Susan Mernit's Blog

Oakland Thanksgiving 2

2011-11-22T09:19:00.001-08:00

Oakland Thanksgiving 2, a gallery on Flickr.

Photos from Oakland

The wild trail of Saturday surfing, aka synchronicity surfaces everytime

2008-04-05T07:38:00.000-07:00

So I am sitting here, dog snoring at my feet, devouring Coilhouse.

Reading about the staff--two (apparently) LA Russians (I have been hanging with some Russians, recently), others. Diving into zoetica's flicker stream and blog, Nadya Lev's amazing photos (and blog).

I'm slowly working my way through the pictures, thinking of how my friend Sarah Dopp would like the delicious androgny of some of the images, and I see that one of them has already been selected by Sarah for genderfork , her photo/gender queer site.

And does that mean the the Net is a big place a small place, or just a place? You decide.

(PS And if you are interested in questions of gender and identity, BTW, genderfork is just plan brilliant.)

Department of Brilliant

2008-04-05T07:16:00.000-07:00

Just discovering the amazing photos of Brit Peter Ashworth, and the spiky pleasures of online magazine and blog Coilhouse.net, where I could read and read (and gaze at the super pictures).
If you have to be up wayy too early on a Saturday, these are a consolation.

Quote of the Day

2008-04-05T07:02:00.001-07:00

"New love is like snow: it covers everything up beautifully. Marriage counseling is like shoveling."

--Lois Smith Brady, writing about marriage, compatability and marital counseling in the NYTimes.

Neil Budde goes to DailyMe, news aggregator and start page

2008-04-04T17:16:00.000-07:00

As Paid Content and other report, former Yahoo! news lead Neil Budde's now made public his move to DailyMe, a personalized news startup, as president and chief product officer. This has got to be a global play, as the founder is Eduardo Hauser, former founder of AOL Latin America, another Miami-area based enterprise.

It's tempting to wonder if Budde talked to NowPublic, which reportedly has been auditioning CEOs for at least eight months before landing with DailyMe. Interesting, there was some tremendous talent at AOL Latin America, including Peter Blacker, who is now at Telemundo; it looks Neil is joining a strong and motivated team that knows how to execute (and he certainly will have ideas.)

At his site, Neil Budde, Online News Visionary, Neil shares some thoughts on the new gig:

"I believe that we are still at the early stages of digital news consumption. The ways in which users like you will find, read or watch and interact with news are still evolving and no single approach to meeting your needs will suffice. Being totally focused on translating your needs and interests into an amazing product will make DailyMe the best news destination and a great partner in the news industry."

Susan sez: It's great that there is always someone taking a run at the front door of news, one of the essential starting points for users on the net. Based on part performance, Neil and this team should have some great ideas and visible impact.

Quote of the Day

2008-04-04T06:20:00.000-07:00

"Instead of stressing yourself out and checking Monster.com and Mediabistro and then dashing around the city, try this: simply sit with a cup of chamomile tea in your apartment, read the Want Ads in the newspaper, and circle them with a big red pencil, just like they did back in the 80's before there were fax machines! Your jobless, low-income heart rate will slow in a matter of minutes, and if you recycle the paper, you lessen your carbon footprint!

It's funny because this is similar advice to what I am telling my more, um...globally ambitious friends... when I was at Davos last week. While there, as a keynote speaker, I imparted the wisdoms of Slow Wealth. I taught them how to knit, make windmills, meditate, and have a nurturing sense of patience while they slash jobs and cut back on benefits for their employees."

--from Slow Unemployed, The Underminer, published at Gawker

Susan sez: read The Underminer by Mitch Albo with Virginia Heffernan and laugh your head off between poignant sobs

Via Irina Slutsky)

New blogger welcome: Ryan Kuder jumps in

2008-04-03T21:34:00.000-07:00

Fellow Ex-Yahoo Ryan Kuder just launched his new blog; he's going to use his social media smarts to do consulting and help companies make the new tools work.

Best of luck, dude! Hope it's glorious.

Quote of the Day

2008-04-03T15:54:00.000-07:00

"You only get to lose your virginity once, so choose your venue wisely."

--Wisemeister Dave Winer, reflecting on the TechCrunch40/DEMO head-on, with the additional comments: "Honestly, what both conferences say about the technology industry is that it's way over-supplied with new product. "

New study: Social Networks and Connection vs. Reputation

2008-04-03T07:11:00.001-07:00

Good data from Canadian research firm Pollara, via MediaPost, reporting that adult social media users value the views of experts (think Engadget or Lifehacker) but put more stock in what friends and family think (is this really a surprise?)

The report says: "Of more than 1,100 adults polled in December, nearly 80% said they were very or somewhat more likely to consider buying products recommended by real-world friends and family, while only 23% reported being very or somewhat likely to consider a product pushed by "well-known bloggers."

The shift here, thought, is that social network users are going to look for family and friend comments and opinions online--in a related study, Pollara learned users considered social media channels--whether blogs, social networks, or community forums--important for sharing their thoughts on products, services, organizations, and brands, and that "57% of those 18-to-34 deemed social media tools very or somewhat important for sharing such opinions online" and 59% said SM was very or somewhat important to learn about products, services, organizations, and brands."

In line with these findings, 44% of the users surveyed said they felt that online forums are a reliable source of information--so the wisdom of crowds found in Digg.com and Yelp.com matter, just not as much as what your cousin or office mate says.

Layoffs 3.0: Does going back make sense?

2008-04-03T06:29:00.000-07:00

At least three people I know who were laid off at Yahoo! have either been rehired or interviewed for jobs there. It's been interesting to watch that process and think about the very personal pros and cons of returning to a company that deemed you non-essential, only to offer you a spot eight weeks later.

For one of my friends, there was a chance to manage people and great promises for the future involved; for another, the lure was security and people he already had worked with before; for a third, it's keeping options and benefits after years at the same firm.

For me, returning to Yahoo! right now would feel somewhere between complicated and impossible (no, I don't have an offer). Some of the elements that made me thrilled to join are still there: good people, very large reach, tons of opportunity to capitalize on what they already have. But there's the negatives: A company that might not have planned well in letting me--and so many others--go in the way they did, uncertainity about what can be accomplished as the inevitable acquisition continues to loom, questions about alignment and strategy of the senior teams beyond a piecemeal approach.

And then there's the big one: Is there more, and better opportunity elsewhere? (Obviously, subjective, here.) For me, heads down with my team and my role for so long (except for a side stealth Brickhouse project that never got anywhere), getting laid off was one of those shoves that makes you reassess and look around with new eyes.

On that level, I've seen opportunities beyond Yahoo, whether I accept them or not, that make me think the sturm and drang I feel about the place just isn't where I want my soul to live, and as much as I recall the high hopes I had when I started, there are better places for me to play those aspirations out, some of which I could never have imagined three months ago.

Ian Rogers leaving Yahoo for start up and other changes

2008-04-02T16:01:00.000-07:00

Just saw the news that Ian Rogers is leaving Yahoo! for a music start up and that Karin Gilford will be taking over his responsibilities.

What's interesting to me here is the following:

a) So many great people are leaving Yahoo! and heading to start ups; Yahoo's clearly an entrepenurial starting point at some level.

b) There seems to be a movement toward promoting people who have been there for a long time; according to her LinkedIn resume, Karin G's been at Yahoo, in one role or another, since 2000, the year she graduated from college.

Valleywag's Scott Moore memo (unverified) says that Amy Iorio and Shine will report to Karin, and that Kids, Food and Astrology, which Amy formerly oversaw, will go to Karen as well, whiile Health goes to Michael Yang (at Y! since 2005 and a great guy, we worked together at a past co.) New acquisition Al Warms gets Tech and Education; I know Amy had Tech for a while.

Tea leaves reading on this one: None of these sites are meeting managements' expectations; shuffling to continue. I feel for everyone working their booties off at Big Purple, know your managers have a plan to turn the company around.

Measuring the Techmeme Lederboard and what the stats suggest

2008-04-02T15:42:00.000-07:00

Louis Gray has a good post looking at the past six months of the Techmeme lederboard and which sites have grown in reach as others have faltered. His analysis of the big blogging sites and their increase in percentage of lead stories--TechCrunch in particular--is interesting, as is his noting how "big media" aka News.com and "blogging/indie media" aka GigaOm, intersect.

One thing Louis doesn't examine that I'd like to see him add to this review is the growth--or shrinkage--in reach of some of the solo bloggers--both the ones he calls out like Mathew Ingram, Robert Scoble, Steve Rubel and Steven Hodson, and others who provide more reflection and commentary and less breaking news (yeah, like this blog).

The interest there would be to see how the solo blogger's focus and reach fares as the blog networks get stronger--as online media increasingly fragments, it's as interesting to watch the people in the middle as the ones at the top--at a certain point, the behaviors around who's at the top--and how they scale up--become increasingly predictable. It would be neat to note, however, if that second and third tier get more traffic and reach--or less-because of their association with the big guy's stories.

Looking at VentureBeat's rise in the Techmeme stats as they're fueled by investment dollars suggests a resources=traffic correlation that is worth checking further.

I'd also like to know how much of the big blogging networks traffic is being bought and how much is truly viral or organic. Are TechCrunch, GigaOm, and others seeding their traffic with SEM search terms? And if not, are the big media players going that route? Techmeme doesn't account for marketing, only linking, and yet reader acquisition is always a factor that has to be in play.

Twitter & Friend Feed: The Pleasure of Permissions

2008-04-02T08:50:00.001-07:00

So, when I set up Twitter in earnest a few months ago, I originally wanted to use it only for good friends, people whom I cared "if they brushed their teeth" as I put it to myself. To that end, I made it permissions-based; you have to ask to follow me.

I did the same thing a few weeks ago when I set up friendfeed.

What's been interesting about that is that because I set up a permissions-based system, I have a much livelier and more engaged sense of who is *following* me than who is reading this blog, either here, or thru a newsreader. While I'm basically approving all(except for obvious spam) requests, responding to individual requests means I get to take a second, if I wish, and actually respond to the individual--in other words, I can look at their RSS feed, their FB, their twitter and try to understand if this is someone I'd like to be reading or following as well (and it is, about 50% of the time.)

So, for me, permissions-based following is supporting a greater sense of exchange with new people, and also giving me a sometimes ego-gratifying chance to notice when people whose work I respect, but may not know personally, want to read me(0r at least get the feeds).

And Facebook? Facebook is fast becoming the small, unfocused cousin of LinkedIn--while the tools are great (groups, events, notes); I'm losing my sense of focus of who I am linked to and why--in many ways, it is becoming a huge affinity and social web tickler file for my life, not much more.

Thinking local: Tools, Information vs. Reporting, Objectivity vs. Accuracy

2008-04-01T06:51:00.000-07:00

I am thinking about information vs. reporting, and how communication is power (think about twitter and how intensely it's becoming the drug of choice for the digital, uh, elite inside the bell jar.)

Richard Sambrook of the BBC made a statement last week helped catalyze some ideas I've been thinking about about journalism, blogging, community and sustainability. Richard said (and this is a paraphrase): "In the future, what will matter is not objectivity, but accuracy." In other words, the idea of reporting as a detached and objective priesthood will fall away, but readers will still want and need accuracy in the information they share.

Another way to look at this is that it's not only knowledge that is power, it's the ability to communicate. And how, for those who are not bloggers, do you give them the tools to do so?

I'm thinking about this alot in the context of local and community, in particular.

What are the places where local news, something there isn't always enough of, in print and on the net(especially on the net) can actually be replace by local information? Where citizens can speak instead of journalists or even bloggers? (Not everyone wants to blog, folks.)

In other words, it is enough for an attendee at the school board meeting to file an account, or do you need a blogger or a journalist to do so? And what tools do each of them need?

To put it another way, when I look at some communities--like parts of Oakland--I see that their needs t communicate what's happening there-between the locals and to the greater world--just aren't met by the press. So how could it work in those communities if the goal was to provide more access to tools to spread more information? Would we see social change and improved quality of life? A more cohesive sense of community among particular groups? Between groups?

And how do you support--and teach--accuracy, anyway? Is BlogHer an example of creating vertical niche communities with power? Are there best practices there to transfer to local? Where are the differences?

I am really interested in this question of community, sustainability and value--if you have sites to point to, things you've read that will help me better understand information, news, community on a local or groups level, please post in the comments, or send them my way.

The April Fools Collection

2008-04-01T06:20:00.000-07:00

TechCrunch: Mike Arrington going to sue Facebook over use of his image
jwz: 10th year anniversary--Mozilla first home now back online.
Problogger--Get paid per tweet
CNET: TechCrunch acquires TigerBeat, will rename it CrunchKids
GMail: Be on Time, Custom Time
Google & Virgin airways: Human settlement on Mars (Susan sez: Google is so big it now gets more than one April 1st joke, eh?)

What else has caught your fancy?

April 1: It ain't just laughing

2008-03-31T22:16:00.001-07:00

Today was kind of a tough day; there was a death in the (extended) family, lots of work to get done post weekend, and some hard choices to work through. I'm also getting ready (or trying to get ready) for an out of the country trip next week.)

In many ways, I feel like leaving Yahoo! has brought me to this new inflection point in terms of where I really want to put my time and what I want to focus on.

One way to look at that is to ask "What do I want to work on in the next year and how can I have the most impact?" Another way is to say "What do I want to have accomplished 18 months-2 years from now?" A third is to say "What will most fully use my skills and my best talents to create meaningful product, experiences, business, change?"

Of course, asking the questions is easy; the answers are always guesses when you start, and you hope you don't regret the choices you've made as they become realities, later.

I'm about to make some big choices about what I focus on in the coming year, and like those relationship choices on Facebook, "it's complicated."

(Or, to look at it another way, it's crystal clear and it's just time to stop dancing around and get in line for the future.)

Happy April Fools, everyone. Let me see you keep laughing.

Blogher: New column now live

2008-03-31T14:04:00.001-07:00

The latest Blogher column is up; it's a roundup of some new(er) voices in the sex and relationships arena.

Shine and media: Jason's not quite right--but he is right

2008-03-31T11:06:00.001-07:00

Jason Calcanis has a post today about how the launch of Shine suggests that Yahoo is not taking care of its media partners. Jason's point is that it's crazy for the Yahoo Developer Network to solicit the business of media partners to deliver services (and sell ads) at the same time Yahoo is launching a site that is going to seek advertising from the same sources (like consumer packaged goods companies).

He writes: "Maybe this is Yahoo's plan to save itself? Maybe if the launch media properties and kill off search and the adnetwork they can convince folks they are Newscorp 2.0?"

Couple of responses here--Jason is right in that there is double dipping going on here--Yahoo wants to sell services to the people they are also competing with for ad dollars, but that's nothing new. And not unique to Yahoo--MSN has been selling ads for partners--and filling MSNBC.com with similar ads--for a while, for example.

What is more relevant in Jason's comments. IMHO, is the question of how aligned the senior teams at Yahoo are. One wonder to what extent the Developer Network execs, for example, actually talked to the Media Group exec about how these strategies fit together.

Will Shine succeed? Only time will tell.
Will publishers get pissed off? I doubt it.
Does Jason have a point? Well, yeah, but....not enough to keep anyone up at night.

Shine goes live--Will women rush there or what?

2008-03-31T10:41:00.000-07:00

Yahoo's Shine, helmed by former print editor Brandon Holley, just launched this am, after weeks of beta testing. The goal here, if it isn't obvious, is to create the most compelling start page on the web for women, all ages;to that end it's a riotous tumult of soft lifestyle features with fashion, parenting, home, dating, relationships and just about any other *female* topic you'd see on a magazine news stand laid out prettily on the home page. In other words, there's no finance, instead it's Work + Money; there's no news, there's a cheat sheet on top news items.

It's going to be interesting to see how this site does. On one hand, it's nice to see the multi-year discussions of women and their value to Yahoo (4o million of their users are female)turn into something; on the other hand, I wonder how useful it is to create a site is that specifically is for women, rather than women friendly--and which such broad scale(pun intended).

You see, Shine feels so fluffy that for me, I can't see it becoming my daily start page--in truth, it's so niche, or so mega-aggregator niche--that it feels not that smart, or not smart enough for me, my friends, or any of the women I know to use as the destination site. I think The Huffington Post would be a great site for Yahoo's team to take lessons from--that site is clearly women friendly, carries great news of interest to women and yet isn't a pink ghetto for the home maker (which Shine kinda feels like on Day 1.)

More compellingly, Shine is encouraging female bloggers like Back in Skinny Jeans Stephanie Quilao, to contribute content; in return the site will send traffic back, a powerful reward from the Yahoo Network people powerhose(or is that firehose)? There's also going to be third party content--more girly, girly stuff, of course--from lots of magazine publishers, including Glamour, Epicurious.com, Style.com, InStyle, Cosmopolitan, Harper's Bazaar, Women's Health, and Good Housekeeping.

So the question is-who is going to use this thing? Or who will it take traffic away from (besides Yahoo's old school front page?) Will the women who use PopSugar come over here ? (Nah.)
The HuffPost ladies? (Nah). Blogher women? (Surely not.)

Conclusion: Yahoo needs to cannibalize its own traffic to retain audience it is losing. Will that strategy work to make Shine a success? Only if canned-magazine style content is what women actually want, vs. the true user generated content and authentic voices Shine's audience can find elsewhere on the web.

Susan sez: Get those advertisers in there quick, before the audience dwindles.

Quote of the Day

2008-03-31T10:35:00.000-07:00

"I just write and talk about sex. But every woman on the Internet gets called slutty and ugly and fat (to put it lightly) no matter what; all we have to be is female. In dinner conversation, my friend Lori reminded me of the Oscar Wilde quote, "Give a man a mask, and he'll tell you the truth." I restated it for the Internet, replying, "Give a man a mask, and he'll slit your throat." The application here is, "Give a man (or a woman) an anonymous account, and he'll eviscerate your self-esteem.""

--Author, blogger, columnist Violet Blue writing about how internet trolls, especially those who think porn star ideals comprise what beauty is, screw up women's self-image, sexuality and self-esteem if they buy into that bullwash.

(Susan sez: The whole column is worth a read, enjoy.)

Scott Karp gets $2.7MM for Publish2

2008-03-31T10:20:00.000-07:00

Just heard Scott Karp has gotten $2.75MM in funding from Velocity Interactive Group to build out Publish2, his social bookmarking service for journalists. This is thrilling news for me for two reasons:
1) Scott is a super bright and talented person
2) It's inspiring, proof that the force of an idea and the courage of acting on it can lead to success (not that Richard McManus and Mike Arrington didn't show me that earlier).

A nice quote from Scott:
"I’ve come to see the experience of bootstrapping a company as akin to marathon runners who train at high altitudes, where the air is thin, which forces their bodies to increase the number of red blood cells and improve oxygen delivery to their muscles. Having trained their bodies to achieve a high level of performance with very little oxygen, returning to oxygen-rich sea level can yield significant enhancements in performance.

It’s time now for Publish2 to come down from the mountain."

Scott, this is a race well worth running.

Quote of the Day, and then some

2008-03-30T12:11:00.000-07:00

"There are no more boundary any more between "species." What's a cat is a dog and vice versa. All media is social and all social is media. End of story. Whether content is created by the Pros or the Joes it all has influence, even if it's small."

--Steve Rubel, writing about how all media, these days, is social.

Susan sez: I agree with Steve on this, but it's important t note that while all media is social, the way we access media has completely changed. IE TechCrunch may have rthe authority nce reserved for John Markoff in the NYTimes, but it got that way through the wisdom of crowds, not because Mike had a decent product and controlled or had the best distribution in the region, which was a critical factor in making newspapers succeed. This is a profound shift.

Also, in the past year, we're shifting again, so the influence of friends recommending stories to one another has become more significant--these referrals have shifted from the automated meme of Techmeme to the hand-rolled links that FriendFeed and FB notes offer, among many others.

In other words, similar destinations, different journeys.

Aril 23rd: From MySpace to Hip Hop conference

2008-03-30T00:20:00.000-07:00

It's in the middle of the Web 2.0 Expo, but the conference danah boyd, mimi ito and others put together to share their findings from their McArthur-funded research on youth and digital media is going to be just too good to miss.

Called From My Space to Hip Hop: New Media In the Everyday Lives of Youth--Silicon Valley, CA, it's billed as a public forum on how digital technologies and new media are changing the way that young people learn, play, socialize and participate in civic life.

Here's the link to the free conference.

Getting into growth: StatWatch

2008-03-29T17:10:00.000-07:00

Louis Gray did me the kindness of including this blog in his stats review of well-read tech blogs.
Not surprisingly, but a bit to my chagrin, my blog's the laggard in a fast-growing category.

However, now that I'm one month out of a demanding job at Yahoo!, I've been putting more effort into the blog and would like to see the readers grow--Louis, hope you'll check back in a bit and see how we've grown here.

Coming up: A redesign, more frequent postings, and some news about future directions and interesting things going on.

Questions:News, Local, Community and the future

2008-03-29T16:45:00.000-07:00

A koan of questions:

What makes local community sites successful?
How do news, activism, and information fit together?
Will as many people read as post?
What makes local community sites and services sustainable (Besides the passion of their founders)?
As news media fragments, fails and consolidates (think about how almost all the newspapers in the Bay area are currently owned by Dean Singleton), what will take its place?
What is difference between information sharing and news on the local level?
Are communities adequately served in their need to share information with those who are part of them? Are their opportunities for discourse?
How can online tools empower more people in more communities?
What does empower mean in a local context--are there a set of key behaviors to support?
Revenue and business models--What will fund quality local online news and communities?

Folks, what are the other questions you're asking about local online news and community? What are the best case studies you're seeing? Please post here.

Reflections on Re:Public and the future of information

2008-03-29T13:16:00.000-07:00

Came back from 36 hours or so in LA with the feeling the time had been well spent; Re:Public was an energizing conference for me, with lots of smart people to talk with.
Some of the themes and thoughts that stand out:

Academics, journalists and community organizers all acknowledge that the definitions of news are changing.

Richard Sambrook of the BBC gave a great speech that included the idea that in the future, news will be valued for being accurate, but not for being objective.

Solana Larsen asserted that by 2013, we wouldn't have foreign correspondents parachuting in and out of countries to report news, like we have today.

David Cohen and Paul Steiger each talked about the shifting marketplace for quality reporting and the web as a market disruptor.

Good conference, great people, more thoughts to follow.

Quote of the Day

2008-03-29T10:38:00.001-07:00

“No man goes to IKEA willingly. 70 of us standing around asking, "Why are you getting THAT?"”

--Chris Brogan, via Twitter

Re: Public: Future of News forum

2008-03-28T14:37:00.000-07:00

This is the eight person panel with Jonathan Krim, Solana Larsen, Paul Steiger, Lisa Williams, Dave Cohn, Jon Funabiki, and some others. Folks are talking about the future of news and Krim is saying that publications are more identified with a particular point of view in the future (in his opinion).

Placeblogger's Lisa Williams (flickr slides here) is saying that newspapers are going through the crash high tech went through ten years ago; we're headed to the place where code and news merge.

More of Lisa's list points: Community is shared lived experience; News is a tiny fraction of that experience (Susan sez: This is a critical point).

David Cohn: Right now, news institutions have space that is closed off; I couldn't visit the SF Chronicle, for example. Why can' the business model for news also become more open and distributed? (Susan sez: I adore this guy's ideas.)

Paul Steiger--ProPublica can redistribute content and get the long tail for content, give writers additional reach...Dave says, Yeah, the mantra is how do you take the process of collecting, filtering and distributing information and make them more open and more distributed (ie the new journalism)?

Jon Fubaiki--SF State prof--some ideas around the question "What will be happening to our communities as news changes?" Passion will be an organizing principal for local community news--There are over 200 ethnic media outlets in the Bay area that many people don't see.
In addition to diversity, we're seeing nonprofits and community orgs using journalistic storytelling and narrative to communicate and talk about their work and try to move their communities in certain directions and this is fueling a civic change--align this with ethnic news media and community momenteum and it's powerful and of note. You can expand community to communities of interest as well--religious and spritual focus as well. Alot of the media coming out is more passion driven. (Susan sez: Yep!)

Solana Larsen, mg editor, Global Voices, previously with Open Democracy: (Tells story about needing outside newspeople to talk to locals...) In 2013, there will be no foreign correspondents; we will no longer have this parachute style of journalism where people jump in and pretend they know what is going on, then leave--Well have a world where journalists will understand the language and be able to read the local paper, speak, communicate and be able to give you analysis, along with the local people. If the mainstream media applied some of this to their coverage, it would be better--look at what is happening in Tibet where a CNN correspondent can file a story and never talk to anyone locally--we see the pull there.

David: Solana is talking about a distributed and open news room; it's a false assumption to say opening it is going to result in crap. (Susan sez:I agree and am amused at how nervous some folks are about this...)

Dave Sambrook--We need to evidence-led journalism that isn't based on trade but data.

Brewster Kahle-My enduring hero

2008-03-28T12:40:00.000-07:00

Just learned via NYTimes that Internet Archive & Alexa and WAIS founder Brewster Kahle has arranged for low-income housing projects in San Francisco to get high-speed fiber into the apartments.

The test project is Valencia Gardens in the Mission; Brewster said: "“We are pleased to be the first non-profit organization to bring public housing online. We are excited to see much faster access to the Internet as a way to experiment with advanced applications, and are pleased that the underserved get first access to advanced technology."

Susan says: I met Brewster back in 1993, when I first started to go online, and the work he was doing with WAIS literally changed my life for the better--and made me want to leaving media for technology, especially search. (Of course, the fact Brewster had a letterpress in his kitchen also showed me he got where I was coming from.) In the 15 years since then, the way Brewster has used his success to be a force for good has continued to inspire, this is yet another effort that makes me feel proud to know him--and encouraged to think about I can help make technology more accessible for low income people.

Re:Public: Measuring success in citizen journalism panel

2008-03-28T12:09:00.000-07:00

Jan Schaffer moderating; Margaret Duffy presenting a study on exploring citizen journalism; they discovered the sites often have gatekeepers in the web site builders.

She and her team have built New news media, a beta site to bring together "people who have solutions for community journalism in a networked world."

Next preso is on the Media Habits of Poli-fluentials--Carol Darr and a large team did a study that
assessed the internet audience and showed online users were the most active and plugged in members of their local communities--they promote candidates and causes. This in turn, she says, educated the campaigns and the news media about the wired political influentials and their impact. Her new research loks at the media habits of poli-fluentials and what activities correlate with this label:
More likely to be a poly-fluential

1.46 read daily newspaper
1.92 watch Sunday morning talk shows
1.51 read news and opion in magazines
2.16 watch news of PBS
(translation, these folks are huge news and political junkies)
Other critical behaviors
5.51 pltical schwag on net
7.37 Belonging to local organization
9.12 Advocacy group member
10,.54 Letter to local officials
73.3 Contributing to a political contribution in 3004 election and being an independent

Discussion:
Dan Gillmor: "Where there is no barrier to entry, gate-keeping becomes irrelevant. Bloggers are solo tenants."

Circling back on metrics of success and measuring:
Quoting Jeremiah around posts as an engagement metrics
Measure against your goals

(Susan sez: I am a metrics junkie and this soft, fuzzy stuff drives me nuts.
Here's my 2 cents--want to measure engagement? Now the rest of this is my digression--

Measure some of the following to assess your own site:

time spent on site
frequency of visits
# of names acquired (registrations)
* of content items contributed per user
number of comments overall month to month (track trendlines)
Increase or decline in end of period active users
Number of new users (registrants) added per month

Also assess the following:

Links to your site/posts
Page views
Comments in the blogosphere about your site/posts/content

Many smaller sites don't have the means to do sophisticated click steam data and complicated pathing, but these data points should be within reach with Google Analytics and other accessible metrics packages.

This just in: Newspaper ad revenue plunge below 2001 levels

2008-03-28T11:58:00.000-07:00

Editor & Publisher just posted NAA news that as revenues for newspaper--we're talking print here--have dropped below the lowest levels of the 2001 bust.
Data points from the E&P story:

Online revenue now represents 7.5% of total newspaper ad revenue in 2007 compared to 5.7% in 2006.
Total print advertising revenue in 2007 dropped 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006 -- the greatest decline since the association started measuring advertising expenditures in 1950.
The drop-off points to an economic slowdown on top of the secular challenges faced by the industry. The second worst decline in advertising revenue occurred in 2001 when it fell 9.0%.
Total advertising revenue in 2007 -- including online revenue -- decreased 7.9% to $45.3 billion compared to the prior year.

Susan sez: Is there any way news organizations won't have accelerating layoffs? This seems like another nail in the coffin.

Question: How does the collapse of print revenue models--and those good profit margins--affect newspapers' ability to maintain their core value as investigative news entities as they try to move online? I suspect that we'll see more independent networks for harder news topics spriniging up as news orgs cut back.

Update: Here's data on how the Microsoft brand is dropping as well, via ITWorld:
"According to the CoreBrand Power 100 2007 study, which polled about 12,000 U.S. business decision-makers, Microsoft dropped from number 12 in the ranking of the most powerful U.S. company brands in 2004 to number 59 last year. In 1996, the company ranked number 1 in brand power among 1,200 top companies in about 50 industries, said James Gregory, CEO of CoreBrand."

Re:Public: John Kelly and the network media ecosystem

2008-03-28T11:28:00.001-07:00

"Looking at the *newsroom* of bloggers:
Columbia grad student and smart person John Kelly is describing how his project does statistical analysis on bloggers and clustering/affinities and then links that with attentive clusters to understand information flow and movement within news organizations and the blogosphere--in 5 languages(!) Russian, Arabic, Persian, Scandinavian and English--He's describing the political bloggers in English on both sides, and looking at the values and Middle-East focused bloggers on the right, and then the inside the Beltway, feminist and African-American bloggers on the liberal side. Kelly's project is analyzing the semantic structure of tagging and who uses specific tags--and which tafs are *biased*--via "moonbats" and "wingnuts"; "Milblog" and Islamofascist."

"Unique as a snowflake the shape of each blogosphere has to do with different things."

Susan sez: I would love to get ah his data and see the actual studies; right now, there is so much information being shared it's going past as a set of showy card tricks.

Looking at how bloggers look out at other sites and links--a visual map--the clusters of outlinks and what is linked to--dominate relationships and clusters are revealed and you can see where the linking centers are--this data is great, but the talk is rolling over me a little, other twitters think there are too many small dots on the slides ("eye exam").

Susan sez: I wish John Kelly could tutor me in his stat magic; I love this kind of research. If I got to play, I'd ask him to see if he could build a predictive model of what is viral for specific segments. That floats my boat bigtime.

Finale: He mapped the bloggers and the org--but Miz Squinty here can't see a damn thing.

Re:Public: David Weinberger

2008-03-28T10:14:00.001-07:00

Dr. Dave is up now @Re:Public; Dave Weinberger is one of my heroes--such a brilliant man, and a ClueTrainer, of course; his other two books are marvels as well--Small Pieces Loosely Joined and Everything is Miscellaneous.

Talking about the web, what are the metaphors and frames we use? Let's look for the uncomfortable ones....
The web is an ecosystem--this is a little too comforting

Pro-AM: Passion of amateurs and the partnership between Pros and Amateurs, but money is the vector right, and that's not it at all! The issues are about quality, not $$--disparity is HUGE. Also, this frame is a sports metaphor, ugh.
Info flow: Useful idea, but people don't read news to get information; that's one reason, but the reasons for creating news and reading news are actually different
Abundance: Here's the one to talk about a bit more--Control doesn't scale well, so we end up in a system that has an abundance of both thegood and the bad--we focus on the bad of course--so we focus on protecting people from the bad--but the crap is scary and the abundance of good stuff is TERRIFYING--we don't know how to deal with it!! Way too much! Experts, editors, curators--we started with those people and it worked, but now--hey,we've gone waaay past the front page of the paper--we're now at the place where the front page is our inbox; the recommendations we get from other people, totally unconfined--The new front pages are the mailing lists (Susan sez, and friendfeed, twitter,FB notes, etc...), tags, and so on....There's a huge cost to reducing information to index cards..Waay too much metadata (how true, Susan sez).
The abundance of metadata leads to tagging;then there's a socialization of knowledge--people you know and trust, and then there's the semantic web where you break things down to show the structure of the ideas and meaning in that domain. Dave says the semantic web has been oversold, and yet it allows computers to do some finding and possibly represent knowledge structures....a useful way to add metadata.
hese new tools all affect our understanding of the data they touch--they are all tools that unsettle knowledge; the info is more up for grabs than we thought, more contextual.
We're in this great unsettling of meaning that is now in our face--and which in term leads to needing more transparency and with fallability, because we see the info sources are humans.
So our own Publics are being created in public (Susan: not sure what he means here...)

Susan sez: Dave is soooo good.

Quote of the Day

2008-03-28T10:11:00.001-07:00

"I often tell my wife to plan on having wireless Internet on trips just like you plan on eating on trips because the Web has become such an intertwined part of everything we do. That some services and sites have risen to the top for me doesn't mean I've acquired an addiction, but instead, a preference. Now, I'd prefer people stop calling their newfound digital lifestyle an addiction. It's silly."

--Louis Gray, talking about internet addictions.

(Susan sez: Louis, I am both with you and--addicted.)

More Re:Public--Roberto Suro talk

2008-03-28T09:57:00.000-07:00

Roberto Suro at Re:Public discussing participatory journalism and the journalism of participation, aka democratic governance (Susan sez: this is a good distinction). Suro talks about journalism as a form of social action, knowledge, civic mobilization. "These two concepts of participation are sometimes confused. The act of participating in journalism is not the same as effective participation in civic progresses..if you are weighing journalism's role as a social actor you have to weigh the outcomes, not just the means."

Suro is doing a tremendous job here; this is a powerful talk...but how about where we are right now with how journalism, media, and community are shifting? I want to hear more about that.

Suro is discussing how does journalism fit with civic engagement--do we focus on creating informed elites or mobilizing the citizenry (Susan says: And why not both? I do not think the
elitist gatekeepers" he is discussing are relevant right now to anyone but themselves...those dinosaurs in the elephant graveyard, again...)

Are we really aristocrats or Jacobists? Suro says yes, I question that. Strongly. Broad participation will come because of the tools--look at YouTube--no discourse was needed, there.

Opening session: Re:Public

2008-03-28T09:26:00.000-07:00

Starting up at Re:Public with about 175-200 attendees, many from the non profit and progressive media worlds, many from academia, a few from big media (Guardian UK, BBC), and many from the hyperlocal and citizen journalism worlds. Totally missing in action: big news portals (Yahoo, MSN,NYT, etc), tech platform companies, and trade press (no GigOm, Paid Content, etc.) Of course, this is not about building and flipping media companies, so no one seems to care; the attendees are bright, engaged, and trying to think about the future of news, media, community and information exchange.

Sociologist and Professor Manuel Castells, an expert on identity and USC Prof, is talking about democracy and media and power and how politics and emotions are linked. He's doing an academic rundown of others' research, but I feel removed from his talk, seems very abstract (though now that he is referencing George Lakoff I am perking up). Good quote: "Social movements act on the mind and are cultural revolutions that act on changing the way we think, for example, the environmental movement has transformed our consciousness to let us think we have a relationship with the planet beyond obtaining resources for material well-being." More on how media drives these changes; he's talking about the past 30 years of feminism and pariarchy and says this is a revolution for women, more than for men, and that the changes are profound in how women think about themselves. (His sound bites on feminism are not impressively worded). More on wireless, always on behaviors, mass level of communication systems totally integrate into society. Also, endless capacity for hackers to create new levels of communication that big media has to adjust to.

Noted

2008-03-28T06:50:00.000-07:00

Paid Content: Congrats to Rafat and Stacy on hitting this latest stage of staffing and growth.(Looks like the server might be down.)
Om Malik: What I learned since my heart attack. ("I was reading a review of the Macbook Air over on Macworld when I realized that the machine and post-recovery me have a lot in common.")
Wired: Detailed and absorbing piece on futurist Ray Kurzweil and the singularity (and his medical regime). "Kurzweil predicts that by the early 2030s, most of our fallible internal organs will have been replaced by tiny robots."
Doublebassist Jason Heath has a cool post about using friend feed and twitter. (Via someone whose link I lost, sorry)
David Cohn: On Ryan Kuder's Ning network for Willow Glen.

Quote of the Day

2008-03-27T16:34:00.000-07:00

"According to interviews and recent surveys, younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well — sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one."

--Brian Stelter, writing in the NYTimes on how social media tools are shifting information sharing and distribution.

(Matt Ingram says: the piece "...does a great job of describing how digital “word of mouth” — in other words, social networking of all kinds including Twitter, IM, Facebook and so on — has become a dominant means of news delivery for young people in a way that I’m not sure old geezers like myself quite grasp, no matter how often people describe it."

One brain drain versus another

2008-03-27T15:49:00.001-07:00

Had dinner with a friend last night who is an ex-Yahoo. Heard this week that Matt McAlister and Greg Yardley are both leaving/have left Yahoo (along with about 10 other people I know.)

Just read this in Wired on Googlers leaving the Big G: "Googlers may as well have targets on their foreheads. The nature of recruiting is that you go after the big companies that have been successful. So any company that wants Google-like success is going to try to hire away from Google."

So, do you think it's that recruiters are also calling the Yahoos and hiring them away? (Meow.)

Layoffs 3.0: Big vs, Small, Start Up vs. Your Own

2008-03-27T06:30:00.000-07:00

Six weeks since I left Yahoo! and what a journey it is turning into. As painful as it is, there is something to be said for the forced disruption of routine: I've gotten a renewed sense of how the world sees me and what I really want to do because of this experience.

One of the things I am struggling with now is the buy vs. own dilemma. It's not whether I should acquire a start-up; it's whether I should let a start up acquire me. In other words, what size conmpany do I want to be at and am I better off just doing my own thing? Risk, reward, adventure..they're all in the mix, along with compelling options for teams of colleagues and friends.

I have pretty much resolved that my next focus will not be a another largeco; I love solving probems and shipping software too much to go anywhere where the focus is conservation and small steps. On the other hand, I see both the strengths and weaknesses of doing my own thing--the opportunity is to go for it and have either a success or a well-intentioned failure--but then, on the other hand, would I have that if I joined someone else's start up?

And then there's my interest in working on things that circle back on specific passions: community, tools, local, social networks, search and social search, and, of course, conversion, transactions and the funnel--specialized knowledge I acquired at Personals and want to make use of.

And my interest in blogging; I'll have a new template here, soon, and some very interesting things coming up to write about-more on that later.

Folks who struggled with Your StartUp vs. Someone Else's--how did you make that decision?
What factors drove you? Comments, please.

Blogs: What they're worth--or not

2008-03-26T22:54:00.000-07:00

Douglas A. McIntyre at 24/7 Wall Street takes a run at valuing various popular blogs and explains his methodology for each one. The focus is on traffic and ad revenue.

Here's the list, with some commentary from moi:

The Gawker Media: $150 million. 30 million monthly unique visitors.
MacRumors: $85 million. 544,000 visitors.
Huffington Post: $70 million. 4 million unique visitors per month.
PerezHilton: $48 million. 10.1 million uniques.
TechCrunch: $36 million. 3.2 million unique visitors and 14.6 million page views.
(tied): Ars Technica $15 million. Over 800,000 visitors.
(tied): Seeking Alpha $15 million. 400,000 visitors.
(tied): Drudge Report $10 million.1.1 million visitors.
(tied): Mashable $10 million. 5 million page views.
GigaOm: $8.4 million. 225,000 visitors.
Boing Boing: $8 million. 8.7 million page views.
Silicon Alley Insider: $5.4 million. 200,000 unique visitors.
ReadWriteWeb: $5 million. 300,000 visits but growing extremely fast.
Paidcontent.org: $3.5 million. 134,000 unique visitors and growing quickly.
(tied) Search Engine Land: $2.7 million. 225,000 unique visitors.
(tied) Smashing Magazine: $2.7 million. 325,000 visitors.
DListed: $2 million. 350,000 visits.
Daily Blog Tips: $1.8 million. 20,000 visitors.
(tied) Techdirt: $1.5 million. 400,000 unique visitors.
(tied): Neatorama: $1.5 million. 300,000 visits and growing very fast.
(tied): BuddyTV $1 million is too much about television. 800,000 visitors.
(tied):The Superficial $1 million. 522,000 visits last month, but dropping sharply.
Talking Points Memo: $860,000. 233,000 visitors and rising fast.

Susan sez: I love the deep dive done on each property, but I have some problems accepting these valuations when I know how much trouble many blogs have in getting decent advertising revenues--and how much run of network gets sold for a dollar or less in CPM, and even less in CPC.

If a magazine site with 4 million targeted uniques often has trouble selling out more than 40-50% of its online inventory, what does that say about something like The Superficial or PerezHilton?

Tech vendors may snap up space on TechCrunch, but I don't know that Neatorama, for example, is selling its inventory out, and if that's the critical piece of the valuation, I have to say hmmmnnn, is this hype or what?

Matt McAlister going to Guardian UK

2008-03-26T22:13:00.001-07:00

Jemima Kiss has a story about Matt McAlister heading off from Yahoo to work at the Guardian, UK. Matt's going to lead a new developer network and make more of their data and APIs available for use by developers.

Susan sez: This is very cool and a great fit for Matt--smart move on the Guardian's part.

Like wow, Progressive Strategy Brain goes live

2008-03-26T07:37:00.000-07:00

As someone who is both interested in progressive movements and in mind-mapping and concept-mapping software, this note about a new map from the Progressive Strategy Studies Project of the Commonwealth Institute in Cambridge, Mass got my attention.

Made with The Brain, it's a visual organization and map of the American progressive strategy within the broader context of progressive politics. The creators says "It includes, but is not limited to, individuals, organizations, issues, concepts, and ideas. "

Susan sez: Neat.

WePlay: Community for kids, parents, teams

2008-03-26T06:28:00.000-07:00

Mike's got some sharp words for WePlay, the kids sports network community play that just raised some new funding. He says that kids aren't actually going to want to be on pages their parents control, pointing out "...Ah, but kiddies are going to want to social network on a site that their parents are using to manage the team, and not MySpace, Facebook, ClubPenguin, Habbo Hotel, EA-Land, Bebo, Friendster…."

Thing is, being a local athlete is alot like using a dating site or a job site--people add a unique identity on a site like this because it allows them to focus on an aspect of their persona specific to that thing--the teen self on MySpace and the up and coming athlete on WePlay are two very different aspects of the same person.

In addition, when founder Steve Hansen says "“Two hundred forty million people in America are one degree of separation from youth sports. Youth sports is held together by e-mails, phone calls and clip boards," he is right. As a former local & community news person, I've seen this same truth.

The McCain Girls: Is this satire, hope so

2008-03-25T10:17:00.000-07:00

Tell me this is serious...just can't be.

Finding the bliss in bickering: New column up at Blogher

2008-03-25T07:48:00.000-07:00

My new column went up at Blogher last night.

Fast Company on AOL: Dead Man Walking

2008-03-25T06:52:00.000-07:00

Fast Company is truly re energizing itself and this article on AOL is excellent. One of my favorite quotes:
"Neither Time Warner's now-CEO Bewkes nor Falco or Grant would agree to speak with us. But in extensive interviews with dozens of current and former AOL insiders (many of whom would speak only on background), what emerges is a tale of failure on multiple fronts: short-term thinking, bad technology, bungled product development, a dramatic miscalculation of what drives page views on its own site, and a risk-averse culture more prone to imitation than innovation. "Pretty much everything we worked on," says a former AOL manager, "executives pointed to someone else's product and said, 'We want that.'"

Assuming this is true, AOL isn't the only wanna-be company out there, but clearly, copy cat strategies are fatal.

The other quote with lots of relevance: "At the simplest level, AOL's troubles in the past couple of years are the story of a business without a vision and therefore without guiding principles to clarify which risks are worth taking -- and which are worth sticking to."

Update: AOL's reinvented itself several times, but it a case study in missed opportunities and arrogant senior managers and civil servant like rank and file, both persistent problems--this piece does a good job on ringing the changes on why reinvention is so difficult.

Quote of the Day

2008-03-24T07:54:00.000-07:00

"The recruiter scheduled a phone interview and gave me advice about how to prepare for it. First, review algorithms, data structures, and Big O notation. Second, read the Google papers on the Google File System, Big Table, and Map Reduce. I didn't mention to the recruiter that the first part, the "review" of algorithms, data structures, and Big O Notation, wouldn't be a review for me; it would be my first formal study of those topics. I was a liberal arts major, Ancient Greek and Latin (an armchair adventure). If I were to be around hard-core computer science majors discussing algorithms and data structures in precise academic language, it would be like me being among the Eskimos, with their many words for snow, me having just a few terms like "snow", "slush", and "powder".

I understand the concepts and apply them daily, but I don't know the words for them. I don't know what the concepts are called. For example, although, I've learned to call a big array that only has a few of its slots ("slots"?) filled in a "sparse" array, I don't know what to call an array where each element is a linked list. I bet there is a formal name, but I haven't learned to speak that language. And I can't read or speak Big O, even though I have experience applying the concepts that Big O notation is used for. My software development skills are solid, but they are ... rustic."

--Corey Trager on his Google interview.

(Susan sez: Read the comments on this piece, they are priceless.)

Note: More Google interview stories here, here, here and (kinda) here

Twitflit: Managing the morning ritual

2008-03-24T06:19:00.000-07:00

So my new thing is to get up, hit FriendFeed, then twitter, then facebook, then TechMeme, then my gmail, then the NYTimes. On the way through this process, I'm making del.icio.us posts (I am turning into a big user, finally), thinking about items to blog, and laughing my head off occasionally.

Noteworthy items here:
1) Look how social information gathering has become with our cool new tools.
2) Look how much more discursive it is. I am long past the efficency of caring what was on the front page of Google News, the NYTimes or anyportal.com. My news is contextual and it takes much longer to absorb.
3) Email has gone down the list because it now carries only personal messages, not news (and because I have always on email on my Blackberry, so there's less of a time gap.)

Observations:
1) 'm doing great on the news through friends and experts filter, but is there a way to get top news headlines without having to get a NYTimes tweet (ugh?)
2) Commenting becomes another way to leave a foot print, as on friendfeed (a favorite feature there.)
3) Matching and referral happen slowly and organically as I see friends of friends posts on FF; would the experience improve if there were people matching/attribute matching tools to speed it up?

Update: Josh Kopelman has a related question: How do all these social feeds scale? Is it a dashboard, simple user selection or wha? (Susan sez: I have an idea..Josh, am writing you.)

Quote of the Day

2008-03-23T19:33:00.000-07:00

"How do I deal with email now? I scan the from and subject fields for high payoff messages. People I know who don’t waste my time, or who I have a genuine friendship with. Or descriptive subject lines that help me understand that I should allot a minute or more of my life to opening it and reading it.

A journalist recently complained in a comment on another blog that he sent me multiple emails asking me for an interview, which went unanswered. But an email that he sent later suggesting some drama between AOL and Yahoo was instantly addressed. He was a little angry about that, which I understand. But what he doesn’t understand is that when I see an email asking for an interview, my brain says “this is not urgent, deal with it this evening,” whereas the possible breaking news has to be dealt with right away."

--TechCruncher Mike Arrington, describing how he prioritizes the communications messages that bombard him.

Susan sez: The important thing to realize here is that many people, not only those as well-known as Mike, are hit with multiple information streams requiring responses--Mike's post is great in that it explains a somewhat reactive way of functioning that is common when you are time challenged.

Congrats, Diane Cole!

2008-03-23T14:24:00.000-07:00

Congratulations, Diane! My old friend Diane Cole and her new husband Phillip Barrett, are profiled in the Sunday times on the occasion of their marriage. Reading the story of her relationship and re-marriage is just lovely.

YouTube Music Sunday: TerraNaomi

2008-03-23T11:08:00.001-07:00

Found this really lovely singer on YouTube this am (while looking for Amy Winehouse).

Loving this: Quote of the Day

2008-03-22T17:49:00.000-07:00

"Emblematic of this diversity as I hung out with old friends and met new ones, I was struck over and over by how many people had multiple business cards -- i.e. multiple lives and multiple identities. How many people could not define themselves in a niche and how many people took vacation time to attend SXSW - even if the web is part of their day job. This is because SXSW [and by extension the Web] is something very personal to them."

--Deb Schultz, writing about the people and the energy at South By Southwest, via Thomas Van derwa

What's Next: Building the Path

2008-03-22T09:17:00.000-07:00

Part of figuring out what's next for me involves lots of talking with other people. It's amazing how spending time with someone with whom you have shared interests/experiences can help create a plan for what's next.

In the past week, I've spent time talking with a range of people, including Dave Cohn, Dan Aronson, Sol Lipman, Valerie Cunningham, and Tara Hunt; even though not all those conversations were about what my next steps sh/could be, each discussion contributed to what is turning out to be a path.

There are so many more people to talk with, and things to focus on coming together, it's like making lace, or piercing together a puzzle, and it's ever-evolving and interesting.

Quote of the Day

2008-03-22T06:34:00.000-07:00

"The average MIT graduate wants to work at Google or Microsoft, because it's a recognized brand, it's safe, and they'll get paid a good salary right away. It's the job equivalent of the pizza they had for lunch. The drawbacks will only become apparent later, and then only in a vague sense of malaise.

And founders and early employees of startups, meanwhile, are like the Birkenstock-wearing weirdos of Berkeley: though a tiny minority of the population, they're the ones living as humans are meant to. In an artificial world, only extremists live naturally."

--Y Combinator's Paul Graham, writing an essay called "You weren't meant to have a boss"

Ellen Spertus at Google sponsored Girl Geek Dinner

2008-03-20T14:06:00.000-07:00

Forgot to post this; Ellen Spertus' piece is priceless, amusing, brilliant--starts about 2:15 minutes in.

Bridge of Sighs: Is gender balancing stupid, or what is Google thinking?

2008-03-20T13:39:00.001-07:00

Just read a post at kottke.org pointing out that the upcoming Google developer conference has 38 male presenters and one woman. Jason also points out this is no better that the conference track record in 2006/07 for rations of women to men.

Back in the day, when I was a freshly scrubbed writer/editor/not quite a web developer yet working at Scholastic in NYC, we were taught that it was good business practice to have your development teams reflect the audiences you were creating for. Despite the fact Google has Ellen Spertus, does this mean that they are only building apps for men?

Surely not--and yet doesn't this speaker lineup send the messages: A)Google doesn't have enough accomplished women developers to send any to this conference; B) Google doesn't care about supporting women developers, or they'd understand that any group needs to see their reflection to feel included (and I am not even going to start on the lack of reflection for people of color, etc.)

Google is great at supporting GirlGeek dinners and other external events--isn't anyone there working with their own teams so they are a little smarter about all this?

Guys, wake up!

(Thanks, Viv iane)

Facebook: 10 months and counting(down)

2008-03-20T07:50:00.001-07:00

So I've been using Facebook for 10 months. I have over 1,000 contacts and I get about 10 emails a day there, half from people I know, the rest from groups and events and from people I do not know. 6 months ago, I logged into Facebook 4-5 times a day; it was my take a break at work for a few secs guilty pleasure. My particular delight were the status updates.

In the 1o months, I have also added and actively use twitter, del.icio.us, and the new FriendFeed.

Of course, that means I use FB less. It also means that what I said earlier, that FB was going to train millions of users to use social networking tools--and then watch them leave for more disaggregated services--just like users left AOL for the web--is proving true.

What's interesting to me, here, is that the biggest behavior-changer is FriendFeed. Because I have made my del.icio.us posts, my blog posts, my flickr stream, my tweets and so on visible on FF, anyone who is really interested in watching my information flow can see it all rolled up there. This means that my interest in and perceived need to do link roundups on my blog (Noted), and to post flickr updates dials down to, well, almost zero. Suddenly, there is a tool that is aggregating my social graph data for me, in a way I can control(you have to ask to get my feed).

This makes Facebook much less compelling (though I still value the Notes, Events, and access to email and birthdays). My biggest use of FB these days is on my mobile phone; I browse as entertainment while in line, or at the airport, once I've read through all my emails.

It also seems like others' updates to FB are much less frequent; the bright, shiny new toy aspect is gone and friends are rushing off to other tools, other experiences. At the same time, people who are not as embedded in the bleeding edge are coming on; two of my relatives joined recently, and the SO's siblings are also there (good validation of the mainstream value).

What's next? FB will continue to be on my active list, but it's moved from 1st position to 4th, with FF, twitter, techmeme still ahead of it as critical information sources.

And my newsreader? If it was a toaster, it would be unplugged and getting dusty.

Quote of the Day

2008-03-20T06:47:00.000-07:00

" I can say that, from what I’ve observed so far, these are things that computers can do for us, to make the social computing experience more humane, should we establish simple and straightforward means to express a basic list of contacts between contexts:

help us find and connect to people that we’ve already indicated that we know
introduce us to people who we might know, or based on social proximity, should know (with no obligation to make friends, of course!)
help us from accidently bumping into people we’d rather not interact with (see block-list portability)
helping us to segment our friendships in ways that make sense to us (rather than the semi-arbitrary ways that social networks define)
helping us to confidently share things with just the people with whom we intend to share"

--Chris Messina, writing about average users, semantic data, portable contact lists, Facebook, and yes of course, data portability as neccesities for supporting seamless online interaction.

More thoughts on Mike's blogging biz post

2008-03-20T06:03:00.000-07:00

Mike's post on the big revenue opportunities for star bloggers and their blogging networks--and the related shift from nice and friendly to playing to win has alot of truth to it--witness the immediate responses from other blog entrepenurs mentioned in his post, like Rafat Ali and Henry Blodgett.

What's most interesting to me here is how, in just three years, blogs have eclipsed big media in many categories as the dominant media entities online. There is no question but that the lower-costs of developing media on the web are leading to powerful returns.

And yet, the very affordability of developing media on the web means that it's a competitor's game--there is perpetually a better mousetrap to be built. In the tech world, this means the rise of GigaOM and Read/Write Web and Mashable against TechCrunch and Paid Content; in the popular culture world this means the PopSugar blog and the AOL-owned TMZ beating down both Entertainment Weekly and Perez Hilton.

Or, to put it another way, is it possible to put a high valuation on a property that has almost no embedded switching cost?

What does paying big bucks to acquire blog media networks do for anyone who has the brains to built it themselves (which means only old media companies, phone companies, wanna be media companies, dot com millionaires, radio station companies and holding companies would consider such acquisitions)?

I like the idea of big ticket tech blogs aligning to take advantage of the network effect; it's smart, but the truth s that the media business is tough and audiences are fickle, no matter how cool you are.

Update: I wrote this last night, but decided to read it again before publishing; meanwhile Kara Swisher wrote an amazingly funny take off on Mike's post.

Update 2: Sweet post by Kumbaya Scobelizer; the nice Robert who remembers bloggers as community.

(Another delicious) Quote of the Day

2008-03-19T16:34:00.000-07:00

"If I see another business plan for a social network, I might blow my brains out. It seems like 2000: Everything is the next big social network, even though no one has figured out a real business plan for that yet."

--Barry Schuler, ex AOLer and managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, , quoted in a CNET article on a panel discussion at the Dow Jones Web Venture Conference this week.

Quote of the Day

2008-03-19T08:50:00.000-07:00

"...Well, all this money flowing into the blogosphere is disrupting the complicated and emotional, but also stable way things are done. Bloggers with money and employees and health care programs and boards of directors and shareholders have to play politics with a whole new group of people, splitting them away from what they do best - Fighting the Blog War. Their behavior can become erratic as they have to decide to tone down their writing to get a certain type of sponsor on board, which in turn lets them make payroll. Investors want to see growth, so more and more blogs are launched, but perhaps without the right talent to grow it into a long term business.

In short, I believe the money is being, for the most part, wasted."

--Techcruncher Mike Arrington, at the end of a superb post explaining how the collapse of big media, the shifts in capital investments in blogggers as media, and the evolving business cycles of growing blog media companies are shifting old-style blogging culture.

NYC Gov Paterson tells media and public he strayed-as did is wife

2008-03-18T19:29:00.000-07:00

NYTimes article on how new NY Governor Paterson was sworn in, then promptly held a news conference, wife at his side, to disclose the other relationships he--and Michelle Page Paterson, his wife--had had during their marriage.

"“I didn’t want to be compromised, I didn’t want to be blackmailed, I didn’t want to hesitate taking an action because the person on the other end might hurt me or my family. I just thought this was the time to come forward and reveal this.”

Susa sez: Is this a new openness that will lead to more discussion about common behaviors we lie about and pretend don't happen--or an effort to stave off more harm from a conservative media and society?

Quote of the Day

2008-03-18T13:22:00.001-07:00

"We are in the middle of a disruptive change in the media landscape brought on by two-way interactive media. No longer do we simply rely on the New York Times for national news, Dow Jones or Bloomberg for business news, Ziff Davis for technology information, or Entertainment Tonight for the comings and goings in Hollywood. Instead, or in addition, we go to Huffington Post for politics, Seeking Alpha for stock news, TechCrunch for technology news, and PerezHilton for the latest in celebrity gossip. What do Huffington Post, Seeking Alpha, TechCrunch, and PerezHilton have in common? They are all blogs. And, blogs have become a significant part of the media landscape. This is a big deal. It’s the democratization of the media landscape. But, it’s not completely democratizing because only a small percentage of people will dedicate the time and energy it takes to blog and build a sizable and loyal audience."

--Fred Wilson, VC, writing about a new commenting system he's investing in.

5 years of blogging=design facelift TK

2008-03-18T11:06:00.000-07:00

And yes, I'm well aware the interface for this blog is both ugly and more than five years old.
And I am (finally) doing something about it.
Like, now.
More on the refresh as it gets more real; seeing first designs tomorrow.

Blog birthday: 5 years of blogging, tomorrow

2008-03-18T08:04:00.000-07:00

As of tomorrow, I will have been blogging here for 5 years.
(WOW)
To be (somewhat) precise, that is 4,548 posts.

And, I think, about 3,000 readers a day (but I tend to ignore these kinds of stats, in truth, because I am going to write here anyway.)

Back in 2003, that first post, the first fellow bloggers I ever linked to were Xeni Jardin and John Parres. I'd recently left AOL and was working on a piece called Kevin Sites and the Blogging Controversy, which addressed the issue that CNN had an *embed* in Iraq with a blog they weren't supporting, but which was more vibrant than their coverage.

The quote about this from a friend/news exec at CNN at the time was:""CNN is interested in a more structured presentation of the news than blogging offers. We will present online photo galleries, brekaing news stories, video and text as a way to give our audience immediate access to new about the war in Iraq"--and they promptly told Sites to take the site down or stop publishing here (as I recall, CNN may not have know about the site till I mentioned it.)

Nice intro to the power of blogging, eh?

(And in the interests of highlighting synchronicity, my next set of blogging links, the following day, on March 20th, 2003, were to a student blog at UC Berkeley that two grad students were doing on digital copyright. The two students were named Mary Hodder and Eddan Katz, and of course, both of them have gone on to do great things..And Mary has become a valued friend.)

So, it's been 5 years. 5 years of change on every level. 5 really good years.

Thanks to everyone reading this blog and others I write, the friends, family, colleagues and community that keep it meaningful, and interesting.

And here's to the next 5!

Blogher column now live

2008-03-18T06:59:00.000-07:00

My latest column at Blogher is live, and it's called Living Past Pain; what I learned from Reading Stephanie Quilao; she has great words about working your way out of emotional trauma.

One quote from her:
"You can try to bury an emotionally painful event like this, but it will never stay buried. It will fight its way to come to the surface, and if you choose not to deal with it, the pain can only be silenced with vices like drugs, alcohol, promiscuity, porn, gambling, eating disorders, cutting yourself, shopping beyond your debt, working 80 hours a week, or any other vice you can get our hands on to feel anything but the pain. Every day, you become more and more detached from your body."

Valleywag: What does it mean when?

2008-03-17T17:36:00.000-07:00

--Jackson West, an old friend and fellow traveller of sorts, goes to NYC to finish school, comes back to San Francisco, and goes to work for...Valleywag?

Be afraid, very afraid...Nick and Owen are moving up from yellow journalists (sorry, folks) to the red diaper crowd.

PS: With Jackson AND Melissa on board, I'd like to think staff meetings just got a whole lot funner, even in the virtual space.

Quote of the Day

2008-03-17T10:45:00.000-07:00

Vin Crosbie describes what is Web 1, 2 and 3.0:

"...The first is when people in a community wonder what's happening when they hear their town's firehouse alarm ring. The Web 1 solution is to publish a professionally reported story, with audio, video, and text, once the alarm is over. The Web 2 solution is to provide a forum for citizens in the town to speculate immediately about what's happening. The Web 3 solution is to do all of those things, plus wire the town's 911 response reporting systems to local media companies' or the municipality's Web sites so people can immediately and accurately know what's occurring."

Susan sez: Web 3.0 is where it's at, of course but till we make the APIs and widgets simpler to use, these capabilities belong to those with the cash for developers.

(Via Daniel X O'Neill)

Noted: Yahoo talk

2008-03-17T07:46:00.001-07:00

Mercury News: "How Yahoo! lost its way"--A look back at Yahoo! through the years, with a focus on mistakes, missteps and weaknesses. "Upper management was plagued by cronyism. Even when new ideas got a green light, the projects were starved of resources. There were too many people with inflated titles, too many business units and too little cooperation among them."

Read/Write Web: Richard likes Yahoo Buzz. Alot. "While digg has been desperately trying to make itself into a mainstream social news site - and it has succeeded to a degree, as its frontpage now includes politics, entertainment and other non-tech stories - it hasn't got anywhere near the punch that Yahoo.com still packs."

Search Engine Land: Quotes the Portfolio interview where Google's Eric Schmidt says a Yahoo-Microsoft merger is "bad for the net:" wonders if there is any way to avoid merger, concludes: not.

Women in Tech: Steve Hodson gets it wrong; Louis Gray gets brownie points

2008-03-15T14:56:00.000-07:00

I was kind of thrilled to see Louis Gray jump in with a lovely and honest post and say "I'd like to read more women bloggers," and kind of distressed to see Steve Hodson point to Stephanie's Quilao's powerful posts on sexual discrimination and feeling denigrated because of her appearance/gender as evidence that there are fewer female bloggers, or women in tech, because those mean old sexist men just make it too unpleasant for them.

From my perspective, while Steve probably means well, that assumption is on a par with saying women don't become doctors because the mean old physicians and all that messy, red blood just drive them away. Like, ugh.

Steve says: "We as a society like to propagate the whole equality line but the reality is that there is no equality for women unless they have nice legs and big tits. No matter how as males we would have the world believe otherwise the fact is we continue to look on women as sexual objects and nice decorations to have around the office and make unwanted passes at."

WTF?

This is the biggest line of bullshit anyone supposedly sympathetic to women has thrown in a while.

Steve, let me try to break it down for you:

Sexism hurts men and women both, and is bad for business
A few assholes don't define everyone
Pointing to problems that need to be resolved and saying, as you seem to be doing, "Oh, these problems mean that this is just how things are and we need to understand that," doesn't create positive change, it just justified keeping things as they are.

Honey, if you think women are less involved with tech because Kathy Sierra got death threats, you're not dealing in reality here.

My suggestion is you stop lumping all men and all women into absolute groups and realize that there are male feminists, women chauvinists and the rest of us in the middle, trying to do the right thing and learning as we go along.

Drilling down on local: East Bay focus

2008-03-15T08:53:00.000-07:00

So one of the things I am doing is thinking harder about local sites and services. I'm interested in learning more about who's publishing community sites in the Bay area, particularly in the East Bay, and in understanding what tools they are using and what the most visited sites are.

I'm curious about the platforms people are using, what kind of tech skills they need to have to get their local sites up and running, what the most sustainable mix of content and services is, and if there are linkages between any of these sites and local media properties like weekly papers, newspapers, radio stations and so on.

Diving into Oakland and the East Bay as a microcosm for that exploration, interested in talking with people about their experiences creating local sites, neighborhood community sites, local blogs, local take action sites, and so on...especially in Oakland, but anyone with good stories and lessons learned to share.

Please leave comments here or email me if you have pointers for sites to look at or have time to chat. Thanks.

Layoffs 3.0: What I want to do right now

2008-03-15T08:22:00.000-07:00

So, it's been almost 5 weeks since I left Yahoo. What a journey!

What I have learned about where I want to focus
When I started off, I was very focused on wanting to have security, which I saw as a new job, similar to what I'd had before. In the 5 weeks, I've moved to a new point of view: my goal is not to maximize my security (and do something interesting); my goal is to maximize my opportunity--and that means avoiding jobs that are secure but not particularly interesting; or, to put it another way, I need to focus on work that engages not only my very pragmatic, loves to see results/execute/get it done side of my brain, but the creative, opportunistic, somewhat disruptive part of my brain--the paradigm shift/changemaker energy I enjoy so much.

How this is playing out
What this means is while I am open to the (right) staff role, I'm seeing myself doing more work with start-ups, emerging companies, and change-making business and products. I've got to focus my energy on things where my skills can have real impact, not just chip away at incremental improvements--been there, done that. I've learned so much in the past 3 years, and I want to use it all, dammnit.

Consulting + Startups + Writing+ Social Action=My life right now
So, I am definitely going to start looking for actively for consulting and project work.
I'm interested in working on:

Marketing, user experience, and product development
Branding, brand positioning
Creating and extending platforms, particularly around publishing, community, blogs--tool sets and software continue to be a huge passion
Conversion and acquisition: I didn't become an expert in conversion and the funnel just to put is aside--this is amazing stuff, and so focused on the bottom line
Social software, search, and Web 3.0 widget type product development and projects
Social media support: helping companies select, install and use social media tools
Editorial programming/direction--both for events and for web sites/services; Relationships & dating, women, lifestage products, fashion, style, travel and so on...that editorial eye is still there, just meshed with a tech developer's experience.
Writing & blogging: Planning to do lots more, ping me if you want to hire me to do some writing/blogging for you; we can discuss.
Doing good: Always a percentage of my time goes to supporting social change; right now I am very interested in local community efforts, particularly in the East Bay.

So, if you have ideas/work/opportunities...let me know. I am feeling very energized.(And thanks).

Start ups
And of course, there are the start up ideas...this is the fun part.

Flying To Chicago, anyone around this weekend?

2008-03-14T07:21:00.001-07:00

Heading out to Chicago...

What does it mean to follow? The digital footprint

2008-03-13T16:52:00.000-07:00

In a recent post about VC Will Price's decision to leave his venture fund to helm a startup named WidgetBox, Mike Arrington says "If you want to follow Price’s regular updates, his blog is here".

Reading this, it struck me that the very concept of following someone, rather than reading them, is very tied to this next generation of social media that Friendfeed, Twitter, and to some extent Facebook and flickr and other slightly older SM services, embody.

Follow is the phrase Twitter uses, and it means to follow someone's tweets--but what it really means is to watch their updates of what they are doing in (almost) real time. Extending this in Friendfeed means that people who follow me there can see my almost real time updates to whatever set of services I choose to aggregate--my blog, del.icio.us links, flickr stream, upcoming events, tweets, FB status--and any set of the other 24 or so applications I can choose to allow people to track me on.

In other words, if I choose to allow it (or if I promote it), others can *track* or follow my digital footprint on the Net, almost in real time--every step I take that creates content (as opposed to creating clickstream data) can, theoretically--be held up, viewed, and shared.

What's prompted this chain of thought is the (to me) large number of people requesting my friendfeed, many of whom I do not know. I'm interested in what's pushed this; my sense is it isn't actually my postings on my blog, or at Blogher--I think it's actually the posts that I and others wrote about my layoff, which turned me, for some people, into an interesting *story*--I have no way of knowing is that is true, but I wonder if it is.

Or, to put it another way, *following * people can mean not only do we have better access to people whose thoughts and words and images we find valuable, we can also track people whose lives we find interesting, or whose personalities we find engaging --and that's a new sort of digital footprint that searching for someone's name in a Google search.

Following people also allows the kind of vicarious celebrity-gazing of the not truly famous that's become a staple of reality TV and celeb gossip; a continuing chronicle of the activities of a (supposedly privileged) few, whose lives the rest of us can either aspire to, or enjoy at a remove. (Is there any other way to explain the huge followings that Scoble, Calcanis, and Mark Cuban have--people rush to have a look at the publicly lived lives of Internet-famous entrepreneurs--so they can both experience and hopefully learn from their hot rush of success (which took talent, focus, and hard work...no question there.)

So, is this a high horse? Am I both allowing people to follow me and disdaining others' interest in my digital footprint? Not.

For me, it's more a fascination with how our world is changing, and how our culture's move from reality TV to user-generated content and sharing online is generating new ways for us to entertain and educate one another...."following" someone being a new one.

Another quote of the day

2008-03-13T08:15:00.001-07:00

"WordPress is 100% open source, GPL....WordPress did 3 major releases last year, we’ll do 3 major releases this year. Along the way thousands of people will contribute, as well as every employee of Automattic. What we build will be greater than the sum of its parts because we’ve been a community and open source from the beginning, and always will be."

--Wordpress founder and leader developer Matt Mullenweg, diving into the SixApart foray on WP users, with gusto.

Susan sez: Worth reading the whole post to see Matt push back to protect his base.

AP consolidates digital/web units; Sue Cross promoted

2008-03-13T08:10:00.000-07:00

Paid Content reports that the Associated Press is consolidating its management groups; as part of that, Jane Seagrave, currently VP of AP Digital, who becomes SVP for Global Product Development; Sue Cross, currently VP of U.S. newspapers online, who becomes SVP of Global New Media and U.S. Print and Broadcast Markets; and Joy Jones, currently VP, Global Business Operations, who becomes VP of Marketing Operations.

Sue is super-bright and right on it--congrats, Sue!

AOL Buying Bebo

2008-03-13T07:50:00.000-07:00

Wow! This is amazing news! AOL is now going to be able to roll it's user base right into the bebo mix, and add 40 milion users--probably with very little overlap--pronto. Smart move! $$850 million, cash.

Susan sez: Here's the deal, and I am impressed with it:

AOL grows user base, asap--and ages it down from their core audiences outside of TMZ.com by, oh, 20% (user base more appealing to advertisers)
AOL has another tool for international expansion--an area where they can effectively compete at a reasonable margin
Great platform to look ahead to stronger and more integrated mobile extensions, for US and abroad
More sites to instrument to offer improved ad delivery and targeting--this will give them more competitive positioning with advertisers--and more data intelligence about a more varied--and international--group of users
Mobile. Did I say mobile? Mobile social network=future=$$$

Facts:
bebo has about 40 million users worldwide, it's in the top 3 social networks in the UK, and is number 1 in Ireland and New Zealand, and number 3 in the U.S. 78 PV average user, per month.

Quotes:
“Bebo is the perfect complement to AOL’s personal communications network and puts us in a leading position in social media. What drew us to Bebo was its substantial and fast-growing worldwide user-base, its vision of a truly social web, and the monetization opportunities that leverage Platform-A across our combined global audience. This positions us to offer advertisers even greater reach and marketers significant insights into the desires and needs of consumers.”

--Randy Falco, AOL Chairman

“AOL understands the shifting dynamics of the Web and has clearly demonstrated its commitment to leveraging the ever-increasing power of social networks. With one and the same vision in this area, it was a natural progression for Bebo to join AOL, and we look forward to working together to continue to expand the online social experience globally."
--Joanna Shields, Bebo prez

"Bebo’s dynamic management team recognizes that the Internet is less about destination and more about connecting people, culture and lifestyles. This acquisition supports our key objectives – accelerating the growth, engagement and monetization of one of the world’s most engaged online communities.”
--Ron Grant, AOL President and COO

Friendfeed and the stalkerati

2008-03-13T06:51:00.000-07:00

We're in a world where 9,000 people subscribe to Jason Calcanis' twitter stream, more than his blog, and where practicing transparency sometimes feels like a weird blend of the global village and an endless rout of self promotion. And a bit like stalkerati rule, too.

Or, at least that's how felt when I read Louis Gray's post reporting on which A list bloggers are public on friendfeed, allowing others to watch their every click and post on their blogs, tweets, facebook and like 30 other social media apps. In case you missed them, Grays' short list of the hot peeps makes it easy for you to peep at their activities.

One just hopes everyone on this list is feeling good about having their life streams scrutinized; if you do the web 3.0 thing, very little is private anymore.

On a different note, I was irked that Gray's A list of thirty-plus has just two women ; on other hands, it's really a list of bloggers he reads, it's really no big deal--even if one if them seems to be a friend he keeps promoting,.

Quote of the Day

2008-03-13T06:01:00.000-07:00

"With rough approximation, it’s like before the Internet era we were single cells swimming alone in the ocean of life. Online communication fused us together into the first multi-cellular social organisms. Or maybe it’s more than that: by, connection, sharing and real time synchronization of people, the Internet gave us the first conscious social organisms: the social networks, and after that, by further evolution, the smarter mobs. And it’s clear to me that this is a two-way process: from individual to the group and vice-versa. The individual adds value – intellectual and emotional – to the group and the group infuses the individual with the collective sum of values brought by the other participants upon a pattern of organic mutual growth."

--Howard Rheingold, writing at Smart Mobs about the power of the individual within the network as the value and impact of one person becomes much clearer.

Miscellaneous linkages

2008-03-12T23:23:00.000-07:00

Friends have things coming up they've asked me to mention--notably the identity workshops Kaliya is working on, Spot's art show in NYC, and Steve Yelvington's classifieds survey. Yes, it's a ragtag bunch, but here are the the links--take what you like and leave the rest.

Identity and DataPortability.org related--

Internet Identity Workshop - May 12-14 in Mountain View California.

The Data Sharing Workshop, April 18 - 19 at the SFSU, Downtown Campus.

The Data Sharing Summit, May 15, at the Computer History Museum.

Electric Sheep and their Dreams in High Fidelity, an amazing art show by the Spot, tech geek turned artist (and still a geek).

Steve Yelvington: "I have a survey online and I'm
seeking folks either in classifieds or at media companies who make
strategy decisions involving classifieds and advertising to take it.
(Consultants, academics, etc. who have expertise in the classifieds
sector also are welcomed.)"

Dave Beach's side project :12 seconds

Steven Johnson has announced that Outside.in is going to be using Fire Eagle for its new Radar functionality I

Noted: Yahoo talk

2008-03-12T12:00:00.001-07:00

Kara Swisher: "I am not clear what the benefit of uniting two troubled Internet companies is, but I am sure AOL and Yahoo investment bankers can explain it all away (taking tips, presumably, from the advisers who cooked up the first disastrous AOL merger with Time Warner)."

Henry Blodgett: "Will Yahoo blow Q1? Certainly possible. The economy is tanking. AOL is sucking wind. Even Google appears to be having a rough go of it. And unlike Google, Yahoo has a lot on its mind other than the crappy economic environment."

HipMojo: Why I Sold 87.5% of My Yahoo! Shares

Susan sez: This coverage is scary.

Quotes of the Day

2008-03-11T18:08:00.000-07:00

"There's no such thing as viral marketing, only viral products."--David Parmet

"I get frustrated when startups are trying to teach a new behavior, but don't spend enough time with their customers...You'll never have a lower ratio of employees:customers than you do now. Now's the time to bring in human beings who can answer questions. This sounds like customer service, but it's really marketing. If you're a large company, break it down into smaller segments so that you can get to a size where you can connect."--Deb Schultz

"The brands with the best storytellers win."--Chris Heuer

Pulled from Christine Herron's post on the SXSW panel on How to Market Via Social Media

Diving back into citizen journalism, news & media 3.0 and platform tools

2008-03-11T17:31:00.000-07:00

As I'm evolving this next stage of my career and work focus, I'm planning to spend some time re-engaging around local, hyperlocal, citizen journalism, participatory media and so on.

I am particularly interested in platforms and tools that support publishing and community for local news organizations, community groups and organizers, and in helping to develop business models and frameworks to accelerate the success of citizen journalism where it's needed (which in my view is often in places where there is pent up demand for a more diverse set of media outlets, particular problems people need to organize to address(schools, crime, come to mind), and/or a smaller communities--geographic and self-defined--which can use online as a focusing and organizing device.

As part of moving more deeply into the conversation, I'm planning to participate in these two upcoming conference, and want to hear about more relevant meet-ups, projects, etc, happening, in particular, on the West Coast and in California.

Also interested in new and emerging platforms and products.

If you are attending either of these and want to meet up, let me know:

March 27,28, Re:public: Assessing the state of Participatory Media (Berkman), Los Angeles, CA
April 30-May 2nd: Journalism that matters: News Tools 2008

Blodgett: "AOL Disintegrating"

2008-03-11T17:10:00.000-07:00

Read the Henry Blodgett posts on Curt Viebranz' dismissal and the imploding of AOL with great fascination.

Whether all his speculation is true or not, it's obvious that AOL, like some many other big portal companies, has suffered from a talent drain to smaller, more nimble and emerging businesses--the little Goliaths that are quickly turning onto big Davids. Even more to Blodgett's point, some of the senior execs at this big portals are lost they fail to even recognize who they should be keeping--and what the strategy should be.

I'm also fascinated by some of the more intelligent comments by folks like "Jim", who writes:
"Henry, how can you publish such a report based on "sources" that are clearly using you for emotional venting. While your writing above does address facts about who was released and who was promoted (old news as of yesterday), the facts stop there. This report exists to embellish and embrace rants of unhappy employees. There is no credibility here...you are a tool for funneling thoughts of whiners. Who are your sources? Don't need names, but give a sense that these are people who know what they are talking about. "

In other words, there's intelligent discourse in the comments that suggests, whatever agenda Blodgett is pushing, AOL is no more made whole now that it was 20 months ago--which has interesting implications for a Yahoo-AOL merger.

New Blogher post now live

2008-03-10T16:00:00.000-07:00

New column up at Blogher on From casual to committed, trying it all again:

"Okay, so there was a period of time—maybe a few years—where I was convinced I’d never meet someone I’d want to spend a large chunk of my life with. In love or not, paired or single, the possibility of connecting with someone I’d both want to live with and plan a future with seemed just really, uh, remote. After all, hadn’t I already been married for 10,000 years and been through all the bonding and the compromises? Why on earth would I ever want to go through the trouble of trying to do that again?"

More here.

Handmade rules: Etsy's $27million, aka People are doing it for themselves

2008-03-10T08:48:00.000-07:00

It's exciting to hear that Etsy raised a $27 million dollar investment round this past January. There's no question but that we've moved into an era where small, independent businesses are flourishing via the web, and Etsy's a leader in the platform/tools/community category, creating an ecosystem of crafters, artisans and purchasers around the globe.

Apparently, the money is going to be used to build out more hardware and hosting services, staff up, localize for international expansion, improve and streamline checkout, upgrade search and (one imagines) build out community and brand positioning further. I'd also suggest they think about creating more developer and affinity communities, streamlining APIs, and adding some craftman/seller support areas.

I was moved by founder Rob Kalin's post on Esty, where he says "We want Etsy to exist for hundreds of years. Our goal is for Etsy to be an independent, publicly traded company, focused on all things handmade.Throughout Etsy's growth, we have been very careful when raising money. We run the company as a democracy, meaning no one party has the power to act unilaterally."

Susan sez: Whether it's manufactured goods, conferences, media interviews, or content, there's been a relentlessly accelerating move toward shared, distributed services that mirrors the move toward user generated content. Short version: People are doing it for themselves...and we have the tools for the good stuff to gain traction and float to the top.

The Mark Zuckerberg, Sarah Lacy, SXSW Flap: The community is the interview

2008-03-10T07:22:00.000-07:00

It's a bit strange to read, from a distance, the feedback and criticism of BusinessWeek blogger Sarah Lacy's interview with Facebook's Mark Zuckberberg, which many observers and audience members felt went terribly wrong.

Jeff Jarvis says Lacy's biggest mistakes were "not knowing her audience" and not asking them what questions they wanted Zuckerberg to answer, and I'd agree those were two key take aways from viewing the video and reading the posts around the blogosphere.

However, I think there's another point here that's worth making--in this day and age of real time interactivity, unconferences and bar camps, everyone in the audience wants to be the interviewer--and, in a way, they should be. One could argue that Sarah Lacy's mistake was in not realizing she was just the vessel to channel the crowd--that she didn't engage enough in participatory media--and that failure made her irrelevant to the audience, who then leapt on her cruelly as she became non-relevant to their agenda.

Somehow, it's hard not to contrast this event and the failure of the talking heads format--with Robert Scoble's coverage of the release of the iPhone at the Palo Alto Apple story last summer--Robert went down to the store with his son, got in line, and spent 24 hours covering the release of the new iPhone as the first in line and man in the street--getting HUGE media coverage for both himself and the new device.

In other words, that third wall between geeks and their heros is gone; fair warning to anyone who gets in the way of direct access--the crowd will get'ya, real time.

Footnote: Sarah's post event comments:

(Weekend) Quote of the Day 2

2008-03-09T16:30:00.000-07:00

Dad and exec Russell Hampton, driving his 14 year old daughter Katie and a group of her friends to a play as the kids stop talking and silence falls in the back seat: “Katie, you shouldn’t be texting all the time. Your friends are there. It’s rude."

The daughter: "But, Dad, we’re texting each other. I don’t want you to hear what I’m saying.”

--Story told in a NY Times piece about the *younger generation* and text messaging behaviors.

(Weekend) Quote of the Day 1

2008-03-09T16:26:00.000-07:00

“A cover on Vogue or Bazaar, I think of it as the new celebrity rehab. Some people go to Utah. Others go to Smashbox and do a photo shoot.”

--Long time publicist Liz Rosenberg, who reps Madonna, commenting in a NY Times story on how Lindsay Lohan's *comeback* is pegged to covers on three magazines this spring--e.g. appearance is reality in the entertainment biz.

Quote of the Day

2008-03-08T13:55:00.001-08:00

"The whole purpose; or at least the purpose that is pimped out to the general internet public is that things like Facebook, Twitter and even FriendFeed are a great way to create new friendships, keep in touch with all these new and old friends and to have a conversation with everyone involved. To an extent among the average users this might be the case but in watching these services for some time now I have come to the conclusion that for the early adopter crowd and other A-Lister types conversation is the last thing they are interested in....
For this very large group this whole social engine is nothing more than another way for them to hype themselves and whatever conference/project they happen to be working on at the time."

--the cranky Steve Hodgson, who has a point.

Quote of the Day

2008-03-07T08:02:00.000-08:00

"Over the next several years social networking and community will become less about specific venues and more of a river that runs through the entire web. As Cisco's Dan Scheinman says, community will define not only how content is created, but also how it is consumed.

This means that although it will get harder for marketers to achieve scale, community engagement will become a much more efficient and effective way to engage an audience. This requires a shift in thinking though as community becomes like running water. "

--Steve Rubel, writing about the web's law of continuous revolution.

Layoffs 3.0: Exhilaration, Fear, Exploration, Community

2008-03-07T06:26:00.000-08:00

It's been almost a month since the Yahoo layoffs. As in any breakup, I've cycled through what many describe as the five stages of job loss grief: shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, but I'm left with four feelings that I want to talk about: exhilaration, fear, exploration, community.

Exhilaration: There is so much going on out there. So many companies, so many people and so many interesting things to focus on. It's a good time to be someone with alot of experience, a track record, and a questioning mind--in some ways, I feel the whole bright, shiny eyes thing of great opportunities--and my heads down, make it ship focus at Yahoo! was just another world(one I want to return to at some point; I love product development).

Fear: In the month, good prospects and projects have materialized, but there's no fulltime staff job offer that came in for something that felt just right--and I realize that one way my ego dealt with getting laid off was the wish to show everyone how quickly I could land another staff job (yes, I know this is silly, it doesn't happen that fast). The fear is of instability, of an unpredictable future, of wishing to feel secure and engaged and wanting to give myself that--and there are moments I just feel scared.

Exploration: This is the moment of infinite possibility. I can start my own thing(s), work with different sizes of start-ups, join a bigger company, focus more on writing and media, get involved with dataportability, microformats, identity, publishing standards--Having cut loose from 50 hour a week job, I get to rethink what's next. This is exciting, but also feels hard to juggle at times--I can explore it all, but I can't do it all.

Community: The strong ties and good will I have with the Bay area and beyond community of digerati, tech innovators, entrepreneurs, execs, media folks, etc. are really showing at this moment, as I look for the next thing or things. In some ways, we are our community, and my hope is that I've provided value to others that helps make them so good to me-I certainly want to pay it forward...and I see how vibrant and rich our world is (and how driven we all are).

Sharing this: I thought about not posting this; after all, no one is supposed to admit they're ever scared, right? But we all are sometimes, aren't we?

In other words, in committing to write about my experiences post layoff, I 've chosen to offer some transparency, knowing that what our social conventions keep us from admitting may be the very thing we all need to hear.

If you want to share about feelings and experiences of your own post a layoff, add to the comments here.

SuperNova Mixer: Good talk, good people

2008-03-07T00:16:00.001-08:00

Got up to the city tonight and went to the Supernova mixer at the SF hub for the Wharton School of Business.

Attended an interesting and lively discussion on social networks and making money (aka 'monetization'') facilitated by Jeremiah Oywang (there was another across the hall run by Jerry Michaelski). Key points: Facebook is the new AOL, lots of revenue models but little actual adoption of any of them, SNs need to--and will--evolve--to support business needs.

The mixer afterwards was outstanding; lots of interesting people to talk with. Some of the new to me people I met included Luke Sontag (Vidoop) and Brian Glick (YouTube); there were other people I hadn't seen for a while, and yet others I always enjoy seeing.

Good feeling both to be out and about and to see the level of intelligence of the discussion...what a great city!

Charlene Li: The future of social networks

2008-03-06T23:59:00.000-08:00

Articulate as always, Forrester analyst Charlene Li did a presention at Graphing Social Patterns in San Diego earlier this week that neatly lays out current thinking and issues around social networks, how they are used, where (some of) the gaps are, and where they are headed.

| View | Upload your own

Note: This is my first use of slideshare, which is pretty cool at first pass(but which seems to lack clipping, storage and filing features I wish it had).

Quote of the Day

2008-03-06T13:22:00.000-08:00

"But the sense I get in talking with other entreprenuers, vc’s, investors, startup execs is that experience and startup experience matter more then ever - the free agent market is hot so to speak. Maybe it’s because we’re entering a down-economic cycle where ideas matter less then execution. Maybe it’s because the dreamy euphoria of the web 2.0 boom is transitioning to a state of what’s real. Maybe it’s because investors are realizing that it’s sometimes best to diversify their portfolios to include some bets on horses with track records. "

--Todd Sawicki, , writing about entrepeneurship, recession, reality

Noted

2008-03-06T09:14:00.000-08:00

Fred Wilson: Esty sellers using twitter to promote new merchandise (this makes perfect sense).
Zawodny: Herding Cats, YouTube video that is "the funniest thing ever." (It is funny.)
Lee LeFever: Another great Common Craft video: twitter in plain English.
Technium: Kevin Kelly on how one thousand true fans is the key to (music) success. (Susan says: Maybe not just in the music biz?)

I love Tim Barsky

2008-03-05T20:40:00.001-08:00

Went a few weeks ago to see Over 9 Waves, a new piece by the wonderous Tim Barsky, storyteller, beat boxer and amazing artist.

Tim did the brilliant Bright River 3 years ago; this new piece is less finished, but also a must see.

Hyperlocal: Passion, reawakened

2008-03-05T19:55:00.001-08:00

I'm getting deeply engaged with both the platform questions about social software and citizen journalism /participatory media, and the community benefit of creating local community, news, and organizing/meet up sites.

My early roots in the Web were partly in local; it's an interest I've never lost, but now that I am out of Yahoo!, the interest is intensifying once again. I've been close to and engaged with local efforts as an advisor, (Placeblogger, Dan's projects), but I'm thinking harder about what's needed for local and asking myself if, before I get engaged in other projects, there's some things I could do to move the conversation--and the toolkits--along.

Thinking that the answer is yes, I'm putting some ideas together, and also planning to attend the Berkman Center's conference on March 27 & 28th at USC Annenberg School for Communication in Los Angeles. Called Re: Public, this McArthur-funded effort will look at the state of participatory media and explore future directions.

What is particularly exciting to me, and is matching the way some of my own interest in local is now trending, is the conscious and deliberate connection between quality of life in local communities, ability to give the citizenry both a voice and tools to organize/address issues, and how these two factors combine to support sustainability/viability for local grassroots media and tech-driven aggregations that wrap around them.

In other words, what keeps people coming back isn't the movie reviews their neighbors write, it's the chance to not only complain about a problem, but to have tools right there online to do something about it (like organize or write a letter).

Or to put it another way, my latest view of social software for communities is that it should use technology to pull in all sorts of feeds and data, but that the best products also contain ways to publish and discuss original content, AND take action tool sets more commonly seen in political campaigns.

Given the election year, and the general excellence of the Berkman Center, I'm looking forward to seeing what John Palfrey, David Weinberger, Lisa Williams, Doc Searls, Tony Pierce and others have to say--and of course, the best conversations are in the corners, right?

Quote of the Day

2008-03-05T10:50:00.000-08:00

"Does anybody want a Facebook invite? I have 6 to give away. Also, I have one Gmail invite left. And add me on Friendster, please! Thx."

--Anil Dash, via twitter

Susan says: ROFL.

Susan Mernit's Blog

Oakland Thanksgiving 2

The wild trail of Saturday surfing, aka synchronicity surfaces everytime

Department of Brilliant

Quote of the Day

Neil Budde goes to DailyMe, news aggregator and start page

Quote of the Day

New blogger welcome: Ryan Kuder jumps in

Quote of the Day

New study: Social Networks and Connection vs. Reputation

Layoffs 3.0: Does going back make sense?

Ian Rogers leaving Yahoo for start up and other changes

Measuring the Techmeme Lederboard and what the stats suggest

Twitter & Friend Feed: The Pleasure of Permissions

Thinking local: Tools, Information vs. Reporting, Objectivity vs. Accuracy

The April Fools Collection

April 1: It ain't just laughing

Blogher: New column now live

Shine and media: Jason's not quite right--but he is right

Shine goes live--Will women rush there or what?

Quote of the Day

Scott Karp gets $2.7MM for Publish2

Quote of the Day, and then some

Aril 23rd: From MySpace to Hip Hop conference

Getting into growth: StatWatch

Questions:News, Local, Community and the future

Reflections on Re:Public and the future of information

Quote of the Day

Re: Public: Future of News forum

Brewster Kahle-My enduring hero

Re:Public: Measuring success in citizen journalism panel

This just in: Newspaper ad revenue plunge below 2001 levels

Re:Public: John Kelly and the network media ecosystem

Re:Public: David Weinberger

Quote of the Day

More Re:Public--Roberto Suro talk

Opening session: Re:Public

Noted

Quote of the Day

One brain drain versus another

Layoffs 3.0: Big vs, Small, Start Up vs. Your Own

Blogs: What they're worth--or not

Matt McAlister going to Guardian UK

Like wow, Progressive Strategy Brain goes live

WePlay: Community for kids, parents, teams

The McCain Girls: Is this satire, hope so

Finding the bliss in bickering: New column up at Blogher

Fast Company on AOL: Dead Man Walking

Quote of the Day

Twitflit: Managing the morning ritual

Quote of the Day

Congrats, Diane Cole!

YouTube Music Sunday: TerraNaomi

Loving this: Quote of the Day

What's Next: Building the Path

Quote of the Day

Ellen Spertus at Google sponsored Girl Geek Dinner

Bridge of Sighs: Is gender balancing stupid, or what is Google thinking?

Facebook: 10 months and counting(down)

Quote of the Day

More thoughts on Mike's *blogging biz* post

(Another delicious) Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

NYC Gov Paterson tells media and public he strayed-as did is wife

Quote of the Day

5 years of blogging=design facelift TK

Blog birthday: 5 years of blogging, tomorrow

Blogher column now live

Valleywag: What does it mean when?

Quote of the Day

Noted: Yahoo talk

Women in Tech: Steve Hodson gets it wrong; Louis Gray gets brownie points

Drilling down on local: East Bay focus

Layoffs 3.0: What I want to do right now

Flying To Chicago, anyone around this weekend?

What does it mean to follow? The digital footprint

Another quote of the day

AP consolidates digital/web units; Sue Cross promoted

AOL Buying Bebo

Friendfeed and the stalkerati

More thoughts on Mike's blogging biz post