Susan Mernit's Blog: Navigating the Info Jungle

Walter Anderson, chairman of Parade Magazine, and my old boss, is publishing a new memoir this month called Meant to Be. Out from HarperCollins, it is the story of his hard-luck childhood and a surprising--and shocking--family discovery. Melinda, his daughter, who works at Conde Nast, is publishing her first book as well--The Catholic Girl's Guide to Sex.
Walter was my boss while I was at Parade(running the new media group) and he was one of the most brilliant, inspiring, and unique men that I have ever met. Melinda, his daughter, started a successful editorial career right out of college and has put the time in to learn from some top editors.
I wish them both the best of luck....and Walter, I can't wait to read your book. Melinda, I bet yours is a hoot.
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Gristmagazine outs Bush's horrendous environmental policies and his active destruction of checks and balances around land and energy use.
The words "worse environmental record in history" come to mind.
Grist references an ongoing study by the Natural Resources Defense Council entitled "The Bush Record" that chronicles hundreds of efforts to weaken environmental regulations -- a tally more extensive than that of any administration (including the famously anti-environmental Reagan White House) since the U.S. EPA was established in 1971. While critics decry these changes as rollbacks, the Bush administration defends them as forward-looking.
(Via tidepool)

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A new study just released by the Online Publishers Association reports that 60 percent of Internet users say they would likely
would notice a campaign ad online. According to the study conducted, which was by the Center for Survey and Research Analysis at the University of Connecticut, nearly 30 percent of the respondents expressed interest in seeing political ads on the Web.

This is on my radar because of the piece I am working on and the general relevance of this to the start of the October 2004 political campaigns. Some other bits of research from the past 3 years that could provide some interesting historical perspective include some interesting Pew reports:

2003: Political Sites Gain, But Major News Sites Still DominateModest Increase in campaign use for Internet in 2002
2002: Digital Town Hall: How local officals user the Internet
2000: Internet Election News Audience Seeks Convenience, Familiar Names: Youth Vote Influenced By Online Information


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I am speaking at BloggerCon in Boston in early October, and have been asked to think about some BOAF sessions for Sunday, the community day. What do you think of these ideas? Do you have other ideas? Please post if you have ideas, and/or if you'd like to participate in one of these panels--that means coming to Harvard on Sunday, October 4th, in person, to be a part of the program.

Birds of a feature session ideas
1) Creating a distinctive blogging voice and persona, a roundtable discussion
One of the distinctive differences about blogging (as compared to traditional journalism and personal home pages) is the heightened sense of personal voice coming through along side the sharing of information and ideas.
How do bloggers develop their personal voice? What kinds of decisions have bloggers made about the voice and persona they manifest in their blogs? As blogging moves into the mainstream, what considerations about voice, persona and tone might new bloggers think about? How do these elements come into play for business blogs, personal blogs, professional blogs, etc?
I'd like to pull together a roundtable of 3-4 bloggers who could come to this session and help kick the discussion off for everyone who came to this program. I'd faciliate the discussion, but would look to others to make significant contributions---volunteers needed!
This one is dear to my heart, because self-expression is one of the keys to why people blog, and my hope is this session helps address that,
'
2) Interactivity and the 2004 elections: What are the key levers and influences emerging?
This is a hot topic! Already, we''ve seen blogs, Moveon.org and MeetUp.com emerge as powerful new tools for political discussion, organizing, and platform development. The California recall campaign--and anti-recall campaign--are also catalysts for using electronic tools, virtual spaces and communities to discuss and address issues.

Let's do a session at BloggerCon that provides a forum for these events--I'd like to see Scott Heiferman, someone from MoveOn, Jock Gill, and a host of others come and share at a session on this topic.
My claim to fame with this one is that I am writing an article on these topics that is scheduled to be published right around the time of the conference. If you want me to facililitate and invite, I could, but someone else could moderate this well if I was to do #1,

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Is jargon the product of a new group's attempt to make themselves secure as a community---ie, they develop their own shorthand language and can require others to demonstrate affinity and/or allegiance by proving they comprehend it?
I am thinking about how there are certain blogging world worlds I truly hate, which is meme.
What exactly is a meme? Sounds like a Greek cough drop, or a pretentious conceit for saying idea.
Tell me what a meme is in plain English, please and skip the pseudo smart stuff.

Are there jargon words you hate? Which ones?

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Rayne's on a rant about AOL Journals: "Several reasons come to mind, the first being that it’s like a train wreck about to happen – I can’t rip myself away, I want to see the outcome. Secondly, I’d like to understand what the experience will be for those AOL customers who think they’d like to get in on that cool blog thing that everybody’s talking about these days (will they come away saying, Hah! That’s a snap! Or perhaps, Bah! Blogging is garbage, based on their AOL experience?). Thirdly, I’d like to watch and see how that anticipated captive audience builds and whether AOL can really cash in."





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There are parts of my life that I never write about and rarely talk about with anyone I know. Many times, at night and on the weekend, my husband and I will look at each other and one of us will say, "The people at work would never believe where we are right now."
We don't go to strip clubs, crack dens, or swingers' parties, but we're pretty addicted to inner-city ethnic restaurants, blues bars, and gospel services at poor black churches, and we spend a chunk of our shared free time sampling all three.
Today, I was typical.
I was up in San Franciso doing meetings--a lunch at the Hayes Street Grill with a colleague of my 5ive partners and a friend of hers who is launching an interesting new business, then I drove over to the Sunset area and spend some time with some folks who have a great start-up I am advising on.
Home by 5 and at 6 we head ed over to McCreery Road to the First MIssionary Baptist Church where the Highway travelers, formerly known as The Gospel QCs friends and bandmates of my husband, are holding a concert, or program as they call it.
Last weekend it was Eli's Mile High Club in Oakland, where our good friends Steve Freund and Wendy de Witt were playing.
And the restaurants--truth is, my son doesn't want to go out to eat with us because we like to try such funky ethnic places--last night, we had grilled flatfish and pike with rice and dishes of pan at a Korean Fish BBQ joint in Santa Clara, finished off with Saffron pistachio ice cream from REAL ICECREAM., the home of the best mango kulfi I have ever had. The only other customers in the fish joint were one of the waitresses and her friends, who seemed to be having a Korea-American booze and BBQ orgy, frying everything from shrimp to beef to bacon on the grill as they drank Korean firewater and diet cokes. Last meal out before that with Spencer was at the Mexican breakfast joint on the East Side where we have huevos con nopales (eggs with cactus, a wonderful dish) and huevos chiquailles, a truly scary mess o'sauce.
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Peoplenews item this morning that no-underwear heiress Paris Hilton was "having fun" with Ashton Kutcher in the corner of a Paris nightclub, while 15 years older girlfriend Demi Moore was home in LA with the kids.
Asked about her relationship with Kutcher, the trailer-trash heiress said, 'Didn't you know that I broke up with Barney, and now I'm dating Bart Simpson?'"
No question but that reality TV has moved off the screen and into what some people think is the real world.
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CNN's Tucker Calrlson has a way with the poptart:
Britney on George Bush: "Honestly, I think we should just trust our president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that."
Britney on her tongue kiss with Madonna at the VMA: "I didn't know it was going to be that long and everything. I've never kissed a woman before."
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This is the end of one of those days:
--My son is still not in the high school he was supposed to get transferred to
--My lunch meeting today got cancelled and moved to tomorrow
--My dog--after a great walk with Spencer and a friend and her dog--lay down in the street for 20 minutes, refused to budge and I thought he had headstroke(again)
--I made a lot of progress at my work, but still did not have time to email Dave Winer back about ideas for birds of a feather Sunday at BlogCon--I have two ideas for a panel I'd like to run--
a) The Blogger's Voice--What does it mean to established your own voice? How is this similar/different from the journalist in traditional media? What thoughts about having their own voice and how it evolves can bloggers at the conference-and elsewhere-- share? What are your thoughts about how blogging is such a personal medium?
b) Political blogging: How the face of both national and local elections are being changed by blogging and interactive platforms and programs such as MoveOn.org, MeetUp.com, etc. I'm writing an article on a topic very close to this, so will be an instant expert by October--but it is less dear to my heart thaan the first.

Anyway, I don't feel like I got enough done today...and I hate that feeling.

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from tidepool.org, an environmental news site: Haida offered fifth of islands
In an unprecedented move, the province is offering the Haida Nation 20 per cent of the Queen Charlotte Islands, hoping to end confrontation and conflict over land use in that area. In return for the land, the government wants the Haida to suspend a rights and title lawsuit in B.C. Supreme Court -- which claims ownership of the Queen Charlottes, including offshore oil and gas rights -- and wants the Haida to "re-engage" in the treaty process. The offer is 2,000 square kilometres of Crown land, of which half would be owned outright by the Haida with the remainder reserved for Haida tenures, protected areas or co-management. It is the largest chunk of land proffered in any of B.C.'s treaty talks.
Source: (09/04/03) Victoria Times Colonist
Haida offered 20% of Charlottes (09/04/03)
Vancouver Sun storyB.C. offers Haida tribe 490,000 island acres (09/04/03) Seattle Times
Haida culture is grounded in nature (05/09/02) Seattle P-I
B.C. ruling could change how Weyerhaeuser logs (05/09/02) Seattle P-I
INFORAIN MAP: First Nations of the Coastal Temperate Rain Forest

The Queen Charlotte Islands are my dream destination, the place I most want to visit. There are Haida villages there with totems just as they were hundreds of years ago, protected in a vast wilderness forest with restricted (human) access. Politically sensitive Canada does something for their indigenous people, once again.

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Anderson Cooper has a piece in Details Magazine this month talking about his brother's suicide in 1988, at age 23. Interviewed in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Anderson said, "I think about my brother every day...The violence of his death still stuns me, and it comes to me at odd times throughout the day... still have a sense of shock that it transpired at all."
Anderson's brother, Carter, was a Princeton student who killed himself in front of their mother by jumping off the terrace of the family apartment. Back in the day, I had a friend who'd dated him, and thought Carter was a sweet, if troubled, guy. She was shocked by his death, as was everyone who knew him (as in how could you not be shocked?) I have a family member who died suddenly in an accident, and believe me, it haunts you.

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Nice assembly by Matt Welch on the spiffily redesign Columbia Journalism Review site of big and emerging media users of blogs. Welch's list is a handy dandy cut and snip, with listings from Slate, MSNBC, FoxNews, etc. This sidebar accompanies a major piece called Blogworld, The New Amateur Journalists Weigh In (I can't wait to find out how he defines amateur journalist!)
Welch: "Blogging technology has, for the first time in history, given the average Jane the ability to write, edit, design, and publish her own editorial product — to be read and responded to by millions of people, potentially — for around $0 to $200 a year. It has begun to deliver on some of the wild promises about the Internet that were heard in the 1990s. Never before have so many passionate outsiders — hundreds of thousands, at minimum — stormed the ramparts of professional journalism. "

Matt's article is one of the best pieces I have read about blogging--and one of the most definitive. Truly a do not miss.

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Well, it turns out there's such a thing now as comments spam--and some people have it.. See this post from Shelley at Burningbird:
The vig-rx blog virus, otherwise known as comment spammer, is using Google against us. After stealing another IP address, as expected.

Weblogs being targeted are being found through a Google search. Example is here. Aren't open web services a wonderful thing? Go ahead -- all open comment MT weblogs on this list have this comment, if they haven't deleted it yet. The key word in the search is Blog -- any weblog title or entry with Blog, and Bob's your uncle.

and a comment on the person doing this, from ralph: I looked at the logs shortly after posting my original comment and saw that indeed they got to my site through Google using the pattern you mention. There was a delay of about seven minutes between the original access and the posting of the comment. When I saw that, I realized the same thing you did in your recent post, that this clown is parsing the form, and that my form is indeed close enough to the "standard" way of doing things that his parsing works, even though the form elements all have different names than MT's. So the software he's using is not tied to a particular tool.


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Movie moguls are blaming text-messaging teens for this summer's box office failure of films like Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle and The Incredible Hulk...In this age of mobile phones equipped with text-messaging software, adolescent thumb-tribes can spread a collective thumbs-up or thumbs-down across the digital grapevine even before the credits roll on opening night.

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Chicken Marsala with mushrooms, peppers, and baby onions (from my landlady's garden)
Curried chickpeas with spinach and shitake mushrooms
Rice
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The amazing Yeehaw Industries, via Blather


When I look at these images, that vow of voluntary simplicity I took when I moved into this San Jose rental (ie no more stuff to move!) burns a hole right in my credit card.

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I like Megnut's recent post: "Don't befriend/work with/love/etc. anyone who is incapable of saying, "I was wrong" and "I don't know."

I'm also eager to see The Lafayette Project, which at one time was supposed to launch in July. At Reboot, Cory Doctorow blogged Meg talking about the product they were developing as an integrated tool suit--a social network/FOAF tool to identify both bloggers and readers for purposes of referral and recommendation, including a recommendation engine aka collaborative filtering/more like this feature; an RRS reader (host-based, I assume), and a translator so that all those Polish, Portguese and other non English blogs can be read in the English speaking world.

Others are also thinking about--and working in this space--and developing what seem like similar products--it will be a step forward when some of these next-generation efforts launch.


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Can it be so? Peoplenews says Justin Timberlake is the new face of McDonald's. Says Timberlake, "'We share the same crowd - people who like to have fun." Lou Perlman should be proud.
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It's getting wacky here in California. According to the LA Times, via Annenberg's Online Journalism, Gateway Inc. is inviting all 135 California gubernatorial candidates to post their pictures on the Internet. In addition to posting photographs, the Gateway-created site, candidatecamera.com, will include poll results and a press area. The photos, taken with Gateway digital cameras, will be edited by photojournalist David Hume Kennerly. Kennerly told the Times he hopes to create a "cumulative scrapbook" of the recall election. (perma-link to this brief)

This is a total publicity stunt and in tenor with the general circus-like treatment of the potential recall, which I think is quickly fizzling out. The real winner here is Gateway, which is hoping for lots of people to go to their home page, see their product offers, and end up buying.
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Smart and hip Greg Allen of greg.org interviewed Sofia Coppola, whose new movie I am eager to see. Lynne Hirschberg and another journalist were part of the group-grope as well. Some Q&A with the auteur of the forthcoming Lost in Translation, which I am eager to see.
LH: The relationship of the fashion photographer and his young wife may or may not have shadings of your own life and your relationship to Jonze. Giovanni Ribisi, who plays the photographer, speaks with Jonze's mannerisms, and Scarlett Johansson, as Charlotte, is dressed and styled to seem a lot like Coppola.
SC: I know. How narcissistic.

G [to self]: Waitaminnit, she said it wasn't like her own experience. And then Scarlett tells Lynn that Sofia tried on the underwear in the opening scene to show her how it should look?
Q [to self]: Gots to get the URL for the onset pics of Sofia in that underwear...

BW: What is this we've read about you and Spike? That you're breaking up and you moved into the Chateau Marmont?
SC: I don't know where they get this stuff in the Post. I mean, I like to read gossip, too. They said it was from a close friend or something? Do they just make this up?

Note: I once flew from London to NY on the same flight as Sofia and her hub; they were the chicest couple on the customs line, with the ultimate downscale clothes (like, her striped shirt was one of the $200 ones from Marc Jacobs, ditto the bag, and Spike's velour leisure suit was old school (okay, I think he was really wearing cordoroys, but...) Oh yes, and the music is already for sale.
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Apparently, America Online is finally going to redesign to old and tired Kids Only service and turn it into KOL, KOL, the first version of AOL designed entirely for children, as the press release says.. Given that one of the really outstanding aspects of AOL is the parental controls feature--and the enclosed envronment it so successful provides to children ages 5-16, this is a very wise move.
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Here's the latest series of books I just read:
Anne Tyler: A Slipping Down Life and Searching for Caleb. I got these for the trip to Aspen, since I find Tyler relaxing, but these were among her weaker efforts.
Wallace Stegner: My current favorite writer, still working my way through all his books, for the first time. Remembering Laughter. Another slight novel, drawn right from an American Realist landscape painting.
Julia Blackburn: The Leper's Companions and The Book of Color. I got these with such high hopes--and hated them both.
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Just read Tom Junod's piece, The Falling Man, in the August 03 Esquire. This essay about the people who jumped to their deaths from the World Trade Center buildings references a series of photos taken on site by Richard Drew. In telling the story of the efforts to identify the man in the photo, and to acknowledge the possibly hundreds of people who jumped--or were forced out, as the Port Authority says--Junod writes a graceful and powerful essay about human life in the face of death, and how survivors mourn and remember.
The piece isn't (yet) available online, but I urge you to pick it up--it is excellent.

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It would be incredibly bitchy to say they didn't get blogging during the Iraqi war, but perhaps they do now. COlumnist Christine Boese says she is obsessed with blogs and tells readers all.
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Rick Robinson in the SF Chronicle today: AOL now has 30,000 registered blog users.
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Old Jokes' Home:
A man walks into a dentist's surgery and says,
"Excuse me, can you help me. I think I'm a moth."
Dentist: "You don't need a dentist.
You need a psychiatrist."
Man: "Yes, I know."
Dentist: "So why did you come in here?"
Man: "The light was on..."

and
"Grandmother used to take my mother to the circus
to see the fat lady and tattooed man - now
they're everywhere." - Joan Collins

Those naughty English! I click on POPBITCH'S emails every time...
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From Sandhill Trek by the estimable Frank Paynter: Seattle blogger Ann Craig just had her laptop stolen; this follows a bout with melanoma.
Here's the thing:Blogger Gary Turner set up a paypal account for donations--I just gave $10 bucks, even though I never heard of her before (but I feel lucky to have $10 bucks I can give, so it's my privilege to share). SO if you feel lucky, too, please donate. A blogger without a laptop is way worse than a fish without a bicycle, like they're screwed.
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Online Journalism Review: Google News draws more than 3 million unique visitors a month, but Nielsen and Media Metrix have excluded them from news site rankings. Now both say they are looking into ranking them with the other top news outlets.
"Google News is a channel within Google, which has enormous reach. We have Google News with 3.4 million unique users in July. In this category, we have CNN at 21 million, MSNBC at 20 million. ... So 3.4 million would place it about 20 spots down the list. We also have subcategories below that."

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Kerry Bodine writes: A few months ago Haven suggested to me that studying tattoos might give me some ideas about the future design of wearable computers. Turns out he's not so crazy after all... In the book Stylemakers: Inside Fashion, the authors talk about David Wolfe, one of Seventh Avenue's foremost fashion forecasters, and his ideas about tattoos. "Based on research from [the MIT experimental clothing laboratory], he predicts a future amalgamation of apparel and technology. 'Tattooing and body piercing are the first steps in this transformation,' he maintains.
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Although 64.4% of the enrollees in journalism school are women, that doesn't mean 64%--or even 20%--of the staffers in newsroom are women, reports a recent Boston Globe story by Mark Jurkowitz.
"And though the pipeline is full of women, the newsroom remains a male-dominated province that presents significant barriers to their success. The new American Journalist Survey found that in the past two decades, the overall percentage of women journalists (33 percent) had actually dropped by about a point. And this, the survey noted, is in a country in which women make up half the professional and managerial work force. For all the talk about changing workplace culture, evolving societal mores, and the abundance of women in journalism school, such traditional issues as babies, bad hours, and old-boy networks still make a career in media a daunting enterprise. And full gender diversity -- which many media analysts say would have a serious impact on news content itself -- remains a distant goal. "
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The always intelligent Peter Krasilovsky gave a talk to some Knight Fellows this month that was written up by Online Journalism Review. Some snippets:
"Paid content is a great way to make more money, but the real money is in advertising and marketing, don't ever forget it, and if you are a consultant you're made sure you don’t ever forget it. ...

So let's look at The New York Times, and how they do it at New York Times Digital, tremendous signs of success there. And they did something that people were afraid to do in the early days, they registered their users and people could be willing to register for the New York Times, because it was considered to be unique content that was very valuable.

The New York Times is very proud of having 11 million active registered users, but that is not where they make most of their money on New York Times Digital. The real money they make -- because they know whom you are, and they can sell your type of person to different types of advertisers on a targeted basis -- comes from the 1.5 million loyal users who come in several times a week. Those are the people that come in and will be exposed to their advertising and much higher cost per thousand rates then the daily e-mail sites and the 11 million active registered users -- the people that come in about once a month or more. This is their bread and butter."


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