In a front page Wall Street Journal story, a pair of reporters uncover the corporate-fueled rise of YouTube star Marie Digby. It turns out that she was signed to Disney’s Hollywood Records for two years. There was a bit of an uproar from both sides. Some cynics felt cheated, believing that the homemade video clips of the very talented Digby were not genuine. That’s rubbish, of course. Even if Disney paid for her Mac and helped her map out a strategy of playing covers of popular tunes, it was still Digby — belting away tunes as she strummed an acoustic guitar or tickled the ivory on her home piano — that drew in music fans. So you can put me in the other camp, of fans defending her work as the real deal. I wrote about it in Birth of a YouTube Star.  

Most people have had a good chuckle or two over the rudderless response that 18-year-old Miss Teen South Carolina gave in the Miss Teen USA pageant recently. Always one to hop on a theme to make a market-driven point, I used the event as a way to pivot towards the importance of having a globally diversified portfolio. After all, if she mentions South Africa, Asia, and “the” Iraq, it can’t be too far away form the minds of “U.S. Americans.” Read Invest Like Miss Teen South Carolina to know what I mean.