Susan Mernit's Blog: Navigating the Info Jungle

Out on the bleeding edge, the technorati are deep into FOAF, ASN (Augmented Social Networks), and all sorts of ways for people to recognize one another (dogs just sniff the piss, why can't we?)
I was talking to Frank Paynter for the first time yesterday--we agreed to do a call since we'd been reading one another's blogs, etc.--and he said something that caught my attention, which was basically, "How come some people are still so uptight about putting their information out in public on the Internet when it's so easy now to get a good sense of who the person is before you agree to talk to them?"
(Frank, if I misquoted you, sorry...let me know.)
Back in the early 90s, when not everyone had email and used news-groups, etc. there was this wonderful camaraderie with other people online, kind of like on The Well and MetaNet, because the size of the populace was small enough to feel somewhat personal, even if it was mostly an illusion.
Then came the era when email exploded and everyone wanted to send a message to Bill Gates, mostly because they could.
Now we're inching into the space where web hipsters have digital identify systems in the form of home pages, blogs and the FOAF and other docs to help signal who they are (what their piss smells like).
But it ain't there for the ordinary folks yet, and I wonder what a more average user, not a super-user would want from an identify-based tool, and to what extent such a person would see the value.

One exciting potential application of FOAF is that it could link everyone who participates into one virtual interactive community. Another is that many of us become part of a web--or mesh--of experts, our identifies signaling distinctive competencies.

Given that two of the most compelling impulses that lead people online are to get answers to questions and to connect to other people, this is pretty heady stuff.

What if Google did what Amazon did and allowed you to set up a page on the service about yourself, with an RSS feed of posts you showed up in and an FOAF identify?
And what if that Google
page was your log in to Google, where you could also save searches and chose to make some of them public to show others what you were looking for, and that page linked with and integrated with your blog and your email system because everything bit of data was just an object treated as a type of message or article post, relating to your identify and your actions.

I think that would kill AOL, Yahoo, and everyone else right there. Bang! Goodbye, portals, you were just dealt a death-defying blow from a (new) disruptive technology.

Of course, FOAF and identify networks are far from this point, and the people talking about them seem to be more like individuals thank companies(this is a good thing). But the day could come when someone big with lots of subscribers adopts FOAF to broaden the scope of their interaction with their subscribers, and that day could be HUGE.

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Australian blogger and techie Charles Miller, in The Fishbowl, not only gets AOL Journals, but he gets the way blogs work. In his recent wise post, he writes:

"...Blogging is a collaboratively filtered trust network. This is a fancy way of saying people who link to each other. In this community, a blog post comes into existence as a web of people's attention. At the centre of the web is the blog on which the post lives. Radiating out from that centre are the people who subscribe to that blog. Traditionally, people who find a particular post interesting will create a link to it on their blog, extending the web to their readers. The reach of a particular post becomes an equation based on how many readers you have and how interesting the post is.

...New sites' main avenue of promotion, on the other hand, is through trackbacks, comments and referrer logs. You get attention by commenting on some existing conversation in the blogosphere. If your comment is interesting, people will follow it back to the source, read some more, and perhaps subscribe.

To me, Charles is spot on with this description of how blogging works and how AOL Journals may--or may not--affect the blogosphere.

One potentially apt comparison is between AOL Journal and the About.com guide sites--On one hand, Guide sites have not affected the web, because they are amazingly disaggregateded and decentralized, vary widely in quality and size of audience they attract and have no overall branding.

On the other hand, they have had measurable mpact because Google search queries always surface a healthy percentage of Guide sides in response to questions, and that gives the sites an influence or weight that makes their model work.

AOL Journals may integrate into thBlogospherere in an analogous fashion--yet for the A list technology and bleeding edge bloggers, most of the AOL Blogs will live quite far down on the food chain. And yet, for AOlers in established AOL communities (I am thinking quilting,or military families, for example, or Elvis impersonators), those blogs could be significant thought leaders, information sources, and flash-points for discussion.



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My talented friend Jesse Kornbluth and his family are in France for much of the summer and his wonderful baby daughter has been sending letters across the pond with a little help from Dad. Here's a snippet of the latest one I've seen:

Dear American Friend,

Busy week for me in France. Things have happened…

I'll start with something "juicy." We were in Domme, a medieval town on top of a cliff. Daddy didn't want to go to the "fine dining" restaurant, so we went to a little place where I could walk around on the terrace. On the way out, a man called out to Daddy. They hadn't seen each other since 1985, and Daddy was very flattered to be recognized, because I gather he feels his looks have changed a lot since then. Daddy brought the man over to meet us. The man said, with a wink, "But, you know, you're really NOT meeting me."

Are you confused? I was. When we drove away, Daddy explained that Mr. X was married to someone VERY CLOSELY connected to his first wife's family, but that he was having dinner with a woman he wasn't married to. I don't want to make trouble, but SOMEONE ought to check her husband's credit card bills next month. No need to thank me, Mrs X. --- just thought you should know.
Ten days more, and we're off to Paris. Daddy's already nostalgic, but sometimes I catch Mommy in the kitchen dancing around and whispering "Paris! Paris!" One thing my parents agree on: They can't wait to go to restaurants that DON'T serve duck, duck and more duck. But they're nervous about taking me to Joel Rebuchon's new restaurant. Is it because they bring my food to every restaurant? Like M. Rebuchon could improve on hot dogs and mac 'n cheese!

Bedtime! Gotta go.

Love,

Boogins

Little Miss Boogins is as beautiful as she is clever, and promises to be as fine a writer as her Dad...


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Grilled salmon and swordfish with sesame and seaweed flakes
Saffron rice
Salad
Gotta keep our strength up.
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Businessweek follows up their recent WiFi coverage with this story by Brian Hindo about AOL's lack of a turnaround strategy and its impact on the company.
Hindo points out, once again, how the unit is managing to its numbers through relentless cutting and cost-reduction, but that just isn't enough.
Some recent conversations with people still working across the company described an environment where various groups were at one another's throats, and it was difficult to get anything done, but this has been the tenor of AOL--and the curse of many large companies--since at least 1998. Maybe AOL just needs to keep rightsizing itself until the unit is small enough that everyone believes there is just one agenda and they deliver magnificently on it. I see that kind of attention to detail, drive, and passion for excellence in the product groups under David Gang--AOL 9.0 looks great, the AOL Journals have a wonderful UI and great ease of use, and You've Got Pictures has gotten much better in the past year, but I don't see it over on the programming side, where the swirl seems to continue.
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According to Mary Jane Foley's Microsoft Watch, the company is planning to to hire another 4,000 to 5,000 people in the coming fiscal year.

I'd like to know how that number compares with the number of people AOLTW laid off in the past year--they could be fairly comparable. On a related note, I heard a rumor that Microsoft makes it a point to avoid hiring people from AOL if at all possible--they consider it a sign of weakness. Of course, they hired my friend Dean Wright away from AOL to be editor in chief of MSNBC.com--but he'd worked there before we lured him to Netscape.


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Blogging in Bruge: MediaBurn kept me reading today, especially dug the links to the expat in Belgium who pointed to this very funny A to Z about the country (some excerpts below):
Delhaize: A supermarket invented by the devil to torture his subjects. Offers every shopping frustration imaginable, from lack of baskets to severe aisle congestion. Home to the most spectacularly slow checkout queues in the universe. Horrid horrid place.

July: The wettest month of the year in Belgium - a fact only really appreciated by anyone who has tried to block book a fixed hour on an outdoor tennis court for the whole summer season.

MediaBurn seems to also share my passion for Ottmar Leibert.

Cat Schwartz' Boobs: Did you hear the one about the cute girl producer who put some picture of herself on her blog, but then those bad boy fans of hers checked out the Photoshop previews and discovered she was missing a top? And then flashed the pix all over the web?
Yeah, I didn't hear about it last week, either, but the minute I did, I went and got a link to the pictures. and the story.
Here's what she looks like all dressed.
(Via JD Lasica)
The funniest part of this is that she sounds kinda pleased with herself about it all, which is not the reaction I expected.

Tuna in (Fruit) Leather: How about wrapping that leaky sandwich in fruit instead of stinky chemical wrap? Boing Boing has a link to a neat science item that explains that it may be possible soon wrap tuna, turkey or PB&J sandwiches with edible vegetable and fruit wraps.
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First there was Blackalicious, then Blogalicious, now it's Dumpalicious, the delicious exercise of making trips to the town dump to throw out your unwanted items, aka all that crap you collected in moments of weakness, on a shopping high, or because you didn't want to tell your spouse not to get it.
Today was container day at the South Orange dump, which meant, as the guy on the phone said, "Lady, you can throw out your whole house so long as you do it before we close at noon."
Among the tossed-out items from our 7 trips back and forth in the car:
The $5.00 kiddie pool we used once in California and moved back here
The 8-year old rusted out gas grill with the broken starter
Various computer parts from older, cannibalized machines (Okay, I know we could have probably found something better to do with them)
A 60's retro office chair we never liked
Carpeting, wood, and old plastic gardening tools

Mmmn, mmmn, mmmn, between last weekend's yard sale, this weekend's dumpalicious exercise, and the bags and bags of trash I've hauled out, I feel almost ready for the movers...Now, it's all about packing.

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1. Which cities have the fastest-growing web usage?
According to a recent Netratings study, Atlanta, Los Angeles and Washington,
D.C., displayed more growth than any other U.S. cities, based on June 2002
to June 2003 measurements conducted by Nielsen//NetRatings.

The top ten growth markets are reported as
1. Atlanta
2. Los Angeles
3. Washington, D.C
4. Chicago
5. Seattle
6. Dallas
7. New York
8. Boston
9. Philadelphia
10. San Francisco


2. How do teens spend their (free) time?
The latest study from Yahoo and CARAT, a media planning/buying agency, reports that teens spend more time online than they do watching television.

The top activities are:
1. Online, 16.7 hours per week
2. Watching TV, 13.6 hours
3. Listening to the radio, 12 hours
4. Talking on the phone, 7.7 hours
5. Recreational reading, 6 hours

How much of that online use is IM-ing and downloading and playing music--simultaneously, of course?

Also, the questionnaire appears to have left out: staring at your face in the mirror looking for blackheads; applying products to your hair, taking long showers 3X a day, smoking weed and drinking beer, and driving around aimless with your one friend who has a license and whose parents are stupid enough to let him have a car (note: this child is usually the youngest or next to youngest of a brood of 4 or more and Mom and Dad have had it.)






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"I got a boning section on my iPod for when I
have sex." - P Diddy

"My biggest fear is to be living in a trailer in my daughter's driveway."
--Ann Richards, former Governor of Texas
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This note made me feel sooo good:
" I hope you don't mind the random reader dropping you a line (presumably not,
as you've posted your email for contact). But I wanted to take a moment to
tell you that I think your blog really interesting -- and refreshing -- on a
number of fronts.
Not just for the industry news you cover, but because it's
great to have woman's voice (especially one that is not single, 19, and
going on about the band du jour and fight with her boyfriend) out in this
space.

I also appreciate finding something that's not full of in-your-face
(male) geek bravado. You get to the point and state it without a lot of "how
great I am" hub-bub."

Wow, I'm going come back to this note next time I feel like shit.
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Jupiter's David Card, reflecting on the recent AOL loss of 846,000 subscribers, wonders why there isn't an audit bureau for web subscriptions:
"... The online industry needs an equivalent of the magazine industry's Audit Bureau of Circulations, or else has to pay more attention to the ratings companies, a la television. As for Wall Street - well, they should have been using a more sophisticated tracking system all along, say, revenues in combination with time spent or unique visitors from comScore Media Metrix or NetRatings."
(link via John Robb)

This is an idea whose time is going to come as the paid content model-and the growing number of "You have to subscribe and give me your name to get these RSS feeds from me" sites continues to grow.

Slightly off-topic: Do Jupiter analyst blogs have RSS feeds? Why the heck not?
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Dave Winer called this morning, we chatted a bit, and then he invited me to present on the technology panel at BloggerCon in October.
On the conference blog, Dave says " I want opinionated big-thinkers, who happen not to be vendors."

I do fit that bill.

This is an opportunity to think carefully about the topic, pull ideas together, and then have dialogue with what is surely going to be an amazing group of people. I am totally psyched.
And committed to doing a great job as a panelist. As someone who is obsessed with blogging and newsreaders, thinking a lot about how they fit into next-generation tool sets for various audience segments, values the perpetual tension between technologists and their end-user audiences, but is definitely on the end-user side. This should be FUN.Thanks, Dave.

P.S. Had to note the strange syncronicity of my last post on women being visible as bloggers and getting this invite.
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A quick look at the Popdex list of the Top 100 blogging sites, and well-articulated grumblings by the few women involved in some of the recent blogging conferences suggest that blogging, like web software development before it, has evolved as a heavily male space, especially in terms of the "top" bloggers.
Now, a report from Jupiter, published in CyberAtlas article, confirms that while guys are not really doing more of the blogging, they make up the majority of blog-readers. According to Robyn Greenspan, author of the CyberAtlas piece,
"...Blogs seem to be read mostly by men (60 percent vs. 40 percent women), in homes where the total income is more than $60,000 per year (61 percent)."

As someone old enough to participate in the early days of the pre-web and web(say 1992-1995), I remember when the Internet was a male phenomena, with few women involved in either using or developing those early web sites. Of course, by 1998, women made up more than 50% of the web-surfing population, even if they were still proportionally under-represented in the management ranks of Internet companies.
So even if the Blogosphere seems like a boy toy right now, the tipping point is going to come. As the tools improve, more and more women will begin to work in this space, writing, creating products, and evangelizing. There already are some great women out there--we just need more of them.
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AOL hired John McKinley from Merrill Lynch as their new CTO this week.

If it was possible to read the unspoken subtext of some of the prepared statements made by McKinley, and by Joe Ripp, AOL's Vice Chairman, would additional meanings would be revealed? As a former AOLer, let me speculate on what the subtexts of the prepared statements might be.

McKinley:"What struck me most was the renewed passion within the AOL organization. There is an energy and a spirit of innovation that, coupled with AOL's historical competencies, make it an exciting place to be."

What this might really mean: "They're desperate for a guy like me. This place is so screwed up, I can have a huge impact."

Ripp:"John has an extraordinary reputation as a strategic thinker and has an intuitive grasp of how new and existing technologies can address the needs of the consumer. In addition, John has helped some of the largest companies in the world implement ambitious technological efforts while maintaining strong fiscal discipline."

What this might really mean: "Given how bad our numbers look to the rest of AOLTW, we can't have the extraordinary spending on the product side we've allowed this year as we've cut $100MM from other parts of the organization. We need to rein them in now."


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Question: If the AOL unit was sold to a large ISP service, or a web-based services company of some type, what would the impact be on the stock price of AOL TW? Who would be a likely buyer?
Folks, gun your engines here--use the comments form to share what you think.
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Today;s Wall Street journal is running a widely picked up piece that speculates whether the reported loss of 846,000 AOL subscribers reflects previously inflated subscriber numbers. he questions are focused around limited use accounts AOL sold to large companies such as Target, Sears,and JC Penney for discounted resale to their employees, (As I recall, the concept of this program as I heard it was to offer both gatewat appliances and AOL-subs as benefits to staffers at large service companies.)
According to today's Washington Post, the problems with AOL have depressed the stock price. Top execs publically discount the problems, but AOL-watchjers and analysts say business just isn't clicking.


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Bloomberg article today states that by March 31st of this year, three out of four mobile phones in use in Japan had an integrated camera. That's a huge increase of 50% from December '02.
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7 days to the big move West.
6 days to the close of the big project I am finishing up.
5 days to the packers coming.

I hate transitions.
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From my friend Syndy, the core tenets of Jewish Buddhism (known as JewBu to some):

Take only what is given.  Own nothing but your robes and an alms bowl.
Unless, of course, you have the closet space.

Let your mind be as a floating cloud.  Let your stillness be as the
wooded glen.  And sit up straight.  You'll never meet the Buddha with
posture like that.

There is no escaping karma.  In a previous life, you never called, you
never wrote, you never visited.  And whose fault was that?

Wherever you go, there you are.  Your luggage is another story.

Be aware of your body.  Be aware of your perceptions.  Keep in mind
that not every physical sensation is a symptom of a terminal illness.

If there is no self, whose arthritis is this?

Drink tea and nourish life.  With the first sip, joy.  With the second,
satisfaction.  With the third, Danish.

To Find the Buddha, look within.  Deep inside you are ten thousand
flowers.  Each flower blossoms ten thousand times.  Each blossom has
ten thousand petals.  You might want to see a specialist.

Zen is not easy.  It takes effort to attain nothingness. And then what
do you have?   Bupkes.

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From my amusing friend Mi Won:
Golden Retriever: The sun is shining, the day is young, we've got
our whole lives ahead of us, and you're inside worrying about a stupid
burned out bulb?

2. Border Collie: Just one. And then I'll replace any wiring that's not up to code.

3. Dachshund: You know I can't reach that stupid lamp!

4. Rottweiler: Make me.

5. Boxer: Who cares? I can still play with my squeaky toys in the dark.

6. Lab: Oh, me, me!!!!! Pleeeeeeeeeze let me change the light bulb!
Can I? Can I? Huh? Huh? Huh? Can I? Pleeeeeeeeeze, please, please, please!

7. German Shepherd: I'll change it as soon as I've led these people
from the dark, check to make sure I haven't missed any, and make just one more perimeter patrol to see that no one has tried to take advantage of the situation.

8. Jack Russell Terrier: I'll just pop it in while I'm bouncing off the walls and furniture.

9. Old English Sheep Dog: Light bulb? I'm sorry, but I don't see a light bulb.

10. Cocker Spaniel: Why change it? I can still pee on the carpet in the dark.

11. Chihuahua: Yo quiero Taco Bulb.

12. Pointer: I see it, there it is, there it is, right there.....

13. Greyhound: It isn't moving. Who cares?

14. Australian Shepherd: First, I'll put all the light bulbs in a little circle...

15. Poodle: I'll just blow in the Border Collie's ear and he'll do
it. By the time he finishes rewiring the house, my nails will be dry.

The Cat's Answer: "Dogs do not change light bulbs. People change
lightbulbs. So, the real question is: How long will it be before I can expect
some light, some dinner, and a massage?"

ALL OF WHICH PROVES, ONCE AGAIN, THAT WHILE DOGS HAVE MASTERS, CATS HAVE STAFF.

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Keep Media, the closely held new venture from Louis Borders, is getting ready to launch on time, if the building output of interviews and articles is any indication. In today's interview with Borders, the new company is described as an online newsstand with strong research potential.
"...When it launches later this month, consumers will be able to pay $4.95 a month for access to the archives of 150 publications. You can also get online content from the current issue of a magazine if you buy a print subscription to that magazine. KeepMedia and the publishers will split the revenue from the fees and subscriptions.

It's as much a high-end research site as anything. Search for "Christopher Columbus" on KeepMedia and you'll find content from branded, well-known magazines and news outlets. By contrast, search Google for "Christopher Columbus," and on the first page you get — I kid you not — fine historical information from one site that otherwise sells Caribbean vacations, and another site that offers a report titled, "Christopher Columbus: His Gastronomic Persona."

Those of us who've been around this industry for a while probably remember Infonautics, the brainchild of Marvin Weinberger and later JosKopelmanan. This online research and media center attemped to get rights to both archival and current materials from numerous publishers. TodayKopelmanan runs Half.com, Weinberger is CEO of the Innovation Factory, and Infonautics is Alacritude, publishers of eLibrary and encyclopedia.com, and run by the founders of Hoover's.
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Although second-quarter profit at AOL Time Warner Inc rose to $1.06 billion partly due to the sale of the company's stake in Comedy Central, a settlement with Microsoft Corp, and the strong success of The Matrix , actual operating income--what they're making from what the groups so ever day-- fell 15 percent ( to $1.29 billion from $1.52 billion).
At the same time, subscribers are dropping off, ad sales will stay flat or decline by as much as 45%, and the company is still cutting and divesting in an effort to get the balance sheet in order.

Oh yes, and thr SEC is continuning its investigations--it'd been 2+ years and at least as many books.

AOL, maybe it's time to retrench in a bigger way. Create 4 core business units, limit their size and offe what you can: 1) dial up access with a kick-ass client, online community, including a trading marketplace,and peer to peer transactions, 2) entertainment and entertainment related services, particularly focused on kids, teens, and the less affluent and urban parts of the country, 3) technology support for the newbies, and premiumn services around computing for the non PC World crowd, 4) online community and tools: AIM, expressions, blogs, message boards, etc.
Keep it simple.
Let TW have their own brands back on the web--AOLers aren't reading enough--and they have great magazines. Go for utility and the friendliness you were know for before you became so big.(Disclosure: I worked for AOL for 3 years).


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You wanna make something of it? What exit?
601am blogs Boro6, but omits the blogs at New Jersey Online, Buzzmachine by Jarvis and his new local blog, whatever it is (if I mention the town he lives in, he'll kill me).

Come on, build a nice list--this is a little week, still...show that Jersey energy
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Louis Borders and a bunch of smart people, including a couple I know and like, have been toiling away for almost a year on a new business, formerly called Spyglass Media and now called Keep Media. Supposed to launch next week, according to Rafat Ali and Paid Content.
"For consumers, Spyglass Media offers access to a library of hundreds of publications and their content archives, all for one low monthly subscription," according to company documents. "For publishers, Spyglass Media is a marketplace to sell online content and print subscriptions, as well as a technology platform that can be used to augment or replace current Web sites."

I'm thinking of Infonautics, some new form of RSS newsreader, and integrated emailers as a publishing package. Am I waaayyy off? New projects are so encouraging--looking forward to seeing this one.

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A saga of back in the day, from birdhouse.org:
"...while companies like Netscape, who are bound by the profit motive, may fail in the marketplace, open source projects are immune from the wiles of capitalism in its most raw form (though open source has other weaknesses, such as misdirection and ill communication).

Thanks for the good times, Netscape. I'll never forget the original pulsing purple 'N' in Netscape 1.0."


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WARNING: Mernit gets geeky wit'it here:
Joi Ito describes the Key Technologies, aka behaviors emerging from today's new tool sets:

Creating and managing identities while protecting privacy
Creating and managing networks of friends and trust
Searching metadata and creating context for metadata
Design and interface for publishing and viewing micro-content
Syndication standards and technologies
Network infrastructure to enable location and mobility
Technologies to move and share micro-content, especially as it grows larger
Web services that interact with micro-content and the physical world such as photo printing, purchasing of real world products, connecting people, etc.

Great ideas, now how do we build interoperability and make these tools more widely available, aka build business modesl around them?


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Via Scott Mace:
John Robb writes:
"Public weblog portability. I was e-mailing with xian about the portability of weblogs and how to maintain presence online. Sure, there is nothing you can do if the people who own the domain you are using shut down your weblog or go out of business in regards to a seamless transition, however, there is alot that can be done. Like what? Here are some ideas for a service that would be really useful. First, I would start with single repository of weblogs where the owner of the weblog can change the location of their weblog and other descriptive data by signing into an account. This service would need to be tightly controlled and trusted. If you don't own the domain, your hosting company or hosting sponsor would need to support the account creation."

This is another intersting opportunity for Web hosting service providers. With AOL's entry into the Weblog hosting space, I've added a separate Radio category to this blog to track Welblog developments. Weblog portability would also be a huge win for consumers, who face "blog tool lock-in" without some kind of portability."

Agreed, these are good ideas.

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Spent some time with a friend today whom I first befriended when our children were less than a year old. Her children are now both in a boarding school that teaches self-discipline, study skills, and instills self-esteem and self-confidence.
Tutition per child is $35,000 per year.
We are in a chic Soho restaurant in the late afternoon as we have the following conversation:

Friend: You have no idea what the last year was like. (16 year old Daughter) spent the past seven months smoking pot 3 times a way. One night she called and said she was in Red Hook--Red Hook!--with a bunch of 21-year old guys and was going to take the bus home--of course, I ran out and got her. (She goes on to describe many other harrowing episodes with both kids, culminating with the decision to put one, and then the other into this special school.)
"So, Susan, tell me, how's your family? How's your son?"

I then describe the night before the flight to Oakland when Zack went AWOL for 12 hours and and made us nuts, ending up with, "But fortunately, that was fairly unusual."

Friend stares at me, eyes wide, hands gripping the table edge. "Don't you get it, what you're describing was every day of my life for more than a year!"
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Stuart Henshall in Unbound Spiral asks: "How many bloggers do you need to change a company? How many newreaders (subscribers in a co) do you need to change information habits?...How do we seed the movement? Alternatively, if you are already a blogger in a business how do you determine the tipping point is near? How do you decide that blogging may really be ready to rock your corporate world? "
Stuart also wonders if corporate newsreader users are more likely to become bloggers themselves.
While Stuart's post is elegant and smart, and he makes going points, the realities, IMHO, are a bit different and the factors for adoption run along different lines:

1) Internal vs. external: Are we discussing internal or external blogs? Blogs intended for the public a la Jupiter Research bloggers who are essentially marketing their services, or blogs that give us that behind the scenes, eating sushi in the locker room frisson. The Microsofties working on .NET seem to be reveling in their ability to blog, relying on us voyeurs, as well as their peers, to magnify their smartnesses.

2) Intranet vs. extranet: Blogging behind the corporate firewall is quite different that being out in public...I think companies would be hesitant to do any external blogging that isn't marketing related outside of the fairly unique software development culture of the West Coast.

3) Workgroup blogs and wikis:: Blogs by one person are quite different that group blogs, project blogs and wikis. I have heard many corporate people express strong interest in Sharepoint, which they understand to be both a document manager and a collaborative workgroup tool. It would be great to see blogs become standard for workgroups and projects inside companies, and I do think that will come.

Staurt, thanks for the great questions.
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So my husband and I head out last night to South Orange's new coffee spot. This little suburban town is so boring, a new coffee lounge is a big thing(we're only 30 minutes from NYC, so excitement usually isn't a local commodity.)
Anyway, the place is packed. Looks like a coffee bar in Los Gatos or Campbell, places where people are serious about both their brew and comfy chairs to drink it in.
So, my old friend Sue Willis is there with her husband and two friends. We all chat. Sue, who is a fiction writer, says she Googled herself the other day and found my blog. I'd started it right after I saw her in March. The other couple have kids who know my son; their son is DJ'ing in the back room of the coffee bar and probably responsible for packing in the gaggle of HS students running back and forth.
Sue's husband is named Andy. He's a doctor. I've known them for 17 years--another set of ex-Brooklynites who moved to South Orange. "You blog?" Andy says. "My brother is really into that. He has a blog..."
Flash of lucidity--Dave Weinberger is Andy's brother!
"His blog is Joho the Blog," I shoot out. "He's great, I've been reading his writing since way before he had a blog."
"Will he know you?" Andy asks. I say probably not, maybe my name, and we keep having the nice chat we're having, which partly consists of my trying to explain to Andy what RSS and news readers are and how he should get his brother to set him up with one.
It's a small world, but I wouldn't want to paint it, as Steven Wright said.
P.S. BTW, Dave Weinberger is one of the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto, one of those books you'll want to check out if you are interested in the new economy and business trends.

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Technorati links to this blog here
Among them are Sua Sponte, who, it turns out, met me back in 1996 (way, cool). Comments are broken on your site, so hey, please email me! Also got a link from Chris Alden at r21, the addictive MediaBurn web log, Roger Cadenhead's Workbench, which is a smart journal by a former journalist and Java whiz, and Mike's Move the Crowd, fast becoming a favorite ( I like Mike because he writes about a variety of things, including food).
Feedster searches say I also got a link from MediaJunkie, another wonderful site,
I am still at the point where getting linked to feels good, so thanks much.
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AOL isn't the only company developing blog-related tools for AIM. Now, Ben Hosken has built the blogchangebot , a blog monitoring service which updates you via AOL Instant Messenger when a blog you are interested is updated.
I tried this this morning--sign up for my own blog.

Mernit: subscribe susanmernit.blogspot.com
blogchangebot: Subscribe
You are subscribed to http://susanmernit.blogspot.com
Blog Change Bot www.neuronwave.com/bcb
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Been thinking alot about what's needed to pull many of the emerging tools and applications together. In that spirit, Phil Wolff raises some good questions once again, sent via Marc Canter's blog:
"How do you scale SyndicationSpace to hundreds of millions of feeds being checked all the time? The answer is intermediaries. Proxy caching, P2P, central aggregators, etc. Don't know which blend of technologies is the right one, but they all require some form of
(a) authentication, so you can trust that this copy of the feed come from the source you know,
(b) encryption (optional), so nobody along the way can read/modify the content of a private personalized feed, and
(c) checksum or another method of assuring that what was received is identical to what was sent.
This tastes like public key infrastructure.

Another application: Blogspace isn't flat. FOAF data, whether explicit via blogrolls or implicit in hyperlinks, should be very useful in P2P. Your subscription list probably has many feeds in common with the people in your weblogNeighborhood, Technorati cosmos, or other people in your blogroll. While John Udell or Marc Canter may be physically distant (in traceroute and ping times), the chances may be as high as 25% that they have cached at least one of my feeds. As long as the feeds have clear BestIfUsedBy/ Expiration dates/ times, the social network can make optimization very efficient."

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Two friends of mine, Marcia Parker, and JD Lasica, are involved in the launch of a new print magazine in the Bay area.
TriValley just published its first issue, covering the Oakland/Danville/Livermore, etc area known as TriValley.
Marcia is the editor, JD is a contributing writer, and I hope to do some pieces for them once I'm back. Folks, if you want help with a web/RSS/email strategy, let me know, and best of luck with what looks like a truly interesting magazine.
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Is it cashing in or cashing out when you're a big CEO and you sell a third of your stock? That's what Yahoo CEO Terry Semel just did, 2 years after his start date. 500,000 shares were exercised and sold at prices way over the option price.
Up2Speed writes:
"Although this may seem like a lot of cash, when Semel took over, Yahoo's stock was languishing in the mid-teens, and the company was struggling to find a direction. Fast forward to today, and the picture is far more rosey - Yahoo's stock is in the 30's, and its forward direction is a lot clearer. Through a mixture of clever buying and bold leadership, Semel has improved Yahoo's position substantially. All in all I'd suggest that this little bonus is thoroughly deserved."
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Two weeks and I'll be blogging from San Jose. Last time I lived in the Valley, I was a corporate VP with no life, could NEVER have had a blog. Now, I'm a free agent, running a consulting company and working on a couple of other under the radar projects. Blogging is my hobby, and I love it.
So, please, let me know what I should be connecting to and who's out there, especially folks I might not know, or know of---- please help me get the landscape.
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Kblogger John Robb is reportedly back online at MindPlex. Yeah! (via Rick Klau)
Note: These links DID NOT work this morning--but I am assuming the server is getting slammed and John will reappear at this address, really, really soon.

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From Hollywood Reporter, via Paid Content
Z100 listeners tuning in Web for IM service
New York's Z100 said that beginning today it will be the first major radio station to offer its own branded instant-messaging service. The Clear Channel station partnered with technology company GTV to create what it is calling the Z100 Messenger, a fancy IM service that interoperates with IM's major players: America Online, Yahoo! and Microsoft. The product can be downloaded free at www.Z100.com. Director of online services Robert Daniel Mathers said he's hoping to encourage more of the station's 1.2 million listeners to become registered online users, as about 300,000 already have done. (Paul Bond)

I just went to the site and the deal is that GTV builds custom solutions for enterprise. See blurb here. GTV says that the app offers platform interoperability as well through a dashboard like sign-in. Here's the image of the "dash board" for sign in.

I hope GTV and similar companies are successful in selling more of these custom, interoperable services, they are pretty interesting.
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Half-way toward a house pared down and the things we don't really want sold, given away, donated, or thrown out. I can see how there's a class of thing that I no longer want, but that is too good to throw out and I can't seem to sell--and don't have the time to give to find someone I can give it to.
If I keep those things, I am letting them own me, so the challenge of the next 10 days is to find ways to remove the Ntozake Shange poetry books, champagne flutes I never liked and similar items from my possession.
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My friend and former colleague Jesse Kornbluth, one of the best writers I know, has been in France this summer doing some writing. We connected a few days ago, and he was kind enough to send me some of the wonderful emails he and his little daughter have been sending friends. Peter Mayle, step aside, you have competition from a toddler!
Just a few snippets of these wonderful letters:

Dear American Friend,

Bonjour! Boogins again. And, again, things have happened.

Let me start with a social item. And how is this for weird --- last night we had dinner at a chateau we paid to visit last week.

Daddy has a friend whose mother lives in the Dordogne. And she asked us for dinner. Daddy said, "Boogins can be…ratty at dinner. Maybe a drink is better." But she insisted. When she gave Daddy the directions, we suddenly we all realized: She OWNS Marquessyac, which has an amazing view of the prettiest valley in the Dordogne and a garden with 150,000 hand-pruned boxwood trees. (These French! So discreet!)

So off we went, me in my best Gap cotton twin-set. Up the hill. Higher. Higher. A gate opened. And there was Madame's house, a small building just below the chateau.

I have heard that the French aristocracy beats the peasants and gives them only a thin gruel to eat and makes them wear clothes made of potato sacks, but Madame couldn't have been nicer. Her other guests didn't seem eager to know me, but that may be because they are very sophisticated Belgians and dinner at 7 PM to accommodate my need for an early bedtime was NOT, as they might say, de rigeur.
(snipped out here)
Bedtime! Gotta go. Will write from Paris, where, Mommy assures me, things will happen.
Love,
Boogins


Jesse is also asking his friends to support the million mom march , a group dedicated to preventing handgun violence.
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Okay, it's over! My stint sitting in the driveway as strangers paw at our discarded good has run its course and we are several hundred dollars richer and many bags of schmutz lighter.
The yard sale is an amazing American custom: offer junk you don't want at rock bottom prices to people looking for cheap ways to satisfy their hunting and gathering urges before you throw the rest of it out--or give it away for free to other people who didn't come to your sale.
Howeverm, this means we've edited out kitchen goods and knacks down to what we actually use--nothing left in the boxes packed away.
Next steps: the books. Take 10 shelves of books, plus about 8 boxes, and reduce them down to what I really want--that means ruthless editing. Good-bye, Black Sparrow Press books! If you want them, let me know.

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