It’s one of my annual goals to stretch my writerly legs and write for a magazine to which I subscribe—a goal fulfilled in several past years by Wired. This year’s entry in that category was somewhat unexpected but humbling.

As part of New York‘s 9/11 Anniversary issue this week, they did an “Encyclopedia of 9/11,” from A to Z, from Abbottabad to Zazi, looking back over the last decade and the changes big and small in the world, in the United States, and in daily life. I was asked to contribute the “Evidence” entry, focusing on how the FBI pulled together the first hours of the PENTTBOM investigation and the critical jumpstart they got from the 1988 Toyota Corolla, California license plate 3JFZ283, owned by Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. It was a fascinating piece to research—I got to spend some time with one of the last FBI agents still assigned to the PENTTBOM case, who has worked the case since the first hours a decade ago—but all the more so, this piece was humbling to be part of such an ambitious project. New York does a great job with its magazine in general, but this encyclopedia was really impressive. I recommend reading the whole thing.

I took some time off the “Threat Matrix” book tour circuit this week to speak at  the NEXT tech conference in Berlin, Germany, about personal branding. The NEXT conference is one of Europe’s biggest and hippest tech conferences, held this year in what appeared to be an abandoned factory a few blocks south of Potsdamer Platz. It was really great to be back in Berlin just six months after my last trip; there are few cities in the world that I have such a strong emotional attachment to as Berlin. I just love being here.

Actually, I gave two talks this week at NEXT—one for the entire conference focused on how “metanarratives” kill on the web and in politics. This is a phenomenon we lived on the Dean campaign (the Dean Scream), as well as how the Macaca Moment killed George Allen in the Virginia Senate race, among other examples. Social media makes it so easy for moments to go viral—but the ones that really impact politics are viral moments that connect with a larger story.

Back in 2007, I was talking to a McCain advisor and he said the thing he feared most was McCain tripping or falling at an event, something that would lend credence to the fear that John McCain was too old and frail to be president. That exact same slip or fall could happen to Barack Obama without any fear of it impacting his campaign as anything more than a night’s laughs on the comedy shows.

Anyway, my second talk in Berlin this week was more focused on personal brands online—specifically, “Inventing an Online Persona: How to balance authenticity and your online brand.” I ran through ten rules of personal branding that would be mostly familiar to any of the graduates of my course at Georgetown. The bottom line of why you want to build a personal brand? We all want to spend our days doing things we love. The presentation itself wended its way from Barack Obama to Charlie Sheen to Julia Allison to Sarah Palin to Gary Vaynerchuk, among many others—each of whom has defined himself or herself online in a certain realm.