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.

We are a diverse group of individuals at Traction with a variety of passions beyond advertising. It can be hard to find time outside of work and life to focus on personal endeavors, so we get very excited when one of our comrades' projects come to fruition.

We are pleased to announce that Traction's own Goyo Aranaga (a.k.a. Goyopod) has released his debut album this month.

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.

We are proud to announce that Cracktion—the current iteration of the Traction house band—will be causing some sonic mayhem at this years Battle of the Bands hosted by the good peeps over at sfBIG.

Our CEO Adam Kleinberg will be speaking at OMMA Global in NYC on September 26.

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.

Traction is honored to be included on the iMedia 2011 list of key West Coast agencies that are pushing the boundaries of digital media. It's a thrill to be in the company of other agencies of such high caliber and to be recognized by a publication that we respect so much.