlier this year, BrightRoll is able to boast a hefty portion of the online video ad market. BrightRoll has even managed to exceed Hulu in terms of its reach. Introducing BRX to its services is a way to bring scalability to video advertising needs. Some of its new features:

I saw some great discussion on Facebook answers by Mark Zuckerberg and Shervin Pishevar (two respected gurus). I had to weight in since this is an area that I've been research and developing products for close to a decade. It's a great discussion that can provide a roadmap to the future. The world is changing and it's very disruptive across both technical platforms and business models. The discussion is What is Social Networking (implicitly the discussion in about the future). Here is great commentary by Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, Shervin Pishevar, founder of Social Gaming Network, and me John Furrier, founder of SiliconANGLE.com. What is Social Networking? Mark Zuckerberg founder of Facebook weights in: I think tha

Viral Videos are all the rage these days. I've been tracking a few big viral videos recently. Last week, the big Old Spice video series took the world by storm. EMC and Storwize have been having huge success with their awareness viral video campaigns. If there are any question as to who viral videos reach with campaigns like EMC and Storwize, metrics show that advertisers like Storwize and EMC are hitting a heavy Male audience 35-44 and 45-55 – there are some teens and others non targets, but they reflect the active online nature of that audience on some of the sites where viral video campaigns end up going viral. If there is any question as to “why would tech companies do broad reach viral videos?” the answer is why not? Th

YAPPER, the self-service tool for creating mobile apps for the iPhone, iPad Android and BlackBerry devices, has launched two full-featured mobile apps for news organizations today. One for Palo Alto Online and the other for West Seattle Herald, the apps combine mobile news distribution with engagement tools for a complete offering to clients. Short for Your APP MakER, YAPPER is the brainchild of SachManya. The team earned early acclaim with its product launch earlier this year, winning the Best of Show award at 2010 Macworld DEMO. One of its key features is the built-in marketing tools YAPPER offers its clients, and rightly so with a starting price of $299 for its DIY services. For the print industry, shifting to the online world was

Brand advertisers are increasingly asking Web sites and publishers to conduct "intent-to-purchase" studies that measure the success or failure of a Web video campaign. Break Media CEO Keith Richman tells Daisy Whitney in this week's New Media Minute how advertisers and publishers can use that data to improve their campaigns.