Welcome to BenWoods.com

August 21 is National Spumoni Day. Did you know that? I seriously doubt it. But who cares? It's an entire day to celebrate Spumoni! If you don't know what Spumoni is, check out the Wikipedia page. Better yet, let me explain why you should care about Spumoni in the first place.

I know I've said this before, but I am getting closer to publishing my new book, "Corporate Ties." There was a bit of foundation work that I needed to construct, edit, tear apart, rebuild, pulverize, stack up, decimate and recompile. Well, the good news is that I'm getting closer to the end. How do I know this? There seems to be a light at the end of each paragraph now.

Google recently made a mildly surprising announcement (at least, to me) that the company is shutting down its online collaboration tool, Wave. Google does a lot of cool, neat and worthy stuff obviously, and I think Wave fits into this category. It's just that the actual marketing of it was rather peculiar.

The definition of "friend" has been watered down a bit with the advent of online social networking. It seems that now, your friend might be someone with whom you've never met, even someone with whom you've never communicated, with the exception of a simple button click on a website. This can be a good way to meet people, but it's a bit weird to call a person a friend when it's quite possible the individual on the other side could be an enemy, a fish or a hat.

By now, I'm sure that everyone and his or her dog (assuming said dog is on DogBook) has heard the hubbub relating to new Facebook privacy policies. I have to be honest: I haven't read every single story about it, primarily because I don't intentionally publish stuff online that should be private. In general, people rarely read terms and conditions before signing up for something online, but hopefully now, people will check out Facebook's privacy terms and decide whether or not they want to keep their account.

People outside of Kentucky might think it's somewhat bizarre that government officials are now blocking state employees' Internet access to blogs that are critical of Governor Ernie Fletcher.

Unfortunately, it's not that crazy. I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner.

The current administration has made a name of cutting off as much negative opinion as possible, and since June 23, state workers cannot resolve the Bluegrass Report and other statewide blogs.

You'll notice that I haven't been writing much, for a few good reasons. At work, we've been pretty busy, and we just moved into a different office. In my spare time, I've been devoting most of my time sending out book queries and proposals and also working on my girlfriend's school's website.

But let's face it: The important thing happening right now is men's college basketball. Who will win their conference tournaments? Which teams will make it to the Big Dance? What team will win it all?

There are two important links you need at this stage:

Recently I was in one of those click-and-conquer moods. You know, where you find something decent to read on a news website, then you see another link, which takes you to something else that looks pretty interesting.

As I begin scheduling stops on my summer book tour, I'm working on putting together a simple program that involves computers, charitable organizations and recycling. No, I don't have a cute name for the program, nor do I have any idea how it will even work. But I'm going to give it a try.

Like most people (I hope), I spend a lot of time thinking. My best thinking moments by far are when I'm in the shower in the morning, just after a nap and anytime I'm at Wal-Mart.