Many movies this weekend--saw

• Capote
• Walk the Line
• The Squid and The Whale

Capote was well-styled, a good period piece, but a small movie and somewhat disappointing.
Walk the Line was fantastic--the acting and the story were outstanding--this is a serious Oscar contender, IMHO.
The Squid and the Whale--GREAT movie, much to my surprise. Laura Linney, Jeff Daniels, Jesse Eisenberg and young Owen Kline give stellar performances in a compelling family drama. (My favorite, over all-though WTL is stellar.)

New and wonderful: NYC's Hollaback Blog, dedicated to speaking out against street harassment and posting pix of the fugly perps.
Posts are from SF, NY and across the globe.

As the girls say: If You Can't Slap 'Em, Snap 'Em!
This is going to go next to Overheard in NY on my blog list.

Scoble's trimmed down his blogroll and published it here.
Nice to see this blog survived the cuts.
I'd like to see J.Wynia mashup this list up into an OPML outliner/aggregator--please!

Web 2.0 workgroup posts, mashed up via OPML and Yahoo search API--worth a look at how it selects out *top* posts. (Via Crunchnotes)
J Wynia: OPML Sampling, Building a page showing the best item from each RSS feed. How he did it.
Marc C: Check out Restaurant reviews with Yahoo maps, a sweet little toy.
Via we make money not art: Zapped!/Preemptive Media mapped the results of their investigation about RFID use in Tokyo. Neat-o.

Via Programmable web: " Auction Mapper is an interesting little application built on the eBay API that gives fast Flash-based search results on a map (and not Google or other public API map)."

This post by Kim Weinstein reminds me how NY and California blogging conferences are, well, different:

Do: Accept invitation heartily.

Don't: Forget this little noun: context. Find out the politics of the aegis under which you will be speaking.

Do: Purchase the sparkliest, pointiest stilletos you can find, especially if the Manolo is moderating.

Don't: Get yourself seated between two thin, beautiful women if you have not lost your two-year-old pregnancy weight. Who are you kidding? It's toddler weight. Why do they have to snack on frigging crackers and cookies all the time, despite your urgings of fruit and veggies? You WILL be photographed looking like Jabba the makeup artist and the unflattering photo will be posted on Yahoo News, so that all of your ex-boyfriends and former friends and enemies can gloat and bask in your back-fatness.

Susan sez: Does anyone in the Valley wear Manolos? Joking aside, Kim's post is worth a read.

From Emergence Marketing: "According to a recent Nielsen report:
"RSS users are significantly more engaged in online news than non-users, visiting an average of 10.6 news sites compared with 3.4 news sites for non-users...Not only do RSS users visit more news Web sites than non-users, they also visit those sites more frequently. RSS users visited the top 20 news Web sites nearly three times as often as non-users and all other news Web sites four times as often. This means that sites outside of the top 20 properties may be among the greatest beneficiaries of RSS. "

Another interesting tidbit is that among the RSS users who understood the technology, 78% were male..."

Fascinating, eh?

Scott Johnson announced the new list of Feedster's Top 500 blogs this week (and blogged about it here). I'm admiring the lovely--and clever--tag cloud of terms down the side of the (very long) list, but I'm even more interested in the unexpected blogs in the top 100--there are a whole lot of blogs I've never read, nor heard of--which makes me hope this is one way out of the big boys bubble chamber.

Some of the surprises (to me)
#18: Spacefem.com Feminist Of The Day

#19: flagrantdisregard
# 35: knittyBlog
#45: National Center for Science Education

Feedster's kindly provided an exportable file for Excel analysis--I'd love to see Tristan Louis analyze the breakdown of the Top 500 by software provided, network affiliation, etc.

Del.icio.us just put up a completely new site.
Andrew Krucoff is off for a month in Israel.
Minority Rapport: Fresh takes on social media/software--my new blog read.
VC Steve Brotman on early social networkfounder Bo Peabody's book Lucky or Smart.
Coming up: Competitive study of search in Chinese market.

Winer: "Arrrgh, I plugged my new iPod into my old Mac and lost everything on it."
Wired: Kevin Kelleher story--Who's afraid of Google? Everyone.

CNet says GoogleBase was "awash in porm spam" till the problem was fixed earlier this week. However, CNET said "With the filter turned off, the amount of adult content on Google Base was staggering considering Google only launched the tool a week ago. A News.com search on the terms "XXX" and "XXX webcam" turned up more than 14,000 results each, including numerous listings under "XXX teen webcam."

Susan sez: I checked GoogleBase out this am-- XXX now has 451 results, about half on the first page clearly porn, XXX webcam has just 7--all porn-- and XXX teen webcam has 2--both porn, of course.
But here's the more fun comparison of data entered in the base:

Technology:

iPod has 277,555
Blogs has 2,627
Podcasting has 280
XBox has 242
XBox 360 has 121

Stuff for sale:
Cars-- 985, 0945

Houses--229,485
Stuff for your driveway(!)--17,213
And for your dog--71, 014

Activities:
Baseball --69,248
Sex -- 17,027
Harry Potter--8,333
Personals -- 8,252

Basketball--68,985
Skiing -- 886

People:
George Bush -- 2,181
Britney Spears -- 107
Bill Gates--96
David Beckham--42

Looks like the local classifieds to me folks--the data in GoogleBase seems to be replicating the same crappy listings we see everywhere--anyone have better news to report?

2005 was the year when I went through the biggest number of changes, ever. Given how full my life is right now, I have a lot to be thankful for--not only today, but every day.
Here's a short list of some people--and things-- I am thankful for:

• Family and friends: Zack, Nancy, Ralph, Sidney, Amy, Lori, BJ, Randy, Peter, Ellen, Mary, Lisa W, Andrew N and many others.
• The 5ive team: Steven, you rock--Kurt, Richard, Jory, ditto.
• Colleagues: Too many to list, but I hope you know who you are.
• Work: We're working with some good companies on interesting projects.
• Intellectual challenges and problem-solving: I am always learning, and the conversation never stops.
• California: I'm living in one of the most beautiful places on the planet. Every day I feel lucky to be here.
• Blogging and writing: This year, I went from one blog to several and started writing poetry again after many years.
• Chances to help others--always an honor.

• Yoga and meditation: Martin and Lori, thank you for what you have shown me.
• The pets: The cat is the boss of the dog. They both are the boss of me.
  
• R: You know why.
• Zack: You get called out twice because you are the best son I could ever wish for...and an terrific person.
  

"Last week my 11-year-old came in and said she needed a JumpDrive to transfer digital files back and forth from school, and who buys it? My wife."
-- Paul Rand, chief development and innovation officer at communications firm Ketchum

The Business Week article on Dell, Samsung and Best Buy's new interest in marketing to women is full of catchy sound bites, data nuggets, and tips on how to make your store decor more appealing to suburban moms(take that with a grain of salt.)
Of course, one hopes the authors came across some of the terrific women-authored tech/gadget blogs out there-- ShinyShiny, TechieDiva, and Barb Dybwad's Geeked (also at Engadget)--as they researched this just in time for the holidays story.
After all, journalists are supposed to be smarter than consumer electronics marketing people--right?

One of the ah-hah! moments of the last three months is recognizing that one of the best ways for a digital media business to reach an audience is to stop trying to be a destination--
The (new) web we are moving into, the one some of us are already sick of calling Web 2.0, is both aggregated (think newsreader and personalized start page) and distributed (the same data can be found in more than one place, in more than one platform).
On a tactical level, this means that web sites that focus on improving their content, updating more frequently, recruiting users through community, etc. are missing half the picture--the half that says that if you issue APIs for your site's products and services, allow remixes, encourage--no, help--users tag your data--and RSS-ify everything--you'll be far ahead of the game and grow links--and audience--like crazy because your discoverability will soar. In other words, you need to not only improve your destination, you need to move off it.
With big media companies, the fear of letting data go into the ozone is often great--after all, mainstream media--outside of investigative journalism--is often about beautifully packaged, highly filtered points of view--as unique and distinctive as possible. The cost and effort involved in these products is often so great the idea of releasing assets--like so many red balloons--seems daunting.
And yet the user-driven successes of the past few years--the slashdots, the flickrs, the wikipedias--show that the greatest access and therefore the greatest exposure--come from distributed, remixed content that's linked and distributed across the net--personalized to fit, if you will, everyone's individual experience of Web 2.0.
Big media, if you want to catch up to your audience, you have to let go.

Update: In the middle of writing this, came across similar thoughts from Dorian Benkoil, NYC blogger and Corante columnist--worth a read, for sure.

I've been cross-posting with MacManus, Arrington , Clavier, et al for forever, so it was a pleasure to join the Web 2.0 workgroup in October. Now, here's an update on the members:

Analysis & Trends
Read/WriteWeb, Dion Hinchcliffe,
Susan Mernit's Blog, Web 2.0 Explorer

Companies & Products
TechCrunch, SolutionWatch, eHub

Design & Usability
WeBreakStuff, Bokardo,
ParticleTree, Emily Chang

VC & Business

Jeff Clavier, Nivi

Podcasting
PodTech, Web 2.0 Show

Tech & Development
Programmable Web, CrunchNotes, Librarystuff

Commentary
Scripting News, HorsePigCow

It makes me happy without compare to see some major (commercial) media companies following the lead of the BBC and providing content that can be remixed with tools and/or APIs and then redistributed. The Washington Post has just taken the plunge and launched Post Remix, a place to share and showcase the good stuff.
Some of the (first) examples Adrian Holovaty and Jim Brady offer:

• News Cloud, which is a tag cloud of Post stories that lets you browse stories by keyword.
• Ripped from the Headlines!, a daily news quiz created automatically from headline feeds.
• washingtonpost.com search results via RSS, which provides RSS feeds for search terms on our site.

Susan sez: Here's some free advice--If you're a big media company and you want to see your Google Page Rank and blogosphere buzz influence go up, there is NO BETTER WAY than to distribute your content via RSS, allow users to tag data, and permit limited-use mashups.

(Via cyberjournalist.net)

Designer Michael Bierut has an interesting post about design and innovation at The Design Observer. The short version would be that businesses--and organizational development teams--are swapping out the term design for the far sexier code word "Innovation."
Bierut writes: "It's not hard to see why innovation is becoming the design world's favorite euphemism. Design sounds cosmetic and ephemeral; innovation sounds energetic and essential. Design conjures images of androgynous figures in black turtlenecks wielding clove cigarettes; innovators are forthright fellows with their shirtsleeves rolled up, covering whiteboards with vigorous magic-markered diagrams, arrows pointing to words like "Results!" But best of all, the cult of innovation neatly sidesteps the problem that has befuddled the business case for design from the beginning. Thomas Watson Jr.'s famous dictum "good design is good business" implies that there's good design and there's bad design; what he doesn't reveal is how to reliably tell one from the other. Neither has anyone else. It's taken for granted that innovation, however, is always good. "

Susan sez: Reading this post made me think about the number of times in the past month people have talked about wanting to hire designers who are "really Web 2.0" types--and how what they always seem to mean is they use Ajax.

AOL "Online Shopping Cities" survey reports that San Francisco--for the first time in 4 years--slipped down the list of online shoppers and spenders to number 22 and off the top 5 list for the first time.
Susan sez: Is it because everyone's recycling their stuff on eBay and Craig's list?

Here's the top (online) shopping cities list, just in time for your rush to the mall:
------------------------------------------------ --------------------
1. Tampa/St. Petersburg/Sarasota
2. San Diego
3. Philadelphia
4. Houston
5. Miami/Ft. Lauderdale
6. Washington, DC
7. New York
8. Dallas/Ft. Worth
9. Chicago
10. Pittsburgh

Who knew?

Jazz musician Ned Otter has built a gallery for 50-odd photos taken by his father, photog Robert Otter. These evocative black and white images of NYC harken back to a quieter downtown, filled with beatniks and bobbysoxers, and they are nice.

(Via Alex Vassifer)

" My interest is to build the great library. That was the goal I set for myself 25 years ago. It is now technically possible to live up to the dream of the Library of Alexandria. Folks are using the Internet as a library, and they're using it many times every day. We're seeing much more traffic on the Internet then we ever did in our public library system, but what's available on the Internet isn't the best we have to offer. Almost everything on the Internet has been written since 1996 -- and most of it has been written for the Internet. Do you know what's carved above the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh? -- 'FREE TO THE PEOPLE' -- what a goal! I can believe in this! At the Internet Archive, we think of our mission as 'universal access to all knowledge.'
That should be carved over our door. If we do this right, it will be remembered as one of the great things humans have done, up there with the Library of Alexandria, Gutenberg's press and putting a man on the moon."

--Brewster Kahle, founder Internet Archive and Open Content Alliance, speaking in The San Francisco Chronicle about efforts to digitize the world's great libraries.

Nichelle Stephens sent me a post from MediaBistro highlighting the news that Gawker Media's shutting down gambling site OddJack and laying off the editor.
Interesting, this unsuccessful site--whose numbers, said Denton, were "just never really there," had 420,000 pageviews and about 180,000 visitors during its peak traffic month of September--probably not too far from the traffic some small regional newspaper sites receive (draw your own inferences from that dig, folks.)

Update: Lock says my stats were wrong, plain wrong--the real data is here and suggests that OddJack actually got fewer visitors than a Fire Department pancake breakfast.

Ethan Zuckerman reports that Global Voices has won a Best of the Blogs award from Deutsche Welle. Judge Lisa Stone said: " In my opinion, Global Voices is the most important blog in the English speaking world, bar none. This site is more than an up-to-the-minute guide and encyclopedia of the international blogosphere. Global Voices Online is a mega-blog the covers free speech by a global citizenry--and covers it well. It's so important at a time when so many international voices are denied free speech by their governments and, in the United States, a very few, English-speaking, first-world media conglomerates dominate and determine the ownership, distribution and content of news. Kudos to founders Rebecca MacKinnon and Ethan Zuckerman, and all the writers on the site. "

Kudos, indeed.

It's that time of year when AOL is inevitably readying its layoff packages-there hasn't been a fourth quarter in the last 4 years that wasn't the time for AOL dusting, cleaning and trimming--but the story from inside is that while the cuts are being planned now, they won't be implemented till Q1 '06--possibly to avoid those AOL lays people off at holiday time tales?
On a related note, I heard that AOL execs are reconsidering their multiple portal strategy and worrying that some of the traffic going to AOL web properties should better go to AOL.com, all the better for a concentrated, targeted set of data--and users.
Does this mean that someday soon Netscape, MovieFone, and perhaps even Mapquest are going to become landing pages for the new AOL?
As one insider said to me, "They just never really got multi-brand."

I started reading Fresno Famous as a way to feed my (now gone) Kevin Federline/Britney Spears gossip addiction and stayed cause editor Jarah Euston is a good writer and a chronicler of the town's (small) music and art scene. Now she's quoted in a "all the smart kids are fleeing town" story in the LA Times--congrats, Jarah.

Tom Formenski's spurred some wise rules for workers from long-time free agent Mitch Ratcliffe:

• Carry and use your own cell phone/number for business
• Carry and use your own email address even at work
• Carry and use your own health insurance
• Incorporate and work on contract rather than as an employee
• Carry and use your own hardware, building tech expenses into your compensation

Susan sez: While not everyone is going to do all this (no one wants to pay for health insurance), putting even one or two of these suggestions into practice makes obvious good sense.

KPUA: AOL cofounder Steve Case invests $10.2 million dollars in Maui Land and Pineapple Company, giving him 3.5 million shares of the land holding and resort company.

Marc Orchant reports on the new AOL Pictures, saying the old You've Got Pictures service has some fancy new Ajax apps, and an offer to give new users AOL 100 free 4x6 prints as sign-up incentives per AOL account/screen name. AOL GM David Liu emphasized the integrated capabilities of the new site, which allows photo-sharing between AOL Mail, the AIM service, AOL Journals and AIM Blogs.

Danny Sullivan hacks AOL stats using the new Google site maps tools. Here's how--and more here.

Via NYTimes: Steve Case-backed Lime, a media company "devoted to new-age lifestyle programs on subjects like organic food, hybrid cars and alternative medicine" gets mucho press. Deepak Chopra, Danny Seo and Rodney Yee are the celeb gurus.