Christine Campbell, often referred to as "Tina", brings 7 years of experience in administrative support, customer service, human resources, and sales to Federated Media. She was previously at an Architectural Firm here in Marin and before that was at Market Tools for many moons in various roles. When Christine is not working at FM, you can find her going to live shows, bowling (she is somewhat of a fanatic and lane snob), watching documentaries, indie flicks and foreign films as well as dabbling in photography...although she claims to by no means to be an expert. She lives in Marin with her Italian cat Vinnie. Welcome to the FM family, Christine!

Apostolia, better known as Paula, joins FM after working as an interactive media strategist for Johnson & Johnson. A native to the New York area, she attended college at NYU with master’s degree in Media Ecology and bachelors in Communications. She has also studied media systems abroad in China and the Netherlands. Paula is passionate about working in the emerging media space and has past experience in journalism and blogging.

In her spare time, Paula enjoys looking at pictures of cute animals online and reading her favorite blogs (they all happened to be represented by FM). She is also known as one of the few Greeks who don’t like olives. Welcome to the family, Paula!

John Battelle's offering a limited-time discount to readers of his Searchblog who pre-register for FM's second Conversational Marketing Summit. It's June 9 and 10 in New York and will certainly sell out, as last year's did, so read about it on Searchblog and get the discount code while it's still valid. (If you're an FM author, watch your email for your own extra-special offer.)

John Ball joined FM this week as a Sr. Account Manager in our Author Services group. John has product management and client relations experience with Intuit, Ticketmaster, Sprint, and a couple of management consulting firms. He also has startup experience at Vicinity and Wholesecurity – two companies which were ultimately acquired by Microsoft and Symantec, respectively.

John has been an FM author for about a year through his site Yao Ming Mania, which he started in 2002. It quickly became the top site for NBA and Chinese superstar Yao Ming (arguably the world's most popular athlete) and a top site for Houston Rocket fans in general.

John holds an MBA from The Anderson School at UCLA and a business degree from the University of Texas at Austin. Welcome to the family, John!

Mallary Weintraub comes to FM with an advertising background in both traditional broadcast production and online media, most recently as Sr Product Marketing Manager at CNET Networks. She loves combining the right and left side of her brain to help marketers understand and utilize sites she is passionate about. She’s lived in SF for the past 5 years and loves to travel so if she’s not in the office her location is anyone’s guess. Welcome to FM, Mallary!

Jason Ratner joins Federated Media after a 10 1/2 year career at Ziff Davis Enterprise/Media. Jason has held various sales positions and management positions within Ziff Davis, most recently in the position of Vice President of Digital Events which includes Virtual Trade Shows, Solution Centers, and eSEMINARS. Jason received his degree in Economics at the University of Michigan (Go Blue!) Outside of work, Jason is an avid road biker, tennis hack, snowboarder and enjoys spending quality time with friends and family. Welcome, Jason!

We're back from SXSW and our heads are reeling from all the fabulous people we met and the great times we had. Thanks to everyone who attended our party on Monday night. And thanks to all who came to our various panels. Already looking forward to next year!

Here are (from left to right) Monish Bhatia of MacNN, Danielle Friedland of Celebrity Baby Blog, Ken Fisher of Ars Technica and Jill Fehrenbacher of Inhabitat being peppered with questions by an eager audience:

And here's a pic of folks enjoying margaritas while shooting the digital media breeze at the party Monday night (Thanks sMoRTy71 for the pic).

Heather Armstrong of Dooce swept the 2008 Bloggies, winning four awards at today's ceremony. Dooce was named Weblog of the Year, Best American Weblog and Best Designed Weblog, and Heather was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award.

And Ree, The Pioneer Woman, won Best Food Weblog for The Pioneer Woman Cooks and Best Writing in a Weblog for Confessions of a Pioneer Woman.

Congratulations!

Congratulations to the FM authors who made The Observer's list of the world's 50 most powerful blogs:

#2: Boing Boing: "It launched in January 2000 and has had an immeasurable influence on the style and idiom of blogging."
#3: Michael Arrington's TechCrunch: "One of the most influential news websites across the entire technology industry."
#5: Heather Armstrong's Dooce: "Readers feel that they have been brought into her life, and reward her with their loyalty."
#25: Pete Cashmore's Mashable: "Readers range from top web 2.0 developers to savvy 13-year-olds wishing for the latest plug-ins to pimp up their MySpace pages."
#31: Hugh MacLeod's Gaping Void: "... acerbic and almost surreal cartoons ... (and) writing about his other passion – the new world of understanding how to adapt marketing to the new world of the net."