Believe it or not, ski season is just around the corner and we will be publishing our annual special section in a few weeks.

You can help adventure reporter Craig Hill fill out the best of Northwest skiing and snowboarding by taking this quick survey.

2008 Snow Ride Survey

Thanks for playing.

You've heard about Twitter by now and may still be wondering "what's the point?" But tonight will be an interesting time to use the service, both locally and nationally.

True, it takes a while to get your head around how this technology improves communication beyond email and blog posts. But, like most of the best things on the web, it's about the community.

The News Tribune's main Twitter account has 135 followers and our new sports account has about 30. That seems like a pretty small number compared to the 100,000-plus households we deliver a newspaper every day, but Twitter is less about publishing and more about connecting.

And it's perfect for mobile.

Followers use "hash marks" - namely a @ or # plus the Twitter account name - to reply to specific Twitterers they follow. This allows direct contact between two people and is the core of what makes Twitter different.

I found more than 230 people signed up for Twitter who list Tacoma, WA as their location. Still, not a lot of people. But look at all the technology development happening around Twitter.

So we’re now using Twitter to send alerts with local high school football game updates to your mobile device. Just sign up for the Twitter service and follow us at twitter.com/tntsports. Or, if you're at a computer tonight, follow along online at the same URL.

And then there's that campaign thing going on. It will be entertaining - or maddening - to watch the global Twitterstream during the presidential debate tonight. Follow along here: http://election.twitter.com/

While The News Tribune has had our share of comings and goings in recent months (I'm still around part-time, in case you're wondering), the Seattle newspapers collectively lost three of the best bloggers in the Puget Sound this month.

John Cook and Todd Bishop are leaving the P-I to start new technology ventures at the Puget Sound Business Journal. This is good news for tech info consumers since Cook and Bishop formed what Lost Remote called the "Techcrunch of Seattle" with their P-I blogs on venture capital and Microsoft.

David Postman, the Seattle Times' political blogger, left the paper to join Paul Allen's Vulcan in media relations.

In case you missed it, football season is back and with it brings loads of page views to our web site for coverage of the Seahawks (and Huskies, Cougars and high schools). Just check out the top 10 stories from last month to see how dominant this topic is on our web site.

As I've noted before, our Seahawks audience is national, meaning those stories have a decided advantage over most of our other content (not many people in Buffalo, N.Y. wondering about potholes in Tacoma, for example.)

Most popular multimedia:

Most popular blogs:

1. Seahawks Insider
2. Lights & Sirens
3. Political Buzz
4. Huskies Insider
5. Mariners Insider
6. Biz Buzz
7. TNT Diner
8. Bring the Noise
9. Prep Blog
10. Word on the street
11. Open House
12. Adventure Guys
13. FOB Tacoma
14. Inside the Editorial Page
15. Online in the South Sound

If you want to be online, you have to be protective of your personal identity. Everyone knows that, especially when it comes to account numbers and passwords.

But sometimes you need a good offense in addition to a good defense.

Recently a frustrated school teacher contacted us because of her listing in our salary database. She wasn't necessarily upset that we published the database, making available the salaries of employees at public schools. The problem was that her entry in the database was the top search result in Google for anyone searching on her name.

I explained to her that the uniqueness of her name combined with a lack of other web references to her name meant the computers and algorithms at Google had no choice but to return the salary database record. And there was nothing we can do to manipulate Google's results (because if we could ...).

So her best plan of action would be to create a web site, a blog - anything with her name and content that would WANT people to find. Over time she could bury the salary database listing in the search results with this new content.

Recently I had to take action in my own defense, after a satirical obituary suggested I met my premature demise over the weekend. Hopefully a comment on that blog - and a reference on this one - will set the record straight.