The finals of the newsroom beard contest were held March 5. Did I come back strong in the second half of the month to take the title? What did one beardless contestant do to charm the judges and earn accolades? And what about the nagging rumors about a performance enhancing substance? Watch this video for more…

It’s week three of The Record’s beard contest, and my plans to regularly post video blogs has been foiled by by deadlines and short weeks due to holidays. I do have a special video blog planned that I hope to have up by the end of the week. I’ve also continued to shoot video daily for the stop-motion video I plan to post when the contest has ended.

Meanwhile, ianhillmedia.com is happy to present a post by its first-ever guest blogger: Record Editor Mike Klocke. Here are Mike’s beard contest rankings; they’re sort of like the ESPN/USA Today coaches’ poll rankings, only better.

Social media can get pretty complicated. I have a relatively small social media presence – the links/icons in the sidebar at left, plus Flickr – but at times I’ve forgotten how each of my pages or sites are connected.

Take, for example, the video blog below, which I uploaded to Youtube yesterday and intended to post here today. A few hours after the video was on Youtube I received a message from my sister on Facebook saying she had watched it. I had forgotten that I had a feed from Youtube to Facebook, and it probably cost ianhillmedia.com a few pageviews.

It’s something I’ll keep in mind in the future. Perhaps I need to create a flowchart mapping out the connections between my social media pages.

That hashtag showed up on Twitter today, which is kinda funny. (It’s also another good example of a specific hashtag.) I have been absent from the blogosphere for a bit while I enjoy a much-needed week’s vacation to Massachusetts. I’m typing this in a room at a Rockport, MA bed and breakfast as we get [...]