Google announced a few weeks back that they were launching a new feature to their Google News product—human beings. Last week, they upped the ante by buying Zagat. 

Have human beings become the next algorithm?

For the past five years, I have practiced tai chi with the disciple of a great master in Beijing. My teacher is very wise.

Of the many lessons I have learned, there are several that I apply to my life in business. So much so, that I've considered writing a book about them. For now, however, I'll begin with a series of blog posts I'm calling Tai Chi for Business.

A few months ago, I spoke on a panel about brand APIs put on by Mashery with the heads of Open API programs at PayPal, NetFlix and Best Buy. I learned a hell of a lot. 

Kumar Kandaswamy is the API chief at Best Buy. He's also a friend. As I've written quite a bit about brand APIs on this blog and on Mashable, Kumar has been generous enough to answer some questions I had about the realities of brands and APIs.

Theo's post on Vaginas in Advertising got more traffic than any other post we ever had on the Traction blog. I thought things couldn't go much farther downhill than that.

I was wrong.

On page 10 of Traction's employee handbook, right in between the sections on "Voting Leave" and "Military Leave," is a little section called "The Burning Man Policy."

Cracktion blew the doors off the Great American Music Hall last night at the sfBIG Battle of the Bands. The Traction house band's 3rd place prize is respectable, yet it hardly tells the story of how hard these guys rocked.

These videos, however, do tell that story.

If your job is to manage your company's or your client's Facebook and Twitter feeds, there are a whole new crop of (reasonably priced) tools to help you make smarter decisions about what kind of posts actually work.

This week, I had two friends in the industry show up at Traction to show me a couple of these tools—Doug Schumacher of Zuum Social and Chase McMichaels of InfinGraph.

Targeting is getting pretty advanced these days. Where you used to just target people by buying sites (or groups of sites through ad networks), now you can just target people by their IP address—and all the associated data that has been gathered in relation to that IP address. 

Site-side personalization is an opportunity to harness the power of targeting on your own website.

I just wrote an article on Mashable called "HOW TO: Gamify your marketing" that outlines what "gamification" is and some case studies and best practices for effectively applying it to your marketing programs.