I'm on vacation, visiting an old friend and logged into her computer to wish everyone a Happy New Year!
Some highlights of my year:
--Going to work at Yahoo!
--Building the team and Yahoo! Personals and working with them
--Having a great boss who can really drive the business
--Seeing blogging move totally into the mainstream and vlogging take off in so major a way everyone forgot it's the basis for YouTube

--Watching friends' companies and projects take off--in this boom year this is too many to list so quickly
--Accomplishing my goal of better balancing work and life--the 13.1 mile half marathon, the yoga classes, the away for the weekend time with friends, stronger connections with family--were all wonderful aspects of 2006
--Resolving to focus more on my health and weight: down 11 pounds and committed to losing alot more through sensible diet and consistent exercise

Resolutions of 2007 to no doubt follow--meanwhile, enjoy your evening and travel safe.

Leeann Prescott at Hitwise says that Google Blog Search traffic is overtaking Technorati's. She writes:
"This week Hitwise data show that the market share of visits to Google Blog Search surpassed visits to Technorati for the week ending 12/23/06. Google Blog Search began catching up to Technorati in October, when Google placed a link to Blog Search on the Google News home page, causing a 168% surge in market share for Google Blog Search over a two week period (week ending 10/14/06 vs. week ending 10/28/06)."
Mike Arrington at TechCrunch, however, takes a look at the Comsore data and says:
"Comscore tells a much different story, and one that makes little sense given the facts. The most recent Comscore data (November) says Technorati had 3 million page views v. Google Blog Search?s 1 million. But Comscore also shows highly erratic Technorati data over the last twelve months, swinging from a high of 22 million page views in April 2006 to a low of 1 million in December 2005."TechCrunch commentator Andrew posts a link to Quantcast's data and wonders "if it's accurate that Google Blogsearch has a lot more regular users than Technorati (relatively)"
Susan sez: This makes me wonder about how Technorati's strategy needs to evolve. Clearly, any shopping around of the company hasn't resulted in a deal, despite the huge number of roll ups going on, and now a big Gorilla can use the power of the homepage (TPHP, to coin an acroynm) to drive users there. What's a indie to do?

Technorati's already deep down the road with partners like Edelman and Associated Press, but they've never actually-IMHO--pulled together a strong white label and partner strategy.
If it were my company--or my client--I'd advise them to take a hard look at how they can build a partner strategy that will drive audience growth in a way Google cannot match.

The sex blogging blogosphere is in a swirl because that darn Google algo's recalibrated something--and it looks like a batch of sex-positive blogs are suddenly missing in action; Some of the coverage:

• Google "disappears" sex blogs? Something's broken. (Boingboing)
• Will Google Kill Comstock Films? (Tony Comstock's Blog)
• google is broken (violet blue)
• Chronicle Write disappears in porn clampdown (Valleywag)
• some thing less pretty and more dumb (pretty dumb things)

Update: I just checked and the Comstock problem seems to no longer be valid--and violet blue comes right up at the top of her Google search, but Chelsea Girl is still MIA.--And some folks say this is part of some deep parsing of data Google has going on, to what end, unknown.

"Word-of-mouth marketing is more important today than it's ever been. It's not so much about traditional media anymore: print, radio or TV. The word of friends and family is valued 1.5 times more than it was in the 1970s. Consumers are more confident in taking decision in their own hands,"

--Word of mouth marketing consultant Ed Keller, quoted in an article on viral aka "buzz" marketing in the New York Times.

"We believe there are several trends that could push either AOL or Yahoo towards a major transaction, with each other or with another competitor. Although not without its problems, we believe that an AOL-Yahoo combination is one of the more logical combinations in this arena."
and
"Our models suggest purchasing AOL would be accretive for Yahoo! in year 2, even if it were to pay $18bn (20x 2007E EBITDA) for only the advertising portion of its business and assuming only $100mn in cost savings. Purchasing all of AOL would be even more accretive given the low multiple of its access business, but this seems less likely."

--Merrill Lynch media analyst Jessica Rief Cohen, writing in a note titled "Is 2007 the year AOL and Yahoo are in play?" on what she sees as the (potential) value of Yahoo acquiring (substantial)assets from AOL.

(Via Paidcontent posts here and here.)

Susan sez: Speculations about former portal businesses' mergers and acquisitions is never-ending, but there's clear evidence another sprint of consolidation is underway and that both these large businesses could potentially be in play. As both a Yahoo and a former AOLer, I have my own thoughts about the value of this scenario, but I'm going to have to keep them private since I am pretty committed to not speculating about my employer(but clearly committed to pointing out items of note that catch my attention.)

Saw the announcement tonight that McClatchy, the third-largest U.S. newspaper chain by circulation, is selling its flagship newspaper service--the (Minneapolis) Star-Tribune for $530 million dollars, almost half of the $1.2 billion they paid 8 years ago when they acquired it. Earlier this year, McClatchy bought and flipped many--but not all--of the Knight-Ridder papers, making a profit that will be offset, according to Reuters, by the loss on the Star-Tribune and making the deal actually worth $690 million. McClatchy said they plans to use pay down a portion of their projected $3.3 billion debt with the sale proceeds.
According to Bloomberg, McClatchy will now have 31 newspapers in 29 markets from Anchorage to Miami with 2.76 million in daily and 3.45 million Sunday circulation. In addition, they will move from being the country's second-largest newspaper company to the third-largest , based on circulation. (Gannett Co., owner of USA Today, is the largest, followed by the Tribune Co., owner of the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, among others.)
The New York Times interviewed Gary Pruitt, McClatchy CEO, and quoted him saying: "It was a drag on the bottom line and we felt we would do better without it. We could also pay down debt and be more flexible to make digital investments, the quality of the other papers could be improved and the price we would get would be enhanced by this unique tax position it was in."

Former Trib staffer Steve Yelvington gets a quote, too:" We're in the middle of a painful, large-scale restructuring of the news business, and investor confidence has fallen sharply....Today's Star Tribune is no less of a quality product than the newspaper of eight years ago. What's different is the world around it."

Susan sez: One can't help but note Pruitt's comment on wanting money not only to pay down debt, but for "digital investments." Given that some of the local Knight-Ridder acquisitions don't really have web sites--let alone revenue producing ones--one might speculate that McClatchy wants to maximize its local ad network, especially since they have a set of Knight Ridder classified products to deploy, but then it could also make sense for them to join the Yahoo network and use the money to develop products to go after audiences--like young adults--that newspaper companies salivate for, but do not have.

Comments some writers have made about newspaper companies needing to rebalance their portfolios ring true here, but even more true is the demonstration of how newspapers--once the core communications devices for their communities--have moved away from the center and are struggling to maintain a space and a daily relevance that other information formats--like alerts, RSS feeds,blog posts and video uploads more easily command.

"The problem I have isn't a presence problem, it's an identity problem. I have too many identities! I know a larger subset of people that have that problem rather than a 'presence managemen' problem. And I think I have a solution: a single identity for all networks."

--Phoneboy, blogging on the need to develop standards for centralized,controllable identity servers (Susan sez: And manage your privacy at the same time!)

(Via Phil Windley)

"Playing princess is not the issue. The issue is 25,000 Princess products. When one thing is so dominant, then it's no longer a choice: it's a mandate, cannibalizing all other forms of play. There's the illusion of more choices out there for girls, but if you look around, you'll see their choices are steadily narrowing."

-- Lyn Mikel Brown, co-author, with Sharon Lamb, of Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters From Marketers? Schemes,quoted in a excellent article in the New York Times by Peggy Orenstein on how playing princess (and dressing in pink) has become the dominant fantasy of girls 4-8 years old--and what that implies about feminism and gender in our culture today.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays, everyone!
Enjoy this sweet drawing from the collection of the infatigable Swapatorium

"Bringing food to people for cash on the holidays is its own special level of hell. Nothing quite reminds you of the pure and unadulterated suckage of your life like the sound of other people having fun,or what appears to be fun, or even if it isn't fun certainly isn't running interference between people and their filet mignon and béarnaise sauce. on culturally mandated days of fun-having. It's no small wonder why waiters get bitterer than badly cooked broccoli rabe, given enough time. That loud rush you hear in your ears as you're steaming the milk for that privileged bitch at table eight's cappuccino isn't the machine's steam; it's the sound of exactly how badly your life sucks ass."

--NYC blogger Chelsea Girl, writing on why stripping on Christmas ("Being the It Girl at the Best Party on Earth") is better than slinging plates.

So I've been on vacation since Friday night and am relishing the idea of just being local through the next 10 days--no trips East, no rushing around.
Plans are to see friends and family, do a lot of walking and cycling, do some yoga, and see as many movies as possible.
Here's the hit list of what I've seen--with my appraisals--so far--and another list of movies I am considering:

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan: I love Sascha Cohen and this movie made me shout with laughter and cringe with embarassment, usually fairly closely together.
The Pursuit of Happyness: It's A Wonderful Life for the new millenium--Will Smith and the well-chosen cast save a sappy story from total sappiness.

Eragon: Can any dragon fantasy movie be all bad? This one is fun.
Blood Diamond: DeCaprio's performance is impressive in a well shot movie that is part political manifesto, part drama. Well worth the bucks.

Not yet seen, but on my list
Volver: Almodovar is a personal favorite, so this is a must see.
The Holiday: How could a chick flick with Jack Black be bad?

Dreamgirls: Can't wait to see Eddie Murphy.
Little Children: I am a Kate Winslet fan, so this makes the list.
Short Bus: Hedwig rocked, this is a must see that may have already gone to video in my area
The Good Shepard: How could I pass up this DeNiro flick? What a cast.

Charlotte's Web: Some pig. And Dakota Fanning.
Sweetland: A small, indie movie that sounds promising.
For Your Consideration: Can I stand to watch yet another Christopher Guest farce? Hell, yes.

If you have any other movie recommendations or pans, comments and tips welcomed.

"My first instinct, without having seen anything, was that we probably shouldn't do that. My thought was that even though it's going on the Internet, it's still representing NBC. But I hadn't seen it yet. So I said it would depend on how dirty it was."

There's An auction of fine art + craft to benefit the family of James Kim ,organized by sisters Lisa Congdon and Stephanie Barnes and their mother Gerrie Congdon about to happen online. 100% of the auction proceeds will go to the Kim Family Fund.
Auction items will be available for bidding starting January 3, 2007. Bidding ends January 7th.
The Kim family loss is tragic; if you're interested in helping this family, this seems one good way to do so.
(Via citymama)

Getting some amusing links from friends:

• Blueprint Ventures Snoman VC card
• OfficeMax personalized elf card
• Stowe's chain of greetings

So dozens of bloggers are posting responses to 5 things you don't know about me, the tagging meme Jeff Pulver kicked off this time around.
Some of my favorites:

• Jason: Sometimes I go to the most disgusting dive of a casino (called Hollywood Park) by the Los Angeles airport and play poker alone for six hours with the dregs of humanity--and love it.
• Dr. Dave W: I hate fish so much that even before I was a vegetarian, I'd sometimes lie that I have an allergy to them. (I like feeding fish, however.) I will leave the table (without making a fuss) if seated across from someone reverse engineering a lobster or crab.
• Steve Rubel: I am an absolute neat freak. My office has no paper in it other than a thin Moleskine Cahier notebook which I use in meetings. My apt and office are both spotless.
• Danny Sullivan: I restored all the wooden floors in our old house, the wooden staircase and opened up four fireplaces. If I never see a dust mask or sander again (I burned through three of them), I'll be happy.
• Jackie Danicki: I was utterly besotted with Madonna when I was six, much to the horror of my parents. I put posters of her on my bedroom wall (some of them got yanked down for being ?dirty?), somehow got myself a pair of white lace fingerless gloves, and was totally convinced that I, too, could move to New York with only $35 in my pocket and survive.
• Ian Kennedy: I have over 1,000 hours of bootleg cassettes of the Grateful Dead in my garage

Find more here. And here at the meta meme of Tailrank.

"Women are almost two and one half times as likely to be channeled into staff jobs like H.R. and communications than into operating roles where they would be generating revenue and managing profit and loss. When more women hold line positions, there will be more women top earners and C.E.O.'s."
--Ilene H. Lang, president of Catalyst, in a NY Times article exploring a new Catalyst study that says that only about 16 percent of corporate officers at Fortune 500 companies are women, and only 76 boards among the Fortune 500 have three or more female members--despite 20 years of equal opportunity and feminism.

"The truth is, left alone, I think the situation would get worse. I think the reason you see roughly 2 percent of Fortune 500 companies run by female C.E.O.'s is because there has been some discussion about the issue. If the topic didn't continue to be highlighted as important, I do think that percentage would slide backward."
-- Autodesk CEO Carol Bartz, quoted in the same story.

Susan sez: The study reports at the rate things are going, it could take another 4o years for women to achieve parity with men in corporate jobs--yet one more good reason to start your own business!

Rich Skrenta blog-tagged me, so here are five things you may not know about me:

1. I edited a small-press magazine for three years just at the end of college. Hand Book got all sorts of grants that allowed myself and my co-editor, Rochelle Ratner, to publish 3 issues before we realized that distributing the thing was going to swamp us. However, I developed a passion for 'zines that played right into the obsession with the Net I'd develop 12 years later.

2. Doing laundry is one of my small pleasures. The idea that in a couple of hours I can take a wrinkled, smelly heap of cloth and turn it into warm, neatly folded clothes and sheets thrills me every time. And no, don't ask me to do yours.

3. I have a 100-lb. American bulldog named Winston and a black cat named Panther. Winston follows me from room to room when he's not asleep. Until a few weeks ago--although he's lived with me for 10 years--Panther didn't really like me. Now he's following me from room to room as well.

4. I love trashy sci-fi, fantasy and horror movies. When it comes to flicks like Vlad the Impaler and An American Haunting, Netflix is my connection. I also love jazz, opera, fado and flamenco--and Tiimbaland ( Sexyback).

5. I started working when I was 17. My jobs included camp counselor, artist's model, babysitter, book binder, waitress, writing teacher, and library clerk. My favorite college job was writing teacher--I taught poetry and journalism to high school students at Buck's Rock Camp.

Bonus: Check out the Blog Tag Tree

I tag Maryamie, Elisa, Rebecca, Mark and Salim

"Individuals are changing the nature of the information age, that the creators and consumers of user-generated content are transforming art and politics and commerce, that they are the engaged citizens of a new digital democracy. From user-generated images of Baghdad strife and the London Underground bombing to the macaca moment that might have altered the midterm elections to the hundreds of thousands of individual outpourings of hope and poetry and self-absorption, this new global nervous system is changing the way we perceive the world. And the consequences of it all are both hard to know and impossible to overestimate. "

--Time editor Richard Stengel, explaining why the populace, yep, all of us, are Time's Person of the the Year for 2006

(Susan sez: Yeah, I know this was a predictable choice, but Rick said it so elegantly I could not resist.)

Spent the weekend seeing an old friend, walking, going to the movies to see Blood Diamond (well worth the time). And of course, opening Hannukah presents and wrapping holiday gifts.

And then, of course, I found out that I was Time's Person of the Year (along with all the rest of you), and I had go back and think about how I learned about Dave Winer waay back in the day, in 1999. (In 2000, I wanted AOL to buy Blogger (they didn't, obviously) , and later, in 2003, as I started to think about blogging myself, I got schooled with my old boss Jeff Jarvis and Dan Gillmor . The big helper for me though was Frank Paynter suggesting to Winer he invite me to moderate a users panel at Bloggercon 1--to say that conference was life-changing for me would be pretty accurate. )

And that train of thought brought me back to today, to friendster and YouTube and flickr and wikipedia, all evidence of how the information paradigm--not to mention the ways we communicate with our friends--have so radically--and interestingly--begun to change.

Rafat Ali reports that Jim Bankoff, EVP, Consumer & Publisher Services; Joe Redling, President, AOL Mobile, Customer Management & Paid Services, and Chairman & CEO, AOL International; and John Buckley, EVP, Corporate Communications are all leaving AOL because they can--i.e.--they have clauses in their contracts that make slamming the door on their way out at this very moment possible.
Jim and Joe are long-term AOLers of the longest standing; Joe started back in the day, and Jim began as an intern in the AOL Greenhouse, working for Ted Leonsis, back in the early 90s and just kept making it work, moving up in the ranks. Jim was my co-worker and then my boss at Netscape and briefly--but importantly-- my boss at AOL --and I consider him one of the best of breed for the AOL mothership and a decent guy. More importantly, he was one of the people who could make a decision and make things happen and keep order among the factions and stay afloat himself and...all the things that so few people can do in a big company gripped by constant change.
Jim contributed alot to AOL, IMHO, as did Joe, and this is the changing of the guard, for sure.

Happy trails, Jim--can't wait to see what your next adventure is!

Yesterday was one of those really good days at work.
We're RITE-studying a new set of feature concepts, and alot of the day was in the usability lab, watching the researcher show paper prototypes to subjects.
It was interesting, but they didn't get some of the features we had hoped they would.
After the sessions, the team sat around talking about what we'd learned and the problems we were trying to solve. Suddenly, we came up with this very strong idea, a new solution no one has done.
Tons of discussion and white boarding began.
I wrote the ideas up.
There was more white-boarding and a whole new way to (possibly) solve the problem.
Today the UED team is paper prototyping the new ideas.
Monday we're testing again and we'll see how these concepts go over.
If these ideas fly, we could have something that would be very cool.
I left work completely jazzed about the thinking we'd done and happy about the problem-solving, the buy-in, and the ownership everyone displayed.
This kind of product development is what thrills me. Can't wait to see the RITE studies on Monday!

"In other words, in the post-network economy, (re)learning how to create value is going to be, in large part, about getting messy. (snip). Forget about economies and cost-cutting and trimming the fat - because that stuff's a commodity. It's not a basis for any kind of advantage.
What is a basis for advantage is exploding what was clean and streamlined yesterday: unlocking new possibilities for value creation which are messy because interactions at the edge are richer, deeper, riskier, and, ultimately, human."

--Umair from bubblegum generation, writing on why MySpace trumps L inkedIn as a next-gen community play precisely because it's messy and non-linear and allow users to create communites and value.

• Om Malik: Linked In co-founder Konstantin Guericke jumps to phone startup Jaxtr. (Wow!)
• Techcrunch: Glam Media announces Hearst distribution partnership,a new $18MM in Serices C funding(bringing t otal to $30M) and new CNET exec investor. And that's just today. Rafat says: "Glam is becoming what iVillage was to Hearst before it got bought by NBC."
• Aaron Schwartz: How Google keeps employees by treating them like kids. Or not.
• Matt McAlister: That Valleywag is so goddamned good now that Denton's writing it. (And Fred Wilson thinks so too).

"I suspect Second Life is largely a "Try Me" virus, where reports of a strange and wonderful new thing draw the masses to log in and try it, but whose ability to retain anything but a fraction of those users is limited. The pattern of a Try Me virus is a rapid spread of first time users, most of whom drop out quickly, with most of the dropouts becoming immune to later use."

--NYU prof Clay Shirky, writing on Valleywag about Second Life's user metrics and how counting trial users for any service just isn't the same thing as a committed installed base.

The news stories are reporting the traditional pre-holiday layoffs at Dulles-based AOL focused on call center employees, but Valleywag reports that four of the company's most senior executives--Joe Redling, John McKinley, Kevin Conroy and Jim Bankoff, were let go.
Assuming this is true, new boss Randy Falco's removed some of the best senior talent AOL had to offer--people nimble enough to survive countless rounds of layoffs, endless shifts in positioning and strategy, and more senior management rallies around the cry "We've hit bottom and it's gonna get better!" than any human should be forced to endure (yeah, those hearty salaries are some consolation.)
Of course, this just means anyone in this highly driven crew who doesn't choose to take early retirement in Middleburg, VA will get recycled into the post-portal bigco and hot startup universe, resurfacing somewhere relevant within the year, so it's all one great chain of being in the end, anyway, isn't it?
Except for Falco, of course, who gets to reinvent a fading company for an angry parent in an effort to save shareholder value.

Update: Rafat Ali, who has ties to many AOL execs, reports that Valleywag is incorrect and these four horsemen are galloping on--at least for now.

Bitter but funny: AOL layoff T-shirts on flickr

This is Rex the Humper, a USB stick with dog nature.
Yep, I want it.
And you can watch the pup hump the port here .

Perfect post for hump day, huh?

(Via digital tokoyo)

"I think my disorientation in the Hearst Building lies in my barely-conscious knowledge accumulated over the past seven years, as I moved from East Coast to West, through boom and bust, from corporation to start-up and now back in a place of co-existence with what I was running from. I could call my stalker the corporate world, but that's too simple. I think I was running from something endemic in the corporate media structure; an insistance on being right. And now I see pockets of humility, people questioning, people willing to knock down walls and open their space to get a better view of what is actually occuring, not what they say is. "

-- BlogHer co-founder Jory des Jardins, writing in a post titled "The Conversion from East Coast Neurotic to West Coast Empath Part II: The Shift in Media" about a November visit to an old media NY magazine empire and the shift in attitudes and vibes she experienced.

"Google Answers is gone because Google isn't in the people business, they're in the computer programming business."

-- Matt Haughey, quoted in Anil Dash's analysis of Why Ask Metafilter works and Google Answers did not.

(Another juicy Anil quote: "Google doesn't have a community to leverage"--which Anil follows with a discussion about place, rules, and moderation.)

Susan sez: Anil's written a tremendous post for everyone interested in building community--I'd love to hear, however--if readers agree with Anil's assumptions about Google's failings--and where they see Y! Answers fitting in to Anil's rules.

Bonus quote: At MiFi, Jim says

Google: Don't be evil
MetaFilter: Don't be an ass

The NYTimes--the most frequently visited newspaper Web site in the U.S-- announced today that they have integrated a new sharing tool into most of their free new stories that allows readers to post content directly to Digg, Facebook, and Newsvine via embedded links. The tool also creates a permanent URL for that story for bloggers who want to link there.

The relevant quote from bd person Christine Topalian from the Seattle PI story is :"The discussions are happening on the other sites, but there is still a way to link back to the site. So it is really to build awareness around the articles with users who may or may not have heard about the article." Back in the day, Dave Winer got the Times to add RSS feeds early on--

Of course, one wonders why other services-- del.icio.us , tailrank, whatever--aren't embedded--but it's still a move many newspapers, if not most-will now copy--and it keeps the Times in the forefront of online newspaper innovation(okay, I know it sounds like an oxymoron, but hey, it's not.)

Susan sez: When will the Times open up article commenting, in effect letting readers post their content to the site?

"I think of them as a handbag with a heartbeat."

--New Yorker Robin Bowden, describing the tiny dogs in fancy clothes--Yorkshire terriers, Cavalier King Charles spaniels, French bulldogs and papillons--that the New York Times says chic women are carrying around the city in their megapurses.

BizWeek profiles Paid Content and Rafat Ali. Rags to riches, they say, but with lotsa hard work in between.
MTVNetworks starts a new *guy* brand--COMEDY CENTRAL, Spike TV, TV Land, AddictingClips.com, Atom Films, IFILM, GameTrailers.com and XFire in the mix.
NYTimes: 10 million invites a month go through Evite.com and the Nos all carry reasons.
Jon Strauss: Yahoo guy publishes Terry Semel's all hands talk, doesn't hold back (Yep, it's the culture that brought you the peanut butter thingy).

"Can Yahoo! build a fast enough, smart enough search engine that can figure out that I live in the Bay Area and then query upcoming.org for a concert of a band that I'm interested in and integrate it back with their other search results? Can their technology handle the task at hand?

In order for Yahoo! to turn the ship around they need to do one simple thing. Execute."

-- Thomas Hawk, writing on Seeking Alpha and asking whether Yahoo! can truly develop its social media and social search tools in a way that will meet Wall Street growth wishes.

For those of us inside Yahoo and not on the VP and above call, last night's scanning the news and the blogosphere for additional detail beyond Terry Semel's memo felt kind of like sitting in front of the TV watching the late-night election returns roll in--bits and pieces of additional details emerging, pierced out from somewhere.

Paid Content and Valleywag and the WSJreport that Lloyd Braun is out of the Y! Media Group; a friend called to say he'd heard some other group heads were also leaving. Terry's blog post suggested that Zod will end up owning more of the platform teams that now live within product--but what that exactly means just isn't clear.
Apparently, according to another story, the Yahoo Network within the audiences team will will include the media unit formerly led by Braun, and the Yahoo home page and communications products and Jeff Weiner will lead that team.
I suppose by the end of today and later into the next quarter, there will be a better sense of what the new plans are and where the investment focus will be but last night it was all random bits of data being put together.
My own thoughts are that Yahoo! needs to move on this pretty quickly to build momentum and keep people focused; the fact there is no head for the Audiences team and they still made this announcement is troubling--but everyone has to know that--and meanwhile, in my world, it's business as usual--we have an interesting release later this month and lots more to get ready to ship.

"In a world of ubiquitous media tools, which is almost here, someone will be on the spot every time."

--Center for Citizen Media founder Dan Gillmor, explaining why professional photojournalists and videoographers are going to be disintermediated by--yes--participatory journalism and those darn camera phones as first on the scene photos become the most valuable images of an event.

Susan sez: This quote is from a wonderfully articulate piece...filled with solid Gillmor insights.

So Om Malik's OMniverse of blogs and podcasts is growing again, this time with the addition of NewTeeVee, a blog about online video in all its myriad goodness. Liz Gannes will lead, with Jackson West, Paul Kapustka (formerly of Advanced IP Pipeline2 and pulvermedia3). Russell Heimlich4 of DVGuru5 and Russell Shaw 6of ZDNet7 joining in.

Om says: "It is a time of confusion, creation and disruption. Which means it is perfect time for a new blog devoted to what Jeff Jarvis describes as 'exploding TV.' A new blog that aspires to make sense of it all, and at the same time has fun doing it. Technologies, companies, people-- everything will be part of the NewTeeVee?s focus. (snip) The new medium is young, and restless, and fun. "

At the same time, more or less, Nick Denton's Valleywag has brought Slate and Wired writer/editor Paul Boutin on as a contributor. Talk about grown-up! Paul's lucid prose is a far cry from some of the sex snark VW did so well in the Nick Douglas days.
Sez Paul: "SVUG is a Gawker property and it's obvious. Witty! Bloggy! Punchy! SHORT! Yet always legally defensible and informed by the AP libel guide. "
Also describes himself as a: "45-year-old guy who lives in Pac Heights with a glamorous tech exec wife with Nob Hill Gazette-worthy connections."

Susan sez: Isn't it a kick how smart individuals can build digital media companies these days and command marketshare and build community with fairly low-cost tools? Oh yes, and it makes me smile that Valleywag is aging up as Om brings in the bright young things.
In matters of taste, no disputem.

"Let's face it, we're not changing the world. We're building a product that helps people buy more crap --and watch porn."

--S eagate CEO Bill Watkins, quoted in Fortune