Selling such a job candidate is more or less the challenge the IBM team has when they try market Watson to corporate customers. It's a fabulous machine. With its blend of big data retrieval, natural language, question-answering and analytics, It represents cognitive computing, the future of knowledge work. But what job can it do today?

We don't know. In these early days, Watson, just like other newcomers to the job market, will take boring jobs for which it's overqualified. A call center assistant, for example. People see that and wonder what all the fuss is about. Spencer Ante of the Wall Street Journal reports (behind firewall) that Watson's numbers are disappointing, and below projections. IBM is now building an entire Watson division.

But Watson, like that high school prodigy, is still in the development phase. This has to be frustrating to investors who are looking for winners in the next stage of the information economy. But it's just the way things move. It's similar, in a sense, to the early period of the personal computers, when no one knew exactly what they'd do. People said that homemakers would use computers in the kitchen, to keep records of food and manage recipes. Finally, speadsheets and word processing programs gave people a reason to buy the machines. (And then many promptly wondered why anyone would do anything else on a computer, including hitching it to a network.)

The fact is that cognitive computing technology, like Watson, will not only do jobs. It will transform work. In information industries, having question-answering machines on hand, in pockets, always on call, will alter our thinking about knowledge and what we have to know. But we don't yet know exactly how these machines will get from here to there, nor which companies will build them. Changing metaphors, if this is spring training and I'm trying to pick the two teams in the World Series, I'd bet on IBM and Google, one coming from the corporate side, the other from consumers. 

***

I was quoted in Spencer's story, which got me an invite to Fox Business News yesterday to discuss Watson's challenges. I went in there, got made up and waited and waited while they aired Gov. Chris Christie's never-ending press conference about the Bridgegate scandal. In the end I was bumped. It reminded me of going to Chicago for a day of Numerati events on the day that Gov. Rod Blagoyevich was arrested for trying to sell Barack Obama's Senate seat. And then when I was pitching Final Jeopardy and had a nationwide slot on Ira Flatow's Science Friday, most markets pre-empted me to cover the fall of Hosni Mubarak. You might assume that I'm unlucky. I'd just say that news happens on a frequent basis. Going back to Fox Biz today...

I'll explain. When you tweet, you send out a nugget of information wrapped in self-branding. If people like that nugget, they retweet, and the information spreads, along with the branding. Maybe they respond with interesting information, or a relevant link. Those nuggets can be valuable. When I was at BusinessWeek, nuggets I harvested turned into blog posts and stories. And the branding was vital for me. BusinessWeek was in late stages of collapse, and I needed the branding to promote my post-BW career, and (hopefully) to sell books. My brand, as I saw it, had been locked up in the magazine for 20 comfortable years. But now I needed to fashion it into a lifeboat.

An example of how shamelessly I used Twitter for my own ends. I started on Twitter on Jan. 5, 2008. I was in Steve Rubel's office at Edelman, above Times Square, asking him how Heather Green and I could update our three-year-old story on blogs. (I remember the day because Barack Obama had just won the Iowa caucases, and his face was on every television in the lobby.) Steve urged me to jump onto Twitter. At that point, I remember, he had 2,400 followers. And he asked them with a tweet why @stevebaker should get onto Twitter. Responses poured in. He was clearly at the controls of a powerful tool. I had a book, The Numerati, coming out later that year and wanted some of that network magic. But how was I going to get thousands of followers?

After a month on Twitter, I had barely 100. But then I came up with a plan to leverage my mainstream journalism asset. I would write a BusinessWeek article explaining Why Twitter Matters. But instead of calling up the usual sources, like @jayrosen_nyu, @jeffjarvis, and @biz (Twitter co-founder Biz Stone), I would research the piece on Twitter. I would tweet topic sentences for each paragraph, and the Twittersphere would respond with examples, links, and insights. Hopefully, they'd discuss and argue. Through this process, Twitter would write the story. Word would quickly spread about this story, and people who wanted to participate would follow me. I would catch up to Steve Rubel, or even pass him! I'd be hoisted up in the nugget economy.

It turned out that turning 250 tweets into a coherent article took a lot of work. But it worked. The article went mildly viral and my Twitter following quintupled, finally reaching 1,000. My evil strategy worked. And I even won a minor magazine award for the story. (I'll note, in passing, that traditional journalism awards carry zero weight in the nugget economy, not unless they're branding giants, like Pulitzers. If I were still focussed on nuggets, I'd trade my dusty old Overseas Press Award for 10,000 Twitter followers in a minute.)

Months after that triumph, the economy cratered and BusinessWeek spiraled toward death. I left after Bloomberg snapped it up for barely the price of a Superbowl commercial, and I got a book contract to write about IBM's Jeopardy computer, Watson. Since then, I've been doing books. That has removed me from the nugget economy. Much of what I'm doing is vaguely secret. For instance, I'm co-writing a healthcare book that Penguin will publish next spring. But they're not publicizing it. So I don't either. As a result, I don't generate good targeted nuggets. And my Twitter presence has degenerated into the occasional note about my life, a wine I drank in France, a slideshow from Africa. I'm a scattered Tweeter, virtually lapsed.

Now that I think about it, though, I should jump back on. I have a novel coming out next spring, The Boost. Maybe if I break down the first chapter into 150 nuggets.... No, really, I should get serious about this.

But this social media marketing is so exhausting, don't you think?

Yesterday, the same day that Yahoo agreed to buy Tumblr for $1.1 billion, I received the strangest email from Flickr. The company virtually begged me to stop paying it money and to switch to its free ad-based service with a terabyte of storage. I obediently complied.

I should mention that Flickr's service of late has been dreadful. The links between Flickr and Apple's iPhoto are a bad joke. But I do manage to store my photos there, and starting today I'll be doing it for free. As Rob Hof notes, the Tumblr acquisition is Yahoo's bid to wrest some social media traffic from Facebook. And the change to a free, virtually limitless Flickr is no doubt part of the same strategy. I have little doubt that Yahoo will start pushing me, the way Google did, to share my photos with my circles of friends.

And I'll push back, or withdraw. It's not that I don't want to share photos. I do. But only about 1% of them. Some of my reluctance has to do with privacy. My friends and family in some of the photos haven't agreed to be posted. The other issue is quality. Most of my photos are boring to everyone but me. Actually, probably half of them bore even me. I keep them simply as historical artifacts. So I want to pick and choose which ones I post. A few might go on Facebook, or on this blog. But the rest of them ascend into this great big shoebox in the sky. For now, it's Flickr.  

It comes down to what you can buy in this world. You can buy $10,000 bottles of wine, and chateaux with exquisite views, you can buy politicians and the allegiance of thousands of workers. It's the free treasures--love, faith, friendship, a peaceful night's sleep, among others--that are in fact priceless. 

Anyway, the news about Rupert reminded me of Tony Soprano, who went to a psychiatrist when the business of violent crime began to mess with his head. The doctor faced an impossible job. And this led me to wonder what sort of therapies other moguls, war lords and cretins might pursue.

Bashar Assad, for instance. The Syrian leader must be at least as stressed as Rupert. I wonder if he's considered a three-day get-away, perhaps to the Mii Amo Spa in Sedona, AZ. Just imagine if he could delegate the war to a capo and sign up for a Jojoba Butter Massage, an Herbal Detox and perhaps spend an hour in the desert doing Tai Chi. Certain risks exist, even at a spa. The Bio Aquatic Cranial could awaken unwelcome associations, and the Circle of Power would no doubt deliver Bashar--in mind, if not body--right back to his palace in Damascus. My concerns, though, are less with the Bashar than the other guests at the spa. Imagine, you spend all that money to relax in the Sononan Desert, and next thing you know this guy arrives with his mustache and his entourage--and suddenly everything feels... toxic.

This has led to charges that BusinessWeek is racist, and is buying into the narrative that poor people, many of them racial and ethnic minorities, "caused" the housing crisis by borrowing irresponsibly. In any case, I'm for moving on.

There's so much attention these days on whether words or images are appropriate, or true, or fair, or "hurtful." And the upshot is that people can get into trouble, or even wreck their careers, by saying or publishing something stupid. This leads to caution, self-censorship, boredom. BusinessWeek's editor, Josh Tyrangiel, has taken lots of chances in the last couple of years. Many of them have worked. The magazine is lively and very good (even though I'm not crazy about the design). He, like the rest of us, should to be free to commit misjudgments with something close to impunity. 

The early  uses for this technology will be to help people with disabilities. Conceivably, a blind person could regain sight, or some version of it, through another sense. Already, people are moving prosthetic limbs with their thoughts. But in the longer run, as I see it, advances in brain-machine technology will extend to the population at large. Imagine downloading an app where you "feel" infrared light or police radar. You might not want it on all the time. But it would have its uses.

Nicolelis has a bigger announcement coming up next month. The Telegraph speculates that he and his team may have pioneered communication between two brains. We'll see. But if that type of communication isn't coming soon, it's coming later. Eventually, I'm betting, we'll all be facing the question of whether to wire our brains--or to stay back in the cognitive slow lane. 

In the realm of CEOs, you can say many of the same things about Microsoft's Steve Ballmer. He's loud and way out there. He's often wrong, whether he's dissing the iPhone or hyping the Zune. By most measures, he has failed spectacularly in his job. He took over a dominant (though, to be fair, declining) tech franchise and has ridden it south. Most CEOs in his position would duck interviews. But Ballmer, like Koch, is a talker. He rolls right on.

In the latest interview with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, he dismisses competition from Dropbox. He refers to the company as a "fine little start-up" and says that 100 million users "sounds like a pretty small number to me." Apparently he thinks that a start-up with that many users is powerless to disrupt the nature of a business software market that is his cash cow. Or more likely he believes that the new cloud-based Microsoft Office responds effectively to that disruption.

It doesn't matter. We don't have too many CEOs who speak with the candor (and apparent job security) of Steve Ballmer). He reminds me of Ed Koch. If I held Microsoft stock I'd be apoplectic. But as an observer, I enjoy having him around.