This past friday afternoon, I joined David Karp, founder/CEO of Tumblr, Dennis Crowley, founder/CEO of Foursquare, Aaron Earls of New Media Strategies, and Chris Grosso of NBCU at the MBA Media and Entertainment Conference to talk about social media.

This is a yearly event that brings together MBA students from Duke, Wharton, MIT, Columbia, and NYU who are interested in working in the media and entertainment sectors. 

At one point in the panel discussion, we got a question about how these MBA students should use social media in their job search. The woman asking the question specifically wondered how prospective employers would react their Facebook pages and Twitter feeds.

David Karp gave an interesting answer. He acknowledged that you have to be careful what you post to Facebook and who you "friend" and how you set your privacy settings. But even more important, David argued, was the need to "own your online brand."

David suggested that the way to combat the unflattering photo of you is to "post lots of flattering ones."

David's point is that you can't control what other people do (tag you in photos, post pictures you'd rather not see online, say awful things about you), but you can control what the Internet sees about you by overwhelming it with your social media presence.

I think David is right and I've certainly done that. If you search for fred wilson, you'll see links to at least a half dozen social media properties that I've built a strong online presence on. You don't see links to negative articles or blog posts about me, and there are some of them if you look hard enough.

Let's contrast that with NYC Speaker Christine Quinn, who I know well and like. If you search for Christine Quinn, one of the top links is to a site called christinequinn.com not a website she'd like to have in her top links. What we don't see in her top links is her blog, her Twitter, her Tumblr, etc. If she had all of those up and running and was actively posting to them, she might be able to run christinequinn.com off of the front page of her google search results.

A few years ago, I bought the internet domains of all three of my children's full names. My two daughters now operate active blogs on their domains (I link to them on the upper right of this blog) and both of them come up in the first page of search results when you google their names. They still spend way more time on Facebook than their blogs but they are building their online brands at a young age. And they can tightly control what goes on those pages.

Chris Dixon and Charlie O'Donnell both advocate the value of the "blog as resume" and recommend starting one to everyone who asked for their career advice. I'll join that chorus as well. We have hired all of our junior investment professionals largely on the basis of their blogs, not their resumes or linkedin profiles. You can learn so much more about a person by reading their blog.

So to all the people out there wondering about the role of social media in their career plans, I second David Karp's recommendation. Build and own your online brand and don't let others define it for you. 

The growing power of smartphones, the resolution of their cameras, and the speed of their wireless data networks are converging to help advance the field of augmented reality. You can already overlay live video footage with map data and use services like Google Goggles to treat your surroundings as visual search terms. Swedish company The Astonishing Tribe is expanding these abilities with its Recognizr software to allow smartphones to quickly identify people, letting you scan through someone's web presence at a glance.

When you sign up for Recognizr you link it to your Facebook, YouTube, Flickr - any accounts you'd want to share with friends. By uploading pictures of your face, you let the company build a facial recognition profile for you and store it on its servers. When another user spots you with his or her camera, also running the app, your face is quickly identified and surrounded with floating icons, linking the user to your sites.

While it might be a little awkward at a party, waving your phone around to scan the room for faces, it's just a matter of time until this sort of tech finds its way into less and less intrusive devices. How long until we wear glasses-based camera and display systems, overlaying everything we see with this kind of data stream? If you don't want to wait another decade, you should be able to check out Recognizr soon on your Android smartphone.

Wieden+Kennedy's latest venture, an online video and radio portal dubbed WK+Entertainment, puts the advertising giant into the content production game. Among the offerings, the web series "Don't Move Here" documents Portland's ever-blossoming music scene in video. Helmed by writer, curator and director Aaron Rose, who's behind the acclaimed film "Beautiful Losers," the project features concert footage and interviews by WK's Shayla Hason, who also acts as host. We recently spoke with Hason about what sets Portland's creative processes apart and why anyone would want to move there.

Cool Hunting: First off, why is the series called "Don't Move Here?" Is there a lot of interest in keeping Portland's music scene more private?
Shayla Hason: I don't know if they want to keep it more private. The title comes from a Tom McCall quote in the early '80s: "We want you to visit, but for God's sakes, don't move here." In the past year or two, people think they're going to make it big in music if they move here, but that's so at odds with what's made Portland's scene so successful. People move here just to play music, not to be famous. The scenes are much more welcoming than in other cities, but there's only so many barista jobs. And it's not like A and R people are wandering the streets here. There's also something to be said for growing the scene where you live. Your town could probably use way more help than Portland could. Your town also needs an all-ages venue and an indie music label. You can grow a community wherever you are.

CH: Everyone talks about Portland's scene in such reductive terms: "Living expenses are cheap! There's a lot of house parties!" What do you think the series is doing differently from all the other music journalists who rapturously cover Portland?
SH: I think one big difference is that it's not cult-of-personality reporting about the musicians. We try to focus on the people that are involved in all different facets of the many music scenes, like the kids who run the record studios, or the poster designers, or the bookers. We always have a band playing at the end of each episode, but we're interested in all different facets. And also, we're not interested in keeping it to bands that are on some national, albeit underground, level. We've had some bands like Yacht that are beginning to be well-known, but we're not going to talk about...The Gossip! Or...the Dandy Warhols! We're interested in the things that are bubbling up.

CH: One of the common themes that runs through the shows is cross-pollination. Everyone's in six bands, and has a clothing line, and works in a bar. Do you think that contributes to Portland's cultural creativity?
SH: Cross-pollination definitely contributes. What saved Portland, and what we saw fail in Seattle, was that there's not one particular Portland sound. So the major music industry can't shoebox it, define it and blow it up. There's so many different kinds of Portland sounds. The welcoming aspect is what's led to the cross-pollination.

CH: When and why did you move here?
SH: It was in the beginning of 2000, I was getting out of the airplane for the fourth time within a year, and I thought, "I should just move here." My brother went to school here in the early '90s. I mainly moved here because it's the most livable city in the U.S.—for a particular sort of person, that is. Definitely don't move here if you think it's a big city, because it's not. But I think it's really livable.

Wieden+Kennedy's latest venture, an online video and radio portal dubbed WK+Entertainment, puts the advertising giant into the content production game. Among the offerings, the web series "Don't Move Here" documents Portland's ever-blossoming music scene in video. Helmed by writer, curator and director Aaron Rose, who's behind the acclaimed film "Beautiful Losers," the project features concert footage and interviews by WK's Shayla Hason, who also acts as host. We recently spoke with Hason about what sets Portland's creative processes apart and why anyone would want to move there.

Cool Hunting: First off, why is the series called "Don't Move Here?" Is there a lot of interest in keeping Portland's music scene more private?

Shayla Hason: I don't know if they want to keep it more private. The title comes from a Tom McCall quote in the early '80s: "We want you to visit, but for God's sakes, don't move here." In the past year or two, people think they're going to make it big in music if they move here, but that's so at odds with what's made Portland's scene so successful. People move here just to play music, not to be famous. The scenes are much more welcoming than in other cities, but there's only so many barista jobs. And it's not like A and R people are wandering the streets here. There's also something to be said for growing the scene where you live. Your town could probably use way more help than Portland could. Your town also needs an all-ages venue and an indie music label. You can grow a community wherever you are.

CH: Everyone talks about Portland's scene in such reductive terms: "Living expenses are cheap! There's a lot of house parties!" What do you think the series is doing differently from all the other music journalists who rapturously cover Portland?

SH: I think one big difference is that it's not cult-of-personality reporting about the musicians. We try to focus on the people that are involved in all different facets of the many music scenes, like the kids who run the record studios, or the poster designers, or the bookers. We always have a band playing at the end of each episode, but we're interested in all different facets. And also, we're not interested in keeping it to bands that are on some national, albeit underground, level. We've had some bands like Yacht that are beginning to be well-known, but we're not going to talk about...The Gossip! Or...the Dandy Warhols! We're interested in the things that are bubbling up.

CH: One of the common themes that runs through the shows is cross-pollination. Everyone's in six bands, and has a clothing line, and works in a bar. Do you think that contributes to Portland's cultural creativity?

SH: Cross-pollination definitely contributes. What saved Portland, and what we saw fail in Seattle, was that there's not one particular Portland sound. So the major music industry can't shoebox it, define it and blow it up. There's so many different kinds of Portland sounds. The welcoming aspect is what's led to the cross-pollination.

CH: When and why did you move here?

SH: It was in the beginning of 2000, I was getting out of the airplane for the fourth time within a year, and I thought, "I should just move here." My brother went to school here in the early '90s. I mainly moved here because it's the most livable city in the U.S.—for a particular sort of person, that is. Definitely don't move here if you think it's a big city, because it's not. But I think it's really livable.

Apple has made available video of yesterday's iPad presentation, perfect for seeing some footage of the tablet in action, or giving Mr. Jobs the chance to sell you on the device if you're on the fence about it.

After the rounds of congratulatory "I told you that's what the tablet would be like"s and once the shock of the lowball starting price wore off, we've all had some time to think a bit more soberly about iPad. While undeniably cool, there are several big issues that could put a damper on whatever enthusiasm you might have had: no Flash is getting harder and harder to live with on the iPhone, let alone a more powerful machine like the iPad; though the 3G connection is unlocked, it doesn't support frequencies needed by T-Mobile 3G; the apparent lack of multi-tasking severely limits its use as anything more than a casual device.

Does the iPad still maintain its sparkly facade in your eyes? Check out the presentation's video, digest it a bit, and let us know in the comments.

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Is access to news online a basic right of the internet that we've come to take for granted? A recent poll set out to get a feel for the public's attitude towards reading our news online, specifically just what we'd be willing to pay for it. Though given a variety of pricing points as options, respondents to the poll overwhelmingly indicated that they had no intention of paying even a dollar a month for their news.

The news industry has been trying for more than a decade to get its head around how to transition from a business model built on presses, trucks, and paperboys to one of servers, RSS feeds, and digital distribution. If you haven't been keeping score, it's yet to find a solid way to monetize online content. The rapidly rising popularity of e-book readers seemed like a glimmer of hope to the struggling industry, with the idea that people would be more likely to return to the typical newspaper-style of presentation - articles, classifieds, ads and all - if they could enjoy it in traditional handheld form-factor. While there's been some success with big names like the New York Times on the Kindle, these polling numbers seem to suggest that most of us just aren't willing to pony up our cash for access.

What do readers think? Have we been enjoying the free-news buffet for too long now, and flat-out refuse to switch to an a la carte menu? Let us know in the comments below.