Susan Mernit's Blog

Heather Green at the consistently interesting Blogspotting breaks the news of an AOL Survey on blogging and why people do it. The story says that the survey reveals 50% of all bloggers blog because it's a form of self-therapy preferable to counselling. Other data points:

• 16% blog because they're interested in journalism;
• 12% blog in order to break or stay ahead of the latest news and gossip
• 8% blog in order to expose political information

Now, here's the kicker, babies--this survey data is based on 600 users who answered it on AOL. The idea that AOL users might be typical bloggers--or that 600 users is a statistically accurate sample--is the same fuzzy logic that makes MSN want to seriously consider buying AOL.

In other words, now we've heard from one segment of the blogging population--how about the rest?
(On the other hand, some of the top bloggers I read are definitely practicing self therapy--in public.)

NY Post reports MSN is talking seriously about acquiring AOL and folding it into the mix. However, the reporter says: " Talks are most advanced with Microsoft, Time Warner management's preferred partner, but the media giant has also had discussions with both Yahoo! and Google over a sale or venture with AOL, according to a source close to Time Warner."

Susan sez: Given the long history AOL has had with Google, and Google's interest in building out their network, I would not rule out a *surprise* purchase or investment in AOL by Google.
After all, AOL has built a terrific server network and infrastructure/backbone over the years, and that would be a strong asset for Google--as would be the millions of pages they could monetize directly.
And they'll have the war chest to do it, won't they?

(Side note to Google execs: Don't do it, you have no idea what you would be getting into!)

(Via Marketing Vox)

So not only did Google launch blog search (more on that in a sec), but they redid the Blogger start page to reflect the new search and drive more traffic into blogs. There's a dynamic crawl linking to newly updated blogs, a blog of the day clickable list, and the good ol' random link.


As for the new Google blog search, it seems to be indexing constantly--I could swear my first search on Jarvis & Dell via Google Blog Search turned up(undated) two posts with no dateline, while the one I did just now resulted in 578 nicely annotated posts. Oddly enough, when I used the new blog search box on Blogger to do the same search I got 550 results--have no idea why.

Meanwhile, my Technorati search on the same keywords provided a clearly labelled 699 posts with 20 posts in the last ten days and a Feedster search provided 390 dated and annotated results.

Susan sez: A good start from the big guys; let's see how the indexing shakes out as they make the small tweaks--and, most importantly--where they integrate this thing. The elephant in the room isn't their computing power, IMHO, it's the building GoogleNet suite of indispensable apps--as they hook them together, world domination looms.

Update: Nick W at Threadwatch says the new search focuses on feeds, not blogs.
Winer explains.

New Netratings data reports that as more and more users integrate photos into their blog pages--and as the world reports on world events--the amount of photo-publishing and hosting has grown more than 406% since January 2005, with photo-hosting sites (including blog ASPs) accounting for 10% of active Internet users.

Netratings reports that top referring sites for the top five image hosting sites during August2005 included MySpace.com, Xanga.com, LiveJournal, Blogger and MSN Spaces.
InJuly 2005, Nielsen//NetRatings reported that 20 percent of active Web users, or 29.3 million people, accessed blogging or blog-related Web sites, growing31 percent since the beginning of the year.
Money quote is from Jon Gibbs, research manager: "The large rise in blogging activity has lifted other Web sites, the primary one being image hosting sites. Simple text-based 'diaries' have evolved into a more image-oriented presentation."
(Susan sez: One might add that world events, not only evolving customer behavior, are responsible for this truth.)

The table:

     Table 1. Top 5 Image Hosting Web Sites, Jan. vs. Aug. 2005 (Home & Work,
    U.S.)
    ______________________________________________________________________
    Site           Jan 05 UA (000)     Aug 05 UA (000)     Jan-Aug Growth
    ______________________________________________________________________
    PhotoBucket        1,537               12,241               696%
    ______________________________________________________________________
    ImageShack         1,150                3,444               199%
    ______________________________________________________________________
    Putfile.com           --                1,302                 --
    ______________________________________________________________________
    TinyPic.com           --                  715                 --
    ______________________________________________________________________
    Imagevenue.com        --                  559                 --
    ______________________________________________________________________
    Category*          2,912               14,734               406%
    ______________________________________________________________________

   Source:  Nielsen//NetRatings, September 2005
   *Note:  Category is comprised of 50 image hosting Web sites.

The demos (yes,teens are into it)
Table 2. Highest Indexing Age & Gender Groups for Image Hosting Sites
    (U.S., Home & Work)
    _________________________________________________________________________
    Demo Group     Unique Audience (000)    Composition %  Composition Index
    _________________________________________________________________________
    Female 12 - 17      2,219                    15%              259
    _________________________________________________________________________
    Male 12 - 17        1,532                    10%              191
    _________________________________________________________________________
    Male 21 - 24          479                     3%              182
    _________________________________________________________________________
    Male 18 - 24        1,004                     7%              175
    _________________________________________________________________________

   Source:  Nielsen//NetRatings, September 2005

So AOL's now added access to podcasts. In addition, TVEyes Podscope search will be integrated with AOL Search and there will be lots o original podcast programming from AOLChannels (and members, one would think.)
Susan sez: This is yet another great example of how podcasting fits the populace, making it quick and straightforward to adapt. AOL didn't add blogging till 2004, quite a while after blogging took off, but they're quick(ish) to adopt podcasting.

Anyone in the Bay area interested in volunteering their expertise for the October 8th Craiglist Foundation Non-Profit Boot Camp - Ask the Experts tables?
Just heard they need some more volunteers--if you are able to provide some services, this is a really worthwhile program--volunteers are needed to work 2-hour shifts for one on one Q&A with attendees.
Check the site for details.

Now the fun begins--more comments on eBay and Skype and market implications:

Nivi imagines eBay should next buy SixApart and writes: 'Ebay cannot accept the risk of having a powerful supplier that essentially has a monopoly on VoIP because Skype has a viral product that runs on a closed network with network effects. You could describe Paypal the same way: a viral product that runs on a closed network with network effects."

Michael Parekh says: " Wired and wireless voice communications are being cut loose, from the predictable, steady, metered subscription revenue streams of the past few decades, to having to fend for themselves. .. In the eBay/Skype case, they'll have to be supported through seemingly esoteric but potentially potent new revenue opportunities like "pay-per-call" (a twist on the "pay-per-click" model popularized by Internet advertising companies. Incidentally, pay-per-call is not a hypothetical exercise."

Umair's as shrewd as usual and takes an economics systems approach: "Web 2.0 is about the shift from network search economies, which realize mild exponential gains - your utility is bounded by the number of things (people, etc) you can find on the network - to network coordination economies, which realize combinatorial gains: your utility is bounded by the number of things (transactions, etc) you can do on the network. " So in his world, Skype is another platform with a transactional user base (as opposed to the NYTimes) and that's the future.

Having fun yet? I sure am.

The new J-learning site just also went live--it's a training site for people interested in community publishing and participatory media and it's huge.
If you're interested in community publishing, it's well worth checking it out,
commenting on an article, registering and writing, etc.

Gabe Rivera's given Memorandum an upgrade that's totally worth a look.
Basically, the site sorts Google News and blogosphere data to present information on two topics--politics and digital media/emerging tech-- as a set of verticals that highlight the contributors from a community of writers. As Gabe says, the pages are built automatically, but they feel meaty--and they uncover links and stories the usual suspects do not.

More: See Robert Scoble's rave review

eBay explains the deal to its investors via a packet of presos (via Paid Content)
Ross Mayfield says "Skype will provide eBay a communications platform for the other half of it's market -- the conversations. eBay will enhance the liquidity of it's spot market, gains a business with great fundamentals, positioning for yellow pages business, further infrastructure for billing, payment and -- identity."
Jeff Clavier weighs in: "eBay is spending about half of its cash reserve to acquire the VoIP company, at a stratospheric multiple (based on Skype?s rumored revenue levels)....and "A key learning: after this one, no deal is impossible or unthinkable."
Richard McKinnon writes: "This would have to be the fastest richification of two founders ever! 2 years after starting Skype, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis are billionaires. Cool. More. It was the IPO of Netscape in the ninties, a company with no revenue, just converts to an idea, the browser, that ignited the first internet era. Was that just ten years ago? Is this that deal of the second internet era?"
Chris Carfi says the key points are: An opportunity to extend eBay communities to the desktop; a strategic move into emerging markets; integration of PayPal into the Skype interface.

Susan sez: All the above are true, but the two bellwethers, for me, are eBay's diversification into another powerful platform business (VOIP + community) and the global nature of the deal--this is the acceleration of eBay's ongoing growth across the planet.

The Austin American Statesman's just launched a new set of Pluck-powered community publishing features to complement their long established Austin360 entertainment site and the news site at www.statesman. com. The community blogs and newsreader will focus on twelve topics of local interest, including an upcoming music featival and kids sports, but citizens can start new topics to discuss.
My favorite quote from GM Jim Debth is this one: "This is very new for us and our advertisers, so it might be a while before the blogs create real revenue. But from the start, we're sure this will significantly broaden coverage of big stories, and add real value for readers."

Susan sez: As local newspapers roll out these offerings, it will be interesting to see who does the best job of marketing and execution and how quickly newspaper evaluate how this kind of product fits into their ROI.

(Via MediaPost)

Congrats to my old boss Jeff Jarvis, who has just been named Associate Professor at CUNY and Director of their new media program. Jeff's been working with CUNY on a curriculum since last year, so this is a nice extension of that work--Congrats, Jeff!

So the press is reporting that eBay is about to buy Skype for $2.6B
If that's true, it means that eBay has the following:

• A distributed platform for small biz/merchants
• A namespace/base of over 22 million users, more if you count affiliates
• A micropayments and merchant banking system (Paypal)
• Reputation management
• An integrated IM and VOIP system (if they buy Skype and integrate it)

Very cool.

So, here's the question--Will Google buy eBay? Or Amazon?
I'd like to bet that big war chest goes for platform tools, not media.

The LA Times reports that Yahoo's hired Kevin Sites, one of the first stand-alone journalists and the first blogger to report from Baghdad, to roam around the world and deliver "Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone" a show that takes the hunky newsman around the world and into hot spots crying out for eye witness accounts and cool video/photography. The Times says
"In an Internet-age twist on the nightly news report, on Sept. 26 he will begin filing video, audio and text dispatches to Yahoo News each day and hold live chat and videoconferencing sessions from the world's most brutal conflicts."

So Elisa Camahort sent me a link to an article by BizWeek's Jon Fine on Technorati's wonderous new blog finder product (never mind T's infrastructure problems when you need t to write a wet kiss piece about their general hotness so your magazine can makes people feel like they're inside the bubble).
The lede:
"How excited is Peter Hirshberg, Technorati's executive vice-president, about his site's new toy? We're at a birthday party -- music playing, cocktails flowing, women in slinky dresses -- and he drags me over to a laptop to show off a beta version of Technorati's new searchable blog directory."

Elisa's comment on this piece of breathless prose: What is the message here? This product is so good that Hirshberg is willing to delay the certain orgiastic fucking ahead implied by the very presence of "women in slinky dresses" (snip)...

Susan sez: Given how great BizWeek's Blogspotting is, let's not only slap Fine's hand for being politically incorrect, let's wonder what his editor was thinking by letting not only a sloppy lede, but a whole article that sounds so 1998 slip through into publication.

It is absolutely hysterical for Fine to publish an article datelined September 19 that doesn't acknowledge that these days, for most web users, it is IMPOSSIBLE to reach Technorati 20 out of 25 tries--especially when the CEO of the company acknowledges the problems on his own blog.

Guys, can you try getting it together a bit? Maybe act more like women in slinky dresses for a change?

Om Malik: Vin Cerf at Google =Googlenet. World domination is just the half of it, think geo-mapped ubiquity
Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and how it changed America(Via Travis Smith)
Jeremy Zawodny: Email bloopers, mail merge edition(very funny)
Roland Tanglao: Rupert Murdoch buying AudioBlog is the latest rumour
Ross Mayfield: Blogging Our Social World conference, Cambridge, UK

Bonus:
greg.org: The New Yorker now has RSS feeds.

BioTeams' Ken Thompson has some suggestions on how to hit the road with only a laptop and a cellphone and still stay connected to everything.
His key points:

• Store your data at an ASP service like backpackit.com
• Get web based email (natch)
• Makre sure all access works before you go
  

Ken references an earlier Dan Gillmor piece in the Financial Times on travelling(and Dan should know, man's a world-class globetrotter.) Dan's must-carries:

• Retractable cables, including phone-modem, Ethernet, USB, FireWire and audio connectors.
• A power supply for my computer that plugs into wall sockets and airplane-seat power outlets
• A 80 gigabyte portable disk drive
• USB headset and microphone system for Skype
• Casio Exilim digital camera
• Treo
• Bose QuietComfort 2 audio headphones

What tech tools do you bring on the road? Besides your laptop, that is?

"The hybrid is the signature of our age. It's emblematic of the casualness with which we have established ourselves in real, physical habitats as well as in digital, virtual domains. Nobody planned SMS or citizen journalism in the form of blogging, RSS feeds and podcasting. Their emergence is a hybrid condition that was most certainly foretold by visionary artists and cultural theoreticians, though not by the marketing gurus of the new economy."
-- Gerfried Stocker, artistic director of Ars Electronica, Wired News

If you enjoy the writings of Howard Rheingold and Anthony Townsend, then you will surely want to read Marko Ahtisaari's Blogging Over Las Vegas, an essay/talk about mobility, values and the future. Currently director of design strategy at Nokia, Ahtisaari is passionate, articulate and smart and this essay carries the authority and confidence of an experienced entrepeneur.
A snippet:
"Next year there will be more than 2 billion mobile phone users in the world. Over the last fifteen years the mobile industry has seen amazing growth. Much of this growth has been in the developed economies but increasingly the value is created in emerging markets.Just as it is difficult to perceive the speed of an airplane from within - blogging over Las Vegas - it is hard to fathom the scale of adoption of mobile technologies. We are numb to it. How will we explain to our children that before, when you wanted to call someone, you needed to stand against a wall? "

There's more, all well worth a read...

So I had one of those watershed moments this morning, when I discovered someone I like and work with put quotes from me into a story he published without ever letting me know I was being interviewed, never checking the quotes, and then getting both the quote and the attribution/relationship completely wrong.
Arggh.
I've written and asked for a correction, but I have to say I am amazed that someone I regard as professional would do that. Despite all the slime (about not being journalists) that bloggers have thrown at them, this feels far more sloppy than anything any blogger I know has done.
Gives me a small taste of what others experience, say, weekly?
Ugh.

So we had a BlogHer reunion dinner at my place last night; Elisa Camahort, Jory des Jardins, Charlene Li, Ashley Richards and Maria Niles came over and we talked and ate and drank and talked and talked...and did I mention we talked a good bit?
It was a pleasure to host this crew; we had some great wine and an assortment of cheese, salami, home-made guacamole, and then roasted chicken, roasted red potatoes with rosemary and onions, and a big salad with goat cheese, walnuts and berries. Cookies and more wine for dessert.

Scott Rafer's just announced he's leaving Feedster. Rafer did an amazing job, imho, in taking a small startup and turning it into a successful early stage company--mostly by dint of sheer hard work and perseverance. Best of luck in your new endeavors, Scott, you definitely have a legacy to be proud of.
(Oh, and he's got a new blog over at Wireless Ink.)

I don't know how Steve finds the time, but this should be good--He writes: "Joseph Jaffe and I dropped subtle hints yesterday, but now we're ready to formally announce our new weekly podcast on marketing. It's called Across the Sound. (MP3 enclosure)."

Also, local Bay area CEO/investor Mabel Yee has launched a new blog called Lead Ceo. She writes: 'LeadCEO.com is focused on sharing problems, solutions and ideas that CEOs face....I've always wanted to network within the CEO community to get solutions to problems and leverage more resources, but I didn't have time to do it. I thought, why not create a blog for all CEOs where we can post information, resources and solutions to problems we all faced."
She's one post into it, and building..good luck!

Reuters.com: ?The Wikipedia, which has surged this year to become the most popular reference site on the Web, is fast overtaking several major news sites as the place where people swarm for context on breaking events.?
Reuters says:
"Wikipedia recently attracted 22.3 percent of users searching for information on "Gaza Strip," tying the CIA World Factbook. It has drawn five times more U.S. traffic than Google News, Yahoo News or BBC, according to Hitwise analyst Bill Tancer.

Similarly, in April, Wikipedia tied with CNN.com as the No. 2 most visited site among U.S. Web users searching for details on the new Pope Benedict. Newadvent.org, a Catholic encyclopedia, was the most visited site among people seeking to learn more about Joseph Ratzinger, according to Hitwise data."

Susan sez: We're surely seeing this with Katerina--Wikipedia as a core asset to get definitive information from an always-open, participatory database of info.

Via the always interesting Move the Crowd: Winners of the 2005 Black Weblog Awards:

• Daily Views, Pop Culture, Rants and News -- Blogger of the Year, Best Humor Blog, Best Writing in a Blog and Blog of the Year
• The Heiress Diaries -- Best New Blog
• Crunk and Disorderly -- Best Entertainment Blog
• Brown Glasses -- Best Photoblog
• Rocka Online -- Best Blog Design
  
• Sex and the Second City -- Best LGBT Blog
• Negrophile -- Best Political/News Blog
• George Kelly won the 'Black Blogger Achievement Award'... George runs Negrophile, AllAboutGeorge.com and Blackosphere

Congrats everyone!--AND BIG SHOUT OUT TO GEORGE

The WSJ's got a piece today about how the newer search engines jump through hoops Google, MSN and Yahoo do not, and by new they are talking Technorati, Feedster, IceRocket and BlogPulse.
While the article is light, it's a good introduction if you're not trolling for data in this uiverse and want to get started...or if you need a piece to pass around to less techy friends and colleagues.

Update: Get the real-deal evals on more search engines--in depth--from VC Fred Wilson.

Umair's got a post speculating--and modelling--how the market might value a DIY media web 2.0 user whose all of whose content goes over IP, vs a more traditional Web 1.0 user--and it's a good read.
His conclusion:"Web/Media 2.0 is going to destroy a great deal of value for many incumbents along the value chain. "

Brian Russell: Audio Activism » How to Create Interview Podcasts on the Cheap
Eric Rice: Audioblog has funding to launch in Asia(Via OmMalik)
NPR launches a large Podcast Directory
Ad Age: Dawn & Drew to work for Adam Curry's Podshow Network.
Phonecontent: Mobile, mobile mobile online mag.

USA Today: Pre teens are the new target for cell phone makers--anyone surprised?

Barbara Bush (on the poor left homeless and evacuated from New Orleans): "This is working very well for them."
George Bush: "The good news is, and it's hard for some to see it now, but out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast."
Britney Spears(2003): "Honestly, I think we should just trust our president in every decision he makes and should just support that, you know, and be faithful in what happens."

Ad Age asked some designers to rethink the NYTimes, but what resulted was a dialogue on newspaper products and how they need to evolve. Some highlights:

Pelle Anderson: "The newspapers of the world, and that includes the New York Times, will have to realize that they compete not in a newspapers market, nor in a media market, but in a time market. The core business idea of any newspaper (although the publishers and editors tend to avoid admitting to this) is to deliver a number of readers to the advertisers, or, more precisely, a certain exposure of the ads to a specific audience. The time the readers spend with the papers is the currency the newspapers sell to advertisers, and that time has been steadily diminishing since the '60s. What to do? To just go on producing what to a large extent is an increasingly irrelevant newspaper, like the New York Times does, is not a good idea."

Lucie Lacavaa: " The newspaper of the future will have options for single urban people just as it will have options for families. The same consumer who is getting used to having convenient on-demand options in all their other media and entertainment is also a newspaper reader, so you have to design newspapers to be bought a la carte."

Jeff's got a smart post about the value of netizens planning ahead to coordinate around the next disaster, especially around peoplefinder and identity standards--see People Finder Format, the Katrina PeopleFinder Project (and more on the same)-- that can look across various databases and other data sets.

Jeff's ideas are good, but on a simpler level, I think the best thing to develop is a centralized wiki where people who want to address a problem can go--and everyone *knows* it's a clearinghouse so the spontaneous respondents to a disaster have a designated resource to work from in addition to what happens on the fly.

In my house, Labor Day was always the last free day before school started, but it started as a way to honor the working people--and the unions--of America, back in the day when unions meant something.
For that reason, I was drawn to a Labor Day post by Tom Guarriello at Truetalk Blog, who wrote:
"My parents were both union members. My mother was a seamstress. She started working in the first of a long series of small manufacturing "shops" when she was 14, and immediately joined the ILGWU. When she died a few months short of her 89th birthday, she was still receiving retirement benefit checks.

My father was a Teamster. But, an odd one. My dad worked a lot of different kinds of jobs, but for the last 25 or so years of his life he worked in the cosmetics business, manufacturing cold creams, toilet water and other products for Charles of the Ritz and Estee Lauder. Those plants were Teamster shops, and eventually my dad was elected shop steward.
(snip)
My mom finished the 8th grade; my dad, the 6th. They were the kinds of people Labor Day was established to commemorate: simple, hard-working."

Here's to all of us and the ways --good and bad--that work has changed in the past 50 years--and to everything we each contribute.

Nivi articulates what many are discovering: RSS is a pretty damn good way to build an enclosure to distribute all sorts of content and applications.
In this new platform-driven, disaggregated world we've building, RSS can be the workshorse driver for a distributed network of information and resources.
How cool is that?
Feednation, Feedburner, Pheedo and lots of others are putting the pieces together for feed processing, but there's tons of other work happening as well...
More tk on next-gen RSS efforts and distributed platforms.

P.S. Have you seen Raw Sugar, a social-network and tagging search tool?

National Retail Federation, via Providence Business News: Back-to-college spending is expected to soar 33 percent to $34 billion this year, while spending for kindergarten through 12th-grade students is predicted to be down 8 percent to $13.3 billion.
Techie Diva: Gadgets for the girlz, reviewed by a Knight Ridder reporter, via North Jersey News.
Forbes: Cosmopolitan Magazine to go on radio with Sirius Satellite radio--Can Cosmo podcasting be far behind?

Chocolate Grey, the deanguelo Chronicles: Electic and fascinating takes on news, entertainment, tech and more.
Yan's Glutter: A Hong Kong digerati's opinion journal.
Orato: New site for first person (news) stories--selected by editors and paid to be published (!)
The ColumbiaRecord.com: The State (Columbia, SC) launches community publishing web only site with local experts as bloggers. iUpload's the platform.
AOL Journals launches a Katrina photoblog(Via MagicSmoke)
Eyes on Katrina: See the power of hyperlocal citizen journalism on this informative blog from the SunHerald.

Erin at Dress A Day has some smart thoughts about how to help survivors of Katrina, and she says it's going to be about helping poor people make it through a season of rising gas prices:
"But -- poor people, just as poor as those left behind to suffer in New Orleans, are going to be hit by a gas price hurricane, right where you live, wherever you live.

High gas prices are going to take a big chunk out of the pockets of the people who can least afford it. Rising gas prices are going to mean hungry and cold people all winter long.

So, please, give what money you can to Katrina relief now. But please also make a resolution to give what you can to your local charities, now and all winter long. I've just put a repeating reminder in my calendar on the 29th of each month for the next year, to remember to see what I can give on that day. Call it Katrina Donation Day."

Erin's got a good point--maybe it's time to start saving the cost of those gourmet coffees and muffins and passing it on.

Bonus: Good list of places to give from Go Fug Yourself

Highly amused today to get a newsletter from Design Within Reach announcing their new bedding collection and to see this photo entitled The Modern Workspace--it makes me smile that DWR recognizes folks now work on their laptops--in bed--and yet, doesn't this bed look far more corporate--and orderly-- than any home office--not to mention bedroom?

More from David Geilhufe on a New Orleans/Katrina digital volunteering effort to create one master Missing Persons aggregrated database. David says " We need community leaders that can help coordinate a massively parallel data entry effort so that thousands of volunteers can enter information from message boards across the web without too much duplication of effort. The thing we need to resolve first is how to coordinate such a significant effort."

This is something everyone everywhere can help with...you can give an hour--or more.

To get involved go to http://www.omidyar.net/group/katrinarefugee/news/0/

Also, see the list of survivor sites they are trying to aggregate here.

One of the efforts ongoing in this horrific situation is coordination of missing persons efforts.
There's a new site that David Geilhufe of the Social Source Foundation and others have pulled together at http://www.neworleansnetwork.org/ that has a "people finder" that can aggregate all the data they can get their hands on.
David says: "We need a plan/strategy for massively parallel distributed action....Basically there is all this unstructured data out on the web in forums and message boards. We want to get it in a central database along with the Red Cross database, Gulf Coast News (33k records) and
any other structured data we can find.

The big issue is how and where to coordinate a massively parallel volunteer effort. How do we make sure that four different people don't enter the same five forum entries, creating a massively duplicate database? (some duplication is fine, but how do we minimize?)"

David--and this project-- need help--contact him at david -AT- socialsourcefoundation -DOT- org if you can assist.

Meanwhile, Cyberjournalist is linking to a list of missing person and found lists pulled together by OJR readers in a wiki on the site. There's an authoritative list at the Red Cross, here.

NowPublic is not only posting queries, but has suggestions on how to search for someone missing and how to place a missing notice. Also Andy Carvin has a site here.

My heart goes out to everyone caught up in this disaster, where help came too late and preparedness was sacrificed to budget, with alarming results.

Stephen Elliott, Three Men and a Woman: "Her husband is upset because having multiple sexual partners is one thing and falling in love is something else. She says this is the first time she's fallen in love since meeting her husband nine years ago."
and
"When I first met her I was shocked by her raw physical beauty. I didn't think the fact that she was in an open marriage would affect me one way or the other. I wasn't thinking long term. I had no idea of Angelina's capacity for affection. Some think that love is a finite resource, like food. That love given to one person is love taken from someone else. Others believe that the more you love the more love you're capable of. It's what enables families to have more than one child."

Susan sez: When the NYTimes goes alt., what (sacred cows) are left?

There was no better way to kick off the holiday weekend than drinks in a garden with the TechCrunch guys--Michael Arrington and Keith Teare, the gold dust twins of Archimedes Ventures.
Michael's a lawyer turned editor/entrepeneur, Keith's the former CEO of Real Names, and they're cooking up a whole lotta stuff.
These two guys have some keen ideas they're planning to roll out as Web 2.0 related services and if they can pull them off as described the (blog) world will say wow.
More tk.

Update: I said TechDirt, this morning...that's what comes of blogging before coffee. Sorry.

The mayor of New Orleans, C. Ray Nagin, speaks out (mp3).
Also,a NYTimes quote: "I keep hearing that this is coming, that is coming.
And my answer to that today is ... where is the beef?"

Meanwhile, via ONA, Nola.com and Advance Internet ask for news producer help:
"We need to find skilled producers who want to work for us on a
temporary basis, at first from home, and eventually down in Baton Rogue
(as soon as we stabilize an office location for them), as a part of the
NOLA.com team. I don't have details on what we can offer them in terms
of pay as of yet. We don't have an idea of how long this assignment
will be for,but, depending upon the person, it could be a number of
weeks, or even a number of months.
For info, email jterrito@advance.net"

No question but that the latest disaster has pushed participatory media aka citizen journalism into the forefront. Two firsts--home pages from AOL and CNN touting stories by residents caught up in the malstrom as well, as asking for inputs.

George Bush: ''I think there ought to be zero tolerance of people breaking the law during an emergency such as this -- whether it be looting, or price gouging at the gasoline pump, or taking advantage of charitable giving or insurance fraud. And I've made that clear to our attorney general. The citizens ought to be working together.''

"I don't treat my dog like that--I buried my dog--You can do everything for other countries but you can't do nothing for your own people. You can go overseas with the military but you can't get them down here.'' New Orleans resident, Daniel Edwards, one one of thousands of people stranded at the Superdome with no services and more than one dead body lying out in the heat, quoted in NYTimes.