"Trying to build your life, your career, around a discussion of sex means accepting that you will always have a fringe identity. That no matter how academic, how smart, how clean you keep it, you will always be on the edges of polite society. You will always be in the Pink Ghetto, and you will never be able to escape it."
--Sexerati co-editor Lux Nightmare, writing on the difficulties of talking openly online about sex and sexuality.
(Via Rachael Kramer Bussel's post on NSFW blogging)
It's been a whirlwind 8 hours in San Diego so far, visiting my son for the day--flying back tonight on a late flight and jumping right back into the work week.
It's cool to visit your offspring in another city and discover what a great job he's done at making a life--relationship, school, work all going well.
"What if the right question is: What does an open journalism company look like? How does it work? Because if traditional journalism is a closed system, it's going to be clobbered by an "OK" open system. How can we make that open system 'good enough?' "
--Long-time on-line news vet Steve Yelvington, exploring the question of what the next generation of journalism--the *replacement* will be.
(Via George Johnson--thanks!)
Fred Wilson's post on saying no reminded me of my own intent to write about saying no in my world of developing big scale online dating and social media applications.
In many ways, my job--leading the product development/product management team--is like being the executive chef in a big kitchen--it's my responsibility not only to determine what we will release, but the best order and sequence of what we will do--and where the resources will be applied.
My top-line criteria are clear:
But if I'm clear on all that, why do I spend some much of my time saying No? Often, I say No because
And what kind of projects, you ask, get the Nos? (Well, this is the place where it hurts.)
As someone who spent a lot of her career being the cutting-edge, push the mass market troublemaker, having a job being the one who says No, is an interesting experience--but it is also incredibly cool.
Working with a team of smart people who are passionate about the customer experience, the product AND the business objectives is tremendously fun--and sometimes, completely harrowing.
I've learned that No can cover a myriad of things:
Yep, I say No a lot more than I used to--but it makes it feel so good when I get to say yes.
Written in honor of my one year anniversary at Yahoo! Personals.
Just wanted to thank everyone for their birthday wishes--it was a good day, a good birthday, and much appreciated.
Now, back to work.
Today's my birthday--looking back over the past year, it's been a really good one, one of the best ever, with lots of personal growth, close friends and family and meaningful work. And all that walking, of course.
Here's to another year with more turns in the road...hopefully, mostly good ones.
( image via pinkcakebox on flickr)
A universe of cute. (Okay it is nauseating, but it's Friday, alright?)
(Via digg and emily chang)
(Credit: Image by Kimberly Holden)
So I wonder where Google is going with Orkut ? Last night, I got an email asking me to merge my (long-unused) Orkut log in with one of my Google sign-ins.
I logged into Orkut, made the change, and started thinking about how counting registered users--not just page views--is probably going to become more important to Google as they build their advertising products--and then need to demonstrate additional forms of growth to the market. Registered users and engagement metrics are both criteria that have never matter much to Google--but now, with the rise of MySpace and the amazing engagement metrics it demonstrated--and the shift toward AJAX-ed pages that reload less often, thereby depressing page views, Google seems likely to join the pack counting audience and engagement along with other stats.
Registrations and time spent seem like especially important metrics given the Big G's recent acquisition of YouTube--If I worked at Google, I would be thinking hard about why and how I could integrate aspects of Orkut and YouTube to development and demonstrate social media metrics and growth that would impress the street and scare my competition.
Came across a lovely set of photos from Gothamist/Blue Jake guy Jake Dobkin this morning called Streetsy--yep, they are photo sets of street pix--photo journalism assemblage around NYC that are daily shots and part of a global network aiming to be the larger set of sreet photography in the world.
Here's one of jake's shots--if you like it, there are lots more--(And yes, there is a streetsy flickr group and a marvelous blog of photos sent to streetsy.)
Susan sez: As a student of Victorian studies in a past life, I think alot these days about John Ruskin and the Machine age and the great interest in the Pre Raphaelite movement and hand-crafted, artisan goods. Seems to be we are in a similar space--as we become more and more wired, the value of individual, artistic expression rises--and more people in the culture b ecome interested in creating--and sharing--expressive art, craft, and words.
"This is yet another of the inexorable signs that there is no going back to a world where we can assume that marriage is the main institution that organizes people's lives. Most of these women will marry, or have married. But on average, Americans now spend half their adult lives outside marriage."
--.Stephanie Coontz, director of public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, a nonprofit research group, quoted in a New York Times article exploring the new reality that 51% of all American women are now living without a spouse.
"For better or worse, women are less dependent on men or the institution of marriage. Younger women understand this better, and are preparing to live longer parts of their lives alone or with nonmarried partners. For many older boomer and senior women, the institution of marriage did not hold the promise they might have hoped for, growing up in an 'Ozzie and Harriet' era."
--William H. Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution, quoted in the same article.
Paid Content: Peter Horan, former head of NYT's About.com, is heading to IAC to run their Media & Advertising group--this means that heads of Ask.com, Citysearch, IAC Advertising Solutions, and IAC Consumer Applications and Portals roll up to Peter.
I heard from a n ex-AOL friend last week that Tina Sharkey had left AOL and moved West to lead BabyCenter; Paid Content has the story; I met Tina back in the day at Children's Television Workshop (think Elmo) and she will kill in this job. Welcome to the Bay area!
Robin Wolaner's brand-spankin' new Teebeedee--a web site for baby boomers--has just gone into beta--it's missing some critical features--like being able to link to friends and email others--but it looks like it will be tremendous fun--an interactive magazine of community, content and services for an upscale, we ain't gonna grow old without a fight kind of audience.
Is it unusual to try to live blog the session before yours as a way to manage being a little nervous?
Monday am: There are over 300 people at the idate conference, and everyone is avidly taking notes as Mark Brooks ( Online Personals Watch) gives a state of the state of the online dating industry from his perspective.
Some up and comers aka growing businesses Mark notes from the stats:
° Zencon?s blackpeoplemeet.com
° Manhunt.net
° glesnet
Mark also recommends Quantcast for another stats view, along with Hitwise, Comscore, Alexa and Compete.com, a service that says they show registered user log ins as well as page view traffic (this interests me, because as we go more Web 2.0, with more AJAX and JSON pages, we'll be reloading less pages-and yet all our ComScore engagement metrics are going waaay up--another reason to look carefully at multiple measurement sets.)
Mark also takes a look at social network and online dating time spent metrics via Nielsen NetRatings and proclaims the winners:
° YouTube-30 min
° Beebo 1 hour and 3 min
° My Space -2 hours
(It occurs to me, as Mark talks, that Plenty of Fish is the golden child of his discussion, mentioned repeatedly, not only because it has tremendous growth metrics, but because Marcus' success is the Horatio Alger story of this vertical, the smaller guy making good in the big leagues.)
Mark's take on top news (online dating) stories for the year:
° Dr Phil joins with Match.com and drives credibility and success
° Putting real people on the home page (Match and Yahoo! Personals both do that)
° Y!P and Starbucks team-up--wonderful branding affinity
° NYTimes piece on social (read anonymous calling) phone numbers: vumber, jangl, talkplus and others
° The Helio/MySpace deal
MB Predictions for 2007:
° Online personals will subdivide into categories
° Social networks will niche out
° Social networks are taking traffic away from online dating sites ('the top of the sales funnel')
° Next generation services will crop up, like high-end matching making services (Love Access, Vintacom)
° Free eHarmony will emerge (he means an EH-like service)
° Mobile dating fueled by Nokia N95 and other integrated phone devices
° Facebook gets swacked by a new player
° Background checks will be added by other big dating services
° Voice 2.0 integrates
° Plenty of Fish gets bigger--top 5 (does that mean someone will buy it?)
MB Issues:
° How about that date bait? Mark has ideas about affiliates.
° Make it easier to cancel a subscription (good point)
° Scamming: Don?t kick'em out, kick'em to some annoying diversionary SWAT team (it's called payback)
° Consider support and extension services, like photo cropping
Cute cartoon: "Let?s go back to meeting online, you're much better looking there."
"Independent bloggers can laugh all they want about the imperious posture of the mainstream media, but I and others at The Times have never been more in touch with readers? every robustly communicated whim than we are today."
--NYTimes media critic David Carr, writing on how his blog has led to ties and a sense of community with his consistent commentators and readers.
"We are living through the largest expansion of expressive capability in the history of the human race. And it wouldn?t be a revolution if there were no losers. The speed of conversation is a part of what is good about it, but then some of the reflectiveness, the ability for careful summation and expression, is lost. There is an obsessive, dollhouse pleasure in configuring and looking at it, a constant measure of social capital."
--NYU adjunct professor and social theorist Clay Shirky, quoted in Carr's article on how a blog "provides feedback through a firehose."
idate starts this am and I'm speaking on Social Networks meet Premium Services: Social networks and the premium online dating user.
This is my first online dating conference; I'll share the highlights of what I learn in the blog.
"Teens have always been connected to their peers -- now they're connected 24/7, texting in class, in the middle of the night, IMing while trying to study or leaving comments on each other's MySpace profiles. In addition to constant communication, teens are also using technology to explore identity joining specific online groups or communities, posting numerous self portraits, creating their own MySpace layouts, downloading their own personal ringtones or creating a fantastical avatar that can fly and shop for virtual clothing. The result is that youth culture is now totally wired, while adults are slowly playing catch up."
-- YPulse founder Anastasia Goodstein, writing in The Huffington Post on a year's look back at youth culture.
(via danah)
Advance Internet's taken the problem that New Jersey's never really had a state-wide TV station (or newspaper, for that matter), and used v-logging and YouTube to address this issue with the just launched tv jersey, the user generated content and video version of nj.com (which jarvis, levitan and I launched in, geeze, 1996)
The site's got a cute call to action for NJ viewers to submit vlog posts for the best Valentine's day videos--which they will pick through and post. Poems, songs, sincere expressions of passion, bring'em all on.
Mindy MacAdams points out some cool things about this new little service:
Susan sez: Nice to see some new things coming out of the Advance shop--it's been a while.
Technorati tags: video news newspapers journalism online journalism online media innovation
Labels: citizen journalism, journalism, news, newspapers, video
Welcome to the suburbs, where the digital home is getting real, like you didn't already know that. I'm in the 'burbs, day off, helping some family members settle into new digs and the amount of activity around wiring the house and getting all the tech online and working together is just a total trip.
Here's what is being installed:
What did cherished family members' last place have? Nada.
This means that these folks will now regularly do the following activities:
I predict that the new set up will also lead to blogging, vlogging, and lots of DVR...I'll report back in a few months on what all this spiffy new tech is making possible--but geeze, for my cherished family members, this is a freakin' revolution!
So I'll be on the East Coast this weekend and then speaking at i-date in Miami early next week. Glad to attend my first online dating conference and interested to meet many of the other folks in the space, sure I can learn alot, especially from the smaller players who have very different approaches.
Will it be Dating 3.0?
Who knows, but I will definitely share impressions--in fact, this is the first moment I am starting to think it could be time to begin--yes--podcasting (as in vlogging).
"I have to wash the geek right off of me."
---CES survivor and Podhaus hotel bubblebath aficianado Loren Feldman, explaining his big wet soak in a tech suite tub ain't just a stunt.
(Via Scoble)
"The concept of local, local blogs is wonderful. But it has problems.
No news operation can rely on part time volunteer reporters.
Hyper local blogs have a long way to go to get the respect, authority, and credibility that existing media have, as flawed as the "placebloggers" may think MSM is.
Advertisers can't be bothered wondering whether local blogger's small audiences will make the registers ring. And they don't trust bloggers, either."
-- Marketwatch's Frank Barnako, writing about hyperlocal news sites
Talking to a fellow Yahoo! yesterday, we agreed that local was one of those fascinating categories that keeps evolving as user behavior changes--hard to commoditize, linked to high-performing, targeted ad revenue, and challenging to scale. The enduring value of local--and the efforts of online newspaper businesses, *community* sites, local placeblog networks, and enhanced directories to build value in the vertical has been fascinating to watch.
20 months ago, when I was consulting with various newspaper chains and media companies, we talked alot about citizen journalism and questions of audience sustainability and business(read revenuer) models. The backdrop of these discussions--almost 2 years later--is what makes the recent shifts and struggles of Backfence and Insider Pages so interesting, and the shift in direction by Judy's Book that Mike Arrington describes worth a look.
Backfence has lost co-founder Susan DeFife and laid off staffers, amid reports of both a "ghost town" of content in some sites and faltering ad revenue. Frank Barnako says the flaw is that these sites are just "too bland" and "corporate", and Matt Ingram notes "a local site has to live and breathe the area it covers, and have lively personalities and content." Fred Wilson's placeblogging (aka hyperlocal) take is that the big thing is aggregation and rolling up feeds and services and that a business based on getting people to post can be iffy.
Judy's Book, as described by Mike and by founder Andy Sack on his blog, met these challenges this year by moving from a community media model--local reviews--to an ecommerce/deal model where sharing and getting the best deals online is the focus. (That's a kinda different sort of participation than news posts, for sure, but perhaps a more sustainable model.)
Susan sez: One thing it's hard not to mention when we get into this hyperlocal, sustainable business question is the issue of scale. Most of the really good--and viable--hyperlocal sites--are small businesses that serve a focused audience, with decent ad revenues but nothing like the big numbers VCs need for their $5 to $13 MM investments. Sites like Jonathan Weber's New West Network, George Johnson's Buffalo Rising, Jarah Euston's recently sold Fresno Famous and Deb Galant's Baristanet--as well as Lisa William's H20town--work because they are small and focused, because they have the same focus and value as hand-crafted cigars--they're not meant to be big networks creating tons of shareholder value--they're services for a specific time and place--built by a participant.
(And no, I don't think that means there isn't an opportunity to derive more large-scale value from local-I just think no one's gone in there and built the next good thing--yet.)
So, as I was checking out the new Time.com site, I came across a blog on the workplace; specifically on getting ahead in your career, especially if you are a late 20o-something corporate type (Note: I did not say clone.)
Some of the tips from expert interviewee John Challenger, CEO of Chicago-based global outplacement consultants Challenger, Gray & Christmas are worth repeating for their basic common sense:
More dubious tips from the same source:
And my favorite quote (so not relevant to most of the people I know, all of whose employers treasure their tasteful tattoos, or, at least, just don't care.): "A tattoo is sort of like an angry blog--once you put it out there, it's really hard to take down. It's more or less permanent. As you hit 25, you think about your professional life, and if you've got some embarrassing tattoos that don't present you in a professional way, you might want to wear clothing to hide them. "
"Magazines that are prospering now offer an environmen that cannot be replicated online. You cannot open your browser and have an experience akin to the September issue of Vogue, with its hundreds of pages of brutally trendy ads mixed in with aspirational articles. The thingness of a magazine, its physical properties, have become increasingly important."
--David Carr, writing about magazines in the age of the Internet and the expensively meaty Time.com redesign, in the NY Times.
"When people say we're to be feared, I never quite know what to make of that. You can always opt out: We never force you to work with us. We typically don't do exclusive deals, so you're never stuck working with us. And it's public that in most cases we still give the majority of every dollar we create from a partnership to the partners, so you still get the lion's share of the money. What about that sounds so unfriendly?"
--David Eun, Google's VP of Content Partnerships, quoted on Paid Content from an interview in the LA Times.
The rumors are finally confirmed-- Forbes reports that Yahoo! has purchased mybloglog, a blogger-focused community and stats service that has benefited from former Feedster CEO Scott Rafer's focused touch--VP Bradley Horowitz is quoted saying: "This closes the loop between readers and publishers. Every publisher wants to know his readers, and the readers want to find out about each other. It's the power of implict networking."
One of the best aspects of this acquisition, from my end, is that Forbes says Rafer is going to stay with the company and evangelize within Yahoo! as part of the Yahoo! Developer Network.
Scott is one of the shrewdest people I know and so good at selling his vision--he'll bring some wonderful drive and energy to integrating mybloglog into Big Purple.
Update: Da Yahoos speak--Bradley's e xultant, writing :"It's like we've been partying in the dark, and MyBlogLog turned on the lights! Now we can all see who's in the room."
Chad tells the tale, saying "If blogging was originally about building a community and having a conversation with people in that community, then MyBlogLog provides the missing link that makes those connections more real." And JZ has some cool thoughts here.
Rafer speaks up on his blog, Eric's and team are moving West, and Arrington has commentary and kudos.
It was great to see all the links and write-ups that Lisa William's Placeblogger received; there was one aspect of the service that I'm very interested in that I didn't have a chance to get into in my earlier post, that I want to talk about now, and that is the open source, structured directory aspect of the service.
In an interview with ClickZ for a story about the service, I said: "I would like to see Placeblogger become the geographical equivalent of something that was powerful early on; the open directory, the first peer-edited, user generated directory for search. DMOZ became the semantic structure for all the search structures that Yahoo and Google used, and it was open source. Placeblogger has an opportunity to become an open source user generated directory of local sites and services."
To expand on that idea, IMHO Placeblogger could evolve into a meta-directory of local sites with a series of regional advisors who funnel sites into the (highly structured) database, a dedicated core of Placebloggers who supply feeds and new links, an API that allows redistribution, mash-ups and new product development, a Creative Commons license that supports third-party--and commercial development--and the means to be one of the platform tools fuleing a new wave of local--and potentially self-service advertising platforms, targeted right down to the zip code.
It's no accident that Topix.net, one of my very favorite locally-focused search/display products, was co-founded by folks who were part of the Open Directory team, but now, as a privately owned service, Topix has their own plans for world domination--or at least, product excellence, that do not (to my kmowledge) focus on platforms and open source.
My hope is that Placeblogger, in its own (admittedly) smaller and more hand-crafted way, can take some lessons from the Open Directory and become the core resource for blogs and other data sources with very specific local identities, affinites, and services. (And just think of how such a service can fit with yellow pages and other enhanced directories, especially when you factor in the community services....)
That art auction for the family of James Kim starts today--here's the details once more.
An auction of fine art + craft to benefit the family of James Kim
100% of the auction proceeds will go to the Kim Family Fund.
Bidding ends January 7th.
The links are live right here on eBay.
Do it.
There's a very moving essay at the New York Times by Dana Canedy, a long-time writer/editor. It's called From Father to Son, Last Words to Live By and it's about her husband, First Sgt. Charles Monroe King, a soldier and officer who was killed in Iraq--and who, in anticipation of his possible death--wrote a moving and detailed book about himself, his values and experiences, for his infant son.
10 digg users said this was a must-read--and I'd agree.
"With all love and respect to our sisters in product management, marketing, sales, finance, HR, and G&A, 50 years of Silicon Valley history strongly suggest that technology companies will ever continue to be founded by entrepreneurs from engineering backgrounds; and if women never become engineers in sufficient numbers, they will disproportionately fail to experience the upper end of the range of Silicon Valley outcomes. "
-- Renkoo co-founder and CTO Joyce Park, writing at VentureBeat on how "everyone in professional or Open Source software development has worked with countless male colleagues who are essentially self-taught, lacking all or most formal training in computer science, and in not a few cases bereft of any post-secondary degree whatsoever,"--and yet so few women fit the bill.
Zoe Margolis, aka Abby Lee of Girl with a One Track Mind says she never planned to reveal her true identity as a 30-something camera operator, even though she agreed to allow her sexy blog to be turned into a book, but when Nicholas Hellen, an editor at the Sunday Times of London did some investigative digging and determined that Margolis was most likely the author behind GOTM, she was outed.
Now Lee's printed one of the bullying emails Hellen sent her before the story was released and asked sympathetic bloggers to link to her post with the published email; her logic is that search engine algorithms will forevermore push Hellen's nasty message high up into searches on this name--forever.
Will it work?
Let's see what happens tomorrow.
Update: It's Monday, 1/08, it worked.
The compete.com blog has a post by Max Frieert reviewing the stats on online dating services that I really enjoyed readiong. First of all, it's got a lot of recent data around online dating sites--second of all, it shows how Yahoo! Personals is doing in an amazing competitive--and increasingly crowded--field.
Max looks at how online dating sites are doing in terms of page views, total member visits and what Max defines as engagement. There are some nifty charts and then he says:
Susan sez- Nothing like reading and interpetation ComScore data, is there? Seriously, this is rewarding information...and interesting analysis. Hope to see more posts about this topic from compete.
There are alot of interesting predictions and postings about what 2007 will bring.
Here's a short list of some of the areas and themes that interest me and that I think will be themes for product development and business growth in 2007:
New models for monetizing 13-18 year olds: There's an explosion of "me-too" services for tweens and teens, but the business models remain the same, pretty much...sell brand and reach. New business models for this market--really, this set of markets--and new products that support those models are well worth figuring out, if amazingly challenging, given how fickle kids can be.
Social media meets premium services: What happens to paid services for dating, jobs, travel and so on as MySpace and Facebook users find their needs becoming more complex? I'm waiting to see how the audience acquisition plays, product features and user experiences of the more traditional paid (non-entertainment)services shift to grab these users--and what happens when new, smaller services arise and try to grab these segments.
Local, local, local: How do enhanced directories, local newspaper sites, classifieds, and social media fit together on a zip code level? This is a question lots of players are tackling, from the big to the small--and an arena where the potential to develop revenue growth through advertising and services--and to command and grow eyeballs--is very real.
Content and portals in the age of YouTube: The audience shift from mainstream media to user generated content(especially video) is standing the applecart on its head. This is one of these meta questions that has to come down to some very specific tools and strategies or wealth(read eyeballs) gets redistributed even further.
Women, act 2: There's more gold in them thar' hills, me thinks. New sites, new services, new products, new growth, new money.
Search: It ain't over and will never be over. IMHO, this one is the secret sauce and knits so many other things together--and there are still new products--killer new products--to be made.
My friend Lisa Williams has just launched Placeblogger, a ( long-awaited) web service that aggregates and highlights content and feeds hyperlocal sites--not only news sites, but community sites, enhanced directories (like, where to find a plumber or a organic pepperoni pizza), personal narrative sites focused on an area, and so on. The locus can be a neighborhood, town, or region, but there's a clear focus tied to that place and to the people contributing. The service is launching with 750 blogs, but the one goal is to make Placeblogger a comprehensive starting point for finding these kinds of sites. As Irina Slutsky says, kinda " MySpace for your town."
Lisa says about Placeblogs: "They?re about the lived experience of a place. That experience may be news, or it may simply be about that part of our lives that isn?t news but creates the texture of our daily lives: our commute, where we eat, conversations with our neighbors, the irritations and delights of living in a particular place among particular people."
Jay Rosen of PressThink and NewAssignment.net and Dan Gillmor of The Center for Citizen Media are two of the advisors for this project (I am honored to be the third); Evan Williams, Dave Winer, Tish Grier, Lisa Stone, Elisa Camahort, Jory DesJardins, Ross Karchner, The Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, and the Berkman Thursday Blog Group are also among those credited.
