If you'd like a copy of the presentation given by Julie Leung and myself at BlogHer, let me know.
No commercial reuse, folks, otherwise, enjoy.

So, it's over.
And so many moments of it--many outside the planned events--were just so great.
For me, the three flashpoints were

• the people--old friends and great new people
• the diversity--themes and attendees varied more widely than other conferences I've attended--and that added such richness
• the fact we did it

I suspect BlogHer will lead the way to many more related events and projects--congrats to everyone involved.

BlogHer was the best--and I took about 60 photos--now all on flickr.
(I will organize them further when I have more time...)

"If we are to survive as a business dedicated to producing quality local news, information and dialogue, we need to move, too, with people and resources. But that means more than just re-creating the print product online. It means understanding the culture of the Internet, and of blogging in particular, and understanding how we can work on and with the Internet (i.e., with users of that medium) to expand the quantity and quality of the local news, information and dialogue we provide." -- Les Alexander, Editor, Greensboro News-Record

"My guiding principles in journalism are the usual ones. I believe in getting it right, being fair, shining lights on things that are hidden when they affect the public good, etc. But I have developed another guiding principle in the way I do this craft.

My readers know more than I do. And if we can all take advantage of that, in the best sense of the expression, we will all be better informed." -- Dan Gillmor, former Merc columnist, author We Media, founder, Grassroots Media

I'm at BlogHer--the conference is swinging into gear with 300 folks crammed into the big meeting room and the sound of Kumbaya is faint above what's turning into a down and dirty moment with a blogger in the audience who tells Halley Suitt "I asked you for a link and you didn't link to me!"
And Halley says "Okay, I blew it--ask me again."
The room roars with laughter and the conversation takes off: Trish Grier,Liza Sabater, Staci Kramer, and others in the audience are chiming in on links, influence and playing the status game(or not).
This is not your father's conference, folks--and this is not even your brother's conference, friends--this is the do-acracy and i have feeling it is going to ROAR.

Congrats Lisa, Elisa, Purvi and Jory--you pulled it off.

"There has been and there is a power shift going on: from the producers of media to the people formerly known as the audience. That's what I like to call them, because they're not really an audience anymore. And terms like "audience" and "consumer" and "viewer" and "reader"--which have become threaded into journalism--aren't really that accurate for the people on the other end of the process. So there has been a power shift from producers to users, mostly because of the Internet.

"Increasingly, because of the Internet, because of blogging, some of the press is actually shifting into public hands. So whereas the press and the media once overlapped almost completely, now the press has shifted. The nonprofit world owns a piece of it, activists and people involved in politics own a piece of it and the public owns a piece of it.

"Bloggers are developing this platform that journalists will one day occupy, and that is the reason why people in the mainstream press should pay attention to them."

---- Jay Rosen, The Nation

Trying to figure out Saturday dinner plans for Blogher--what are other conference attendees doing?
Also thinking about post-party hanging out at my place....
If you are interested in a meet up at dinner or hanging out later in the night, let me know.

Serial entrepeneur and smart guy Seth Goldstein's got a long and fascinating post about
his new Attention Trust nonprofit and the market shifts and consumer behaviors that led to these ideas.
Building off Michael Goldhaber and others, Seth defines attention as a valuable commodity and posits that we can manage it like other assets(I think).

He writes: "Our challenge as consumers in the age of paid search and performance marketing, therefore, is whether/how to wrest control back from the machine that has begun to anticipate our intentions for its proprietary gain."
And
"The choruses of attention, data, privacy and identity are all converging in one giant conceptual mashup, which stretches from Web 2.0 pundits to members of Congress grappling with identity theft regulation. Lost at times are the basic rights we are fighting for, which I understand to be:

• You have the right to yourself.
• You have the right to your gestures.
• You have the right to your words.
• You have the right to your interests.
• You have the right to your attention.
• You have the right to your intentions."

Yup, it was true- -release is on the wire now:

 AOL Working with Leading RSS Search Engine to Provide Fully
 Customizable Portal Page with Automatic Updates for RSS News and
 Content Feeds from across the Web
 
Rafer quote: "AOL is one of the first to make RSS easy-to-use for mainstream
Internet users. With My AOL and My Feeds, AOL is continuing its
industry leadership in making new technologies accessible. We're thrilled to be AOL's
partner powering My AOL's Feeds and Search. Together, we will

demonstrate to AOL audiences and the online industry the growing power

of RSS feeds."

(Note: Tony Gentile says this was announced back in the day...stil gets my attention.)

"Today, the ability for anyone with a computer and a connection to the Internet to disseminate news and information is shaking the foundations of the news business. Traditional news organizations are competing both online and off with thousands, potentially millions, of people who are telling stories ranging from global to personal." --Dwight Silverman, Houston Chronicle

Just heard that Feedster's about to announce that they will be powering RSS search and feeds for an improved My AOL.
Guess that means that Feedster is going to power AOL's My Yahoo competitior--does it also mean AOL will buy eventually them?
Hmmnn...

Did you hear the one about the woman whose cat leapt over the fence on the patio, broke its leg, splintering the bone?
And how the repairs cost about as much as a used car?

That woman would be me and my little black alley cat is now suddenly worth a few thousand dollars, based on the surgery invested in him.

The emergency room vet said to take him to the regular vet, but the regular vets couldn't handle the his broken leg, so I ended up at the orthopedic surgery experts, having a consult.

The way you fix a broken leg with splintered bones in a cat is that you screw a steel plate into the leg, add steel pins, then lock it in a big crate for 6-12 weeks till it heals.

The only other fix possible, the vets said, is to cut the goddamned leg off.

So, given the choices between orthopedic surgery and amputating the broken leg to save money, which would you pick?

So yeah, now my new car is a pussycat...one I am happy is walking, safe and home.

Crain's NY Business reports that Jane Magazine founder Jane Pratt is leaving the magazine she started in 97 to start a new entity that will "talk to women in this peer-to-peer way."
Does this mean Ariana Huffington is going to get a run for her money?
Or that Pratt is going to do something as cool and right today as Jane was back in the day?

"Readers are writers, consumers are producers, but everyone is aware of the need for a filter -- someone who knows what news is."
--NYU Professor Jay Rosen, during a Berkman Center speech, Harvard University

Lisa Stone's hitting her stride. This bright and passionate woman, one of the driving forces behind BlogHer, has some things on her mind.

She writes:
"It's time we got back to rocketing the conversation about women and blogging to higher ground. Like a different galaxy. Now that we've demonstrated where (some of) the women bloggers are, let's leap-frog tokenism, push past lip-service, and frame a discussion about our future with this technology (not their plans for it).

The BlogHer Debate question for 2005 is this: Women bloggers, how do you want the world to learn about what you're creating -- if at all? Do you want to play by today's rules or change the game?"

So, how would you change the game?
As Lisa suggests, there will be lots of people in Santa Clara on July 30th living out these questions--Stay tuned to see what answers bubble up (including some from me...)

Well, Technorati's got that big, integrated media deal-- Newsweek's just launched their new Blog Talk feature, which is a see what the blogosphere is saying about this article feature built into all their article pages (see example here.)
Congrats, everyone.

Fuse: 'Find, Use, Share, Expand' --
"At the center of the idea of FUSE is what's happening to media - how every single medium - music, TV, print, telecom, even our first versions of the web - is being remixed and reordered by Web 2.0.
It's an old saw, but mass media really is becoming my media - through RSS, podcasting, iTunes, Tivo, blogs, and many innovations to come."
--John Battelle, John Battelle's Searchblog

Mary's got a detailed analysis of how services track links to blog up, with more to follow.
She writes: "This exercise is an attempt to give readers and users of the services a comparison of how the services so that they can take best advantage of the strengths and avoid the weaknesses in order to track URLs, keywords, other special services, and alerts or subscriptions or watchlists (the services each use different terminology in order to differentiate themselves but users tell me the terminology is just terribly confusing and they wish that as an industry we would settle on one term and use it across all the services and then get on to figuring out how to provide the service better."

Well worth a read.

Oh, and here's a PDF of the data.

Guardian Unlimited: Ben Hammersley writes about personal outsourcing--web sites, blogs, and even the transcription and writing of the article he published.

"In a world where national leaders are turning away from the news media, citizens have an increasing lack of confidence in the press and young people are moving perhaps permanently away from traditional newsgathering organizations, a radical rethinking of how news is delivered seems necessary- even overdue." --Merrill Brown, Abandoning the News, Carnegie Foundation report, January 2005.

JD Lasica's posted a link to a story on consumers becoming their own editor (by using newsreaders) by Anick Jesadnun--but there seems to be something waayyy off about a story whose headline touts consumers consumers using newsreaders leading with a hed on someone who is both a practicing journalist and a leading blogger.

It's great press for JD, who rocks, but please, this is sloppy. Wouldn't a better title have been "Growing usage of online newsreaders poses questions for publishers?"

Oh, well.

Niall Kennedy and others are watching Microsoft crawl and spider feedspace and wondering when the new product--an RSS search engine--will inevitably launch.
Micrsoft's Scoble implies the feeds were for the brand new Virtual Earth.
...I don't think so.

It's a matter of when, not if.

Jeff Jarvis, Susan Crawford and others have been writing eloquently about the mesh of links and relationships at the heart of Web 2.0. I look at it as introducing the individual--as a reader, content producer and plain ol'human--into the center of the diagram.
For that reason, this quote from Dave Weinberger's Small Pieces Loosely Joined says alot to me:

"By removing the central control points, the Web enabled a self-organizing, self-stimulated growth of contents and links on a scale the world has literally never before experienced.

 Seth Goldstein's launched a new non-profit
called Attention Trust, a nonprofit
organization focused on Steve Gillmor's
theory of attention and "dedicated to
promoting the basic rights of attention owners".

Photostream here

What is this organization going to do?

We'll find out.

So an article in the NY Times says perky but sensitive divorcee in NYC Stephanie Klein has a Technorati link rank of 2,132, and quotes Dave Sifry saying that puts her in the top 1% of all bloggers.
Does that mean that this blog is in that (large) list as well? At 2,387, guess it's yes.

"All around us there has been a shift in power from companies to the consumer. This "bottoms-up" trend has been transforming the way we live our lives. Innovative companies from amazon to ebay, are leading the way in personalization and consumer-created content.? --Joel Hyatt, CEO of Current, a new cable channel focusing on 18-34 year olds and emphasizing user-created content (Via Jay Rosen)

Bill Densmore and some folks have a project I just came across called Media Giraffe, where they are capturing quotes and projects related to citizen journalism, participatory media, shared content--pick your term. About page says: "The MGP is a one-year, pilot initiative to find and spotlight individuals making innovative use of media (old and new) to foster participatory democracy and community." (This is from last March.)
Looks pretty good--going in my newsreader, for sure.

Michael Parekh: What if Amazon started a blogging service (great idea!)

Donga says there are 15-20 million blogs--13 million at Cyworld (Via BlogHerald)
Ellen Finkelstein: Syndicating Web sites with RSS feeds for dummies. No more excuses.
Jeff Clavier: Bloggish tools he likes.
The marvelous Halley Suitt is Gamermom--tracking what her kid's playing.

Associated Press: They're launching an online video news network for newspaper, television and radio Web sites, ad supported and available through AP member Web sites." The beat goes on.

Is NYTimes exec editor Bill Keller invoking the gratuitous jabs gambit when he slams both blogging and cable television on the eve of LA Time's editor Jim Carroll's retirement?
You decide--here's a quote:
"We've only got two things that distinguish us from blogs. One is we have reporting staffs who actually go out and see stuff and are trained professionals. And we have standards which are enforced by editors-- you double-check things, make sure it's right--and all that costs money.
If you aren't giving people the basics-- good reliable news, smart analysis and in-depth investigations--then all they're going to see is the same stuff they can get on cable TV."

Susan sez: Always nice when BSD corporate types feel a need to strike out at the industries nibbling at their margins, but I'm surprised to see a top editor at the NY Times stoop so low. Guess everyone reserves their right to make cheap shots (I know, I have...)

Paul Frankenstein, H20: An incomplete bibliography for China hands (with very cool tagging).
Slate: Tony Wu on China's bid to divide the Internet.
Always On: Are you ready for the Chinese revolt? (Flash of conference session.)
Jonathan Newhouse: China's hot for magazines.
Also:
NYTimes: China re-valuing yuan; no longer measured against the dollar.

Bob Lutz, General Motors, in InfoWeek: "To any senior executive on the fence about starting a corporate blog, I have a word of advice: Jump."

Perhaps this is the kick off of a series of M.F.K. Fisher memorial posts--What I cooked for myself, by myself, when I got home after a 12 hour day at a client's office and needed to eat something nice:

• Shitake mushrooms sauteed with garlic, ginger, scallion and a little soy
• Steamed fresh corn
• A slice of parma ham and a small hunk of Oregon blue cheese
• A little spot of smelly French cheese
• A handful of red grapes
• Oh, and 3 olives--I am obsessed with olives

WTF? MSFT. vs. Google via NYTimes: " Microsoft filed a lawsuit against Google on Tuesday asserting that Google hired away a Microsoft executive in violation of a clause in the executive's contract that precludes him for working for a competitor."

" Ishmael Reed and Esther Dyson starred in my Saturday afternoon, casually defying expectations and stereotypes. I did not construct the afternoon ? it just happened as it does, in the Bayosphere."--This is from a post by Mimi Kahlon, a San Fraciscan who's posting on Bayosphere,

Dan Gillmor's citizen journalism platform.
(note: Bayosphere seems pretty quiet so far...wonder what the audience acquisition strategy is?)

Korby Parnell's posted some presos from the recent Microsoft Social Computing Symposium
His top picks:

1. Backchannels: Power and the Active Audience -- by Liz Lawley and Richard Hodkinson
2. Visualizing Social Interactions and Collaboration History by Fernanda Viegas
3. From Trees to Tags -- by David Weinberger
4. Tesla, Tagging for the DeskTop -- by Matt McLaurin of Microsoft Research
5. Exploring the Social Institutional Dimensions of MoSoSo Design: Are Smart Mobs Institutions for Collective Action? -- by Howard Rheingold

Watching a terrific HBO documentary about old burlesque queens, made by Liz Goldwyn.
Fun.

IHT: Web site is Iraq's first independent news service. (Thanks, Mark)

WSJ: Yahoo's (media) staffing--it's a little messy,with VP and GMs shifting, leaving--bitching? ( Rafat adds a good bit to this story)
Steve Gillmor: Podcasting is dead. Sarcastic, biting insider dish on the booming new business.
Always On starts tonight at Stanford--I will be there for some of it--email if you want to meet up.

LATimes: Al Gore's Current PR starts for August 1 launch--inside peek here.
Plus: Michael Wolf of McKinsey has a new column--this man is smart--can't wait to read.(Via iwantmedia)