As ever, the best thing about blogging is the conversations it kicks off. Some nice responses to recent posts here and around the web:

• In a follow-up to Gourmet Live and Rewarding Experiences, Mathew Ingram of GigaOm ruminated a bit about magazine apps as walled gardens. Overall, Mathew’s got a strong skepticism about a lot of efforts in this area, but I was pleased to see him say “About the only magazine that has taken any kind of creative steps in this direction with its iPad app is Gourmet magazine”. Ron Mwangaguhunga of eMedia Vitals continued the conversation as well.

• A few weeks ago I was quoted in the New Yorker talking about Facebook and its impact on culture. In this week’s issue of the New Yorker, I pop up again, but this time quoted in Ben McGrath’s lengthy profile of Nick Denton. Spoilers: The piece closes with me asking, “Who has more freedom in the media world than Nick Denton?” People seem to like lines like that, as the quote popped up in The NY Times Dealbook blog and elsewhere.

• I argued with Malcolm Gladwell’s assertion that social media can’t be tools for real change. Eric Harvey offered a thoughtful, well-reasoned counterpoint to my piece, which is well worth a read.

• Last week, Twitter changed CEOs with Ev Williams focusing on product and COO Dick Costolo becoming the new CEO. ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick examined the transition, with a nod towards my piece on ten years of history behind Twitter’s senior execs.

• At Web 2.0 Expo here in New York last week, I did an interview with Mac Slocum of O’Reilly. While I included the video here in an earlier post, Mac revisited the interview on the O’Reilly Radar blog under the title “Why blogging still matters”, focusing on one of the points that came up later in the conversation. It had been a long day with lots of different ideas flowing, so I’d nearly forgotten that we even talked about that, but now I’m pretty glad that part of the conversation was captured.

• I was a judge in the Apps 4 Africa contest which ended last week with some amazing winners, including my favorite iCow, which came in first place. You can listen to an interview I did with Future Tense about the competition, or check out this video of Secretary of State Clinton congratulating the winners:

• This past weekend, I attended the Open Web Foo Camp hosted by O’Reilly. While the camp itself is off the record, Scott Rosenberg did an admirable job of documenting one of the key themes of the event — whether the present “open” phase of the web is merely an aberration. I tried to use my access to influential open web advocates at Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other big web companies to push them to make their employers more open and to resist the urge to compromise on their principles despite the understandable pressure they must be under. Hopefully a little friendly urging can give them the support they need to make the right choices.

• Finally, with ThinkUp well into beta-testing and Expert Labs supporting its first deployment by Code for America, Gina Trapani and I joined John Moore on The Lab for a brief interview about Expert Labs and where ThinkUp is headed.

Okay, that’s enough roundup of Other People’s Content. We’ll return to original content here again shortly.