Michael J. Totten

Michael J. Totten is a foreign correspondent and foreign policy analyst who has reported from the Middle East, the Balkans, and the Caucasus. He publishes lengthy first-person narrative dispatches on his website, and feature and analysis pieces for various newspapers and magazines.

He has visited Iraq seven times, and on three of his trips he embedded with United States military personnel – with the 82nd Airborne in Baghdad in the wake of the surge during the summer of 2007; with the Third Battalion Fifth Marine Regiment in Fallujah during the winter of that same year; and with the Army's Fourth Infantry Division in Baghdad in late 2008. He is a former resident of Beirut and covered Israel's Second Lebanon War in 2006 from the Israeli side of the Lebanese border.

He writes regularly for Commentary magazine, and his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Daily News, City Journal, LA Weekly, the Jerusalem Post, Beirut's Daily Star, Reason magazine, Azure magazine, and the Australian edition of Newsweek. The Week magazine named him blogger of the year in 2006 for his dispatches from the Middle East, and he won the annual Weblog Awards two years in a row, in 2007 and 2008, for the Best Middle East or Africa Blog.

Susan Feldman

Vice President of Search and Discovery Technologies, IDC

Susan Feldman is Vice President of Search and Discovery Technologies at IDC and is director of IDC's Content Technologies Group. Ms. Feldman’s area of specialization includes market research on search engines, text analytics, unified access to information, categorization and other information retrieval technologies, as well as digital marketplace dynamics.

Ms. Feldman won the 2003 James Peacock Research award at IDC for her work on modeling and forecasting the search and retrieval technology markets, and an Innovation Award from IDC in 2007 for developing a new research program on the digital marketplace. Her current work includes creating an interactive model for the digital marketplace. She has written and edited numerous articles and books about the Internet and information retrieval technology for which she has won several national and international awards.