You knew that already, and now we do too. We have now restored all accounts that were mistakenly marked as spam yesterday. (See: Spam Fridays)

We want to offer our sincerest apologies to affected bloggers and their readers. We’ve tracked down the problem to a bug in our data processing code that locked blogs even when our algorithms concluded they were not spam. We are adding additional monitoring and process checks to ensure that bugs of this magnitude are caught before they can affect your data.

At Blogger, we strongly believe that you own and should control your posts and other data. We understand that you trust us to store and serve your blog, and incidents like this one are a betrayal of that trust. In the spirit of ensuring that you always have access to your data, we have been working on importing and exporting tools to make it easier to back up your posts. If you'd like a sneak peek at the Import / Export tool, you can try it out on Blogger in Draft.

Our restoration today was of all blogs that were mistakenly marked as spam due to Friday's bug. Because spam fighting inherently runs the risk of false positives, your blog may have been mis-classified as spam for other reasons. If you are still unable to post to your blog today you can request a review by clicking Request Unlock Review on your Dashboard.

Again, sticking with my goal of making all podcasting content for this newsletter, let's give you five podcasting tools to check out.

1. Odeo. Want a simple way to record a podcast on your computer? This is about as simple as it gets.
2. Audacity. This is the opposite of easy, but it's very flexible, and a podcaster's best free multi-platform audio editing tool.
3. TubeMogul. You've recorded a video and you want to put it in more places than just YouTube? This is your tool.
4. Flip Video Camera. For cheap money, this is the tool of choice for SIMPLE video recording. Nearly indestructible, easy to use, and I would buy these for every field employee or remote sales person, if that was a need.
5. Blog Talk Radio. Want a simple way to record a live audio podcast with multiple guests, callers, etc? BlogTalkRadio is the reigning champion at present, followed closely by TalkShoe. Both are great.

There you have it. Five for the podcasters. (Sure, if you're already podcasting, you probably know about all these. What would an ADVANCED 5 tools be? You tell me!)

Our teams have been working to develop tools to make it easier for people to track election-related information. A few months back, YouTube encouraged everyone to participate in the discussion process through the CNN/YouTube debates, Google Checkout offered an easy and fast way for individuals to make contributions to political candidates, and the Geo team created maps and layers to inform voters during elections.

Today, the Google speech team (part of Google Research) is launching the Google Elections Video Search gadget, our modest contribution to the electoral process. With the help of our speech recognition technologies, videos from YouTube's Politicians channels are automatically transcribed from speech to text and indexed. Using the gadget you can search not only the titles and descriptions of the videos, but also their spoken content. Additionally, since speech recognition tells us exactly when words are spoken in the video, you can jump right to the most relevant parts of the videos you find. Here's a look:

Warning: On average, knowledge workers change activities every three minutes, usually because they're distracted by email or a phone call. It then takes almost half an hour to get back to the task once attention is lost. So if you're trying to read this column at the office or within range of your mobile device, what should be a few minutes can take much longer. Consider the rest of this article an 800-word test of your ability to maintain attention.

A decline in our ability to focus is a side effect of the otherwise powerful tools we use to gather and analyze information. A new organization has just been launched, the Information Overload Research Group, whose founders include executives from companies such as Microsoft, Google, IBM and Intel. These are the very companies that have done the most to create the information tools that undermine our ability to focus; indeed, an initiative from them to address too much information could be compared to video-game programmers launching a line of Zen meditation centers. Still, it's encouraging that the most information-intense companies are trying to overcome their own overload.

Time magazine was spot-on, dead-bang correct when it named "You" as its Person of the Year for 2006. I knocked the inspired choice, and I was way off base. Read that column.

Time Warner's Time magazine was clearly ahead of its time.

There's no doubt by now that these 21st century user-driven innovations -- Facebook, Friendster, Google's YouTube, News Corp.'s MySpace, LinkedIn, Yelp (oh, yes) and others -- are taking over the way people communicate with one another. (News Corp. is the parent company of MarketWatch, publisher of this column.)

Back then, I viewed the "You" cover -- designed to connect the dots between YouTube and the other social-networking Internet sites -- as a mere publicity stunt on Time's part. What was I thinking? A major magazine engaging in a publicity stunt? Perish the thought.

"Combining the power of the social network map - namely: 'who I know, how I know and where I know' - with that of mobility, presents the greatest opportunity for revenue generation," Juniper Research analyst Ian Chard.

The federal government's Networx Universal project is finally yielding some revenue for telcos. The Department of Homeland Security awarded about $679 million worth of work from a $1 billion, 10-year contract to Verizon Communications, with potentially another $292 million from the contract going to AT&T as a back-up service provider. The DHS deal involves more than 5,000 employees and 22 different agencies. Verizon will consolidate multiple wide area network architectures on a secure IP infrastructure.

Perhaps the contract will be an ice-breaker between government agencies and the carriers authorized to bid on Networx Universal deals. Since carriers received authorization more than a year ago, very few Networx contracts have been drawn up. The telecom industry has been expecting that would change as this year plays out. The DHS deal is the largest Networx contract awarded thus far.

Verizon Business has captured one of the largest federal network deals of 2008: a 10-year contract to provide managed network and security services to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that is valued at $678.5 million. AT&T Government Solutions is the secondary provider for the project, dubbed OneNet, winning a 10-year contract worth an estimated $292 million.

Losing out on this much-anticipated deal was Qwest Communications.

Web ad tracker eMarketer cut its ad spending estimates for Facebook, MySpace and other social-networking sites amid growing questions over whether such sites will attract major ad dollars.

Before I respond to the specific questions, though, a raw perspective:

We’re nowhere. Social media and true consumer-centric brand behavior is prevalent in the technology bubble and few other places. While adoption has been steady and progress has been made, the premise of the book hasn’t exactly “gone viral.” Businesses in general still think bottom line and “what’s in it for me,” first. Advertising still sucks, is loud and intrusive. And consumers still have little reason to trust brands, companies and even folks like me – marketers trying to connect them with products and services that fit their needs.

I’m still a used car salesman to a lot of people. Companies are still monolithic, smoke and mirrors, money hoards with automated phone systems and customer service that has nothing to do with the customer and scantly qualifies as service.

For a market-changing, environmental-shift of a document The Cluetrain was, either it actually wasn’t or the majority of American businesses and consumers are just plain dumb.

To me, The Cluetrain is logical. Be nice. Expect it in return. Why can’t we get this, people?

That said, some people are getting it. More every day. It’s a fight worth fighting. We’re trying to teach business and industry that they should do right because it’s the right thing to do. And someday, we’ll win. When we do, we all will.

Measurements

I’d measure my community manager on the following:

• Responsiveness to communications (blog comments, emails, twitter messages and forum threads) less than 24 hours max.
• Number of QUALITY blog posts read and shared via Google Reader.
• Number of meaningful comments (more than a few words, on topic, pertinent to the space) on appropriate blogs, videos, and other media per month.
• Overall quality of her Twitter stream ( maybe a 60/30/10 mix of industry-related / personal @ comments / and off-topic).
• Engagement on our blog/community/network. (Number of subscribers, number of comments, number of links out to other blogs from our community site).
• Number of quality blog posts and linking posts (probably a 40/60 split between original and linked, though some would argue for 30/70).
• Eventually, number of links from other sites to our blogs and media.

Success of the Project

I’d feel our community manager was a success if she accomplished the following through her efforts:

• Empower the listening ability of our organization to our community’s needs and desires.
• Build an awareness of our organization through non-marketing efforts, measured by favorable or at least non-negative mentions on other blogs, forums, and in Twitter.
• Deliver a blog and/or media platform that’s useful to the community at large, and that grows in number of subscribers as well as engaged commenters.

Overall, I believe these efforts would be measured by an increase in attendance at our face-to-face and virtual events, an increase in subscriptions to our newsletter, and a larger blog commenting community. This would be a win to our organization, and would thus be worth the expense of another salaried employee.