"The thing that's missing [in local information] is a centralized place. You remember Weblogs.com [a running list of recently updated blogs]? There isn't one for geography.

A lot of interesting blogs got bootstrapped off of Weblogs.com because they were watching the traffic go by. A lot of people have tried the rocket science approach to geographical search, natural language search, and that hasn't got us very far.

If we want this to work, we need some help from the producers, and if we want their help, we have to be super-polite about requirements and make it super-easy and fun.”

-- Placeblogger and hyperlocal media champion Lisa Williams, Knight Foundation grant recipient and founder of H2otown and Placeblogger, quoted in a article by PBS's Mark Glaser

Niall Kennedy launches StartupSearch, a new analytics and reporting service (think Paid Content/ Tech Crunch meet Web 2.0 Google Zeitgeist). (Susan sez: Looks great!)
Yahoo: Zod's retiring; Yang's filling in.
BizWire: eBay buys stumbleupon.

"Yahoo! is not the kind of company you can just retire from and forget about. It's more than just using the products everyday or having your kids proud to tell their friends where Dad worked...
(snip)
..One of the hardest things about deciding when to leave is the knowledge that Yahoo! is perpetually preparing to share the next big thing with the world."

--CTO Zod Nazem, on retiring from Yahoo! after 12 years

"We're living in two Internets. It looks much like the companies we find in the world of brick and mortar. One is about places, information, and data. It's the buildings in which people work. The other is about people, relationships, and conversation. It's the people who work in those buildings. One is a structure. The other is social."

--Blogger Liz Strauss, writing about the seperate but equal worlds of business and personal blogging, people and applications--and how she feels relationships power everything, in the end.

(Thanks, Viviane!)

I got a big kick out of Dave Winer's Facebook post--where Dave (rightly) notes that FB's how you know someone choices when you confirm a friendship haven't " been updated since Facebook was opened to people outside the education system. "

As Dave jokingly suggests, how about those selections for "delighted by," "flattered by,""fantasize about," and so on?

Susan sez: For the team that hammered together those rich APIs, updating the checkboxes should be child's play.

I've been writing about--and fascinated by--microformats, APIs, structured data and widgets for about 3 years. so sometimes the amazement and mystification of other folks working online around the concept of widgets just baffles me. (See my/a June 2006 post on widgets here.)

To make a widget, you need a good API, and an easy build procees (a tool) that allows you to build a widget, applet or some other kind 0of microformat that is interactive and that provides a means for you to quickly embed and syndicate data and services to URLs not your own.

That's it, period.

So why the amazement? (And why wouldn't any business owner and/or developer in their right mind want to go down this road: APIs, microformats, build tools--nothing risky any any of 'em.

Was over at the Netsquared conference kick off last night, working on an elevator pitch with Michel Kuit for farmer2farmer, the sustainability farming open source tool project for which I'm the executive sponsor.

Agenda's here; presenters are from everywhere.

"Interesting how much can change in just a year. "

-Serial entrepeneur Jason Calcanis, noting that 18 months later, most of the Weblogs Inc crew--and many of the AOLers they worked with--are no longer resident in Dulles--or anywhere at AOL, for that matter.

A more detailed snippet:
For those you playing along at home... the management team at Weblogs, Inc and how long they stayed at AOL:
Shawn Gold (Publisher): 90 days
Jason Calacanis (CEO): one year
Judith Meskill (COO): one years, five months
Brian Alvey (President, co-founder): one year, six months

Mashcode's got a list of facebook apps right here...and it's a classic case of taking the API and making it available to a great set of services--Feedburner, College Humor, ilike, dogster--there's plenty for everyone.

Isn't there an obvious question here why other networks with larger user bases haven't developed their internal APIs in a way that would fuel this kind of development?

And another question about whether facebook's investment will accelerate that movement?

"By providing a clear roadmap – and business opportunity – for the widget makers, Facebook has just increased it's virtual R&D budget by over $250 million dollars. By welcoming third-party innovation, Facebook will reap the benefit of hundreds of millions of dollars of venture investment – and the Facebook user will have a much richer experience. I'd wager that every widget maker who has previously relied on Myspace for traffic is hard at work this holiday weekend on migrating their application to support the Facebook API."

--Smart guy and now VC Josh Kopelman, asking Is MySpace the next Prodigy? within a discussion of creating widgets users can embed within their MySpace and facebook pages.

Susan sez: IMHO, developing out APIs and building widgets for your core audience base is a no-brainer--but for many services, it's still not yet happening--let's see if the Facebook upgrades will tip this further.

Update: This is all good, but Scott Rafer says widgets do not exist in the FB developers platform.

(Via Mike A)

Coming back from a weekend on a friend's boat (and hence unplugged expept for my PDA), I go to check email, read news, and do some blogging, but I soon realize a 4th activity has entered the lists: dealing with a responding to the messages, friend requests, updates, new data and so one that my social networks generate.

I ask myself How can it be that applications with fairly narrow values can generate so much activity? and I realize it's two things:

1. Digerati like many of my friends emulate each other and don't want to be left out--we tumble from one app to another and there's always an investment cost while we're in the early stages of setting up the most current YASN or maybe next big thing.

2. Filling out profiles, adding photos, adding friends and sending messages via social network systems has become the digital equivalent of the late 19th-century's dance cards--Just like the young ladies out in good society in Boston and New York at the turn of the century who wanted beaux to claim dances with them waay ahead of time---we want to feel that our inboxes are filled up with notes and message from our compadres--and that we're the belles(of both sexes) of our digital balls.

In other words, a new activity has entered the lists: seeing who's added you, sent you a note, changed their profile, etc.--usually fairless pointless data that serves the purpose of making you feel connected to your digital community--but accomplishes little else.

The funny thing, for me, is how enjoyable these little activities are--just like running into friends at the co-op, or the coffee shop, the messages on these services offer casual ways to check in with people and have some approximation of what they're up to--especially the ones who don't blog.

"Today, we are taking the CBS Audience Network directly to the user. In launching the CBS Audience Network we solidified our position as the most widely distributed professional content provider on the Web thanks to our great video distribution partners. We now want to empower our audience to be creative and deepen their experience with our content by allowing them to share and embed CBS-provided clips to their blogs, wikis, widgets, community sites and whatever else gets thrown our way.We are delighted to have so many quality partners -- established and start ups -- helping to bring CBS content to the online community."

--Quincy Smith, President, CBS Interactive, announcing deals to integrate ning, word press, meebo, slide and what seems like dozens more.

Susan sez: Talk about accelerating change! I love the word delighted in there....this is going to be a great use case to see whether people will build communities where the content is--or, more likely, export the content using tools provided. Very neat!

"At Meetup, you eat at one of NYC's 18,696 restaurants. They're not free, but some are cheap. It's the best cafeteria in the world.

At Google, you eat exquisite free Google Food with other Googlers at the Googleplex, prepared by Chef Googlers. It's the best company food around.

At Google, after you consume all the Google Food you can eat, you will enjoy Rear Cleansing, Front Cleansing, Dryer, and Oscillating options.You will not be forced to interact with those without ample access to Rear Cleansing, Front Cleansing, Dryer, and Oscillating options.

At Meetup, there are no options when flushing the toilet.You will be forced to interact with the un-cleansed and un-oscillated."

-- Meetup founder Scott Heiferman, via Anil Dash

Susan sez: This is a hoot.

"Blogging consistently 5 days a week year after year is like going to the gym 5 days a week year after year. It takes a great deal of dedication, commitment, and discipline to stay at that level over time. Yeah, anyone can go to the gym to workout 5 days a week for a short period of time especially if they are trying to lose weight for a wedding or summer vacation, but how many people do you know are committed to exercise at the 5 day a week level for long stretches of time?"

-- Stephanie Quilao, Back in Skinny Jeans blogger, writing about how getting a batch of blogs going and then continuing to post can leads to serious blogger burn out.

The Knight Foundation announced the winners of its News Challenge awards today, including grants for projects helmed by Lisa Williams, Jay Rosen, J.D. Lasica, Adrian Holovaty, Amy Gahran, Paul Grabowicz, and Ethan Zuckerman.

It's exciting to see over $12 million dollars given out to support innovation in participatory journalism and citizen media--bloggers, academics and small non-profits are among those who received grants.

Gary Kebbel, a friend and former news lead at AOL--the behind the scenes guy who did much of the good stuff--has been at Knight for a while, and I'd like to think he's played a guiding role in all this--Gary's sense of service, his ability to embrace new ideas and his enthusiasm for innovation look like they have served Knight well in this instance.

Update: Quote of the moment:

"I'm thrilled to announce some huge news: I've been awarded a grant by the Knight Foundation, as part of the Knight News Challenge program.....I'll be founding a Web startup, EveryBlock, that focuses on making local news and information useful. I've been feeling the entrepreneurial itch for a while and can't wait to start hacking on this with a crack team of Web developers."

-- Adrian Holovaty, formerly of washingtonppost.com

"When we first started studying life stories, people thought it was just idle curiosity — stories, isn't that cool? Well, we find that these narratives guide behavior in every moment, and frame-- not only how we see the past but how we see ourselves in the future."

-- Dan P. McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern and author of the 2006 book, The Redemptive Self, quoted in a NY Times article on how mental reslience is tied to emotional narrative and personal story telling.

Technorati's redesigned itself, and the work is ...smooth.

Back in 2003, Technorati was one of the first of the blog search engines (I remember much discussion of the merits of searching XML feeds versus blog posts/HTML), but now, with Google Blog Search, Sphere and many others, it's had to push to stay serviceable.

This new design and refreshed information architecture should go a long way toward bringing Technorati to new audiences and retaining long-time users. I like the tabbed structure that lets searchers check both for vanity links (a huge focus on blogosphere searches) and for blogs--and posts--on specific topics.

There's also an efficient integration of video and events content and a wise move to a single search box, as Mike A points out.

On the other hand, as Steve Rubel points out, is checking blog links as relevant as it used to be?

The big thing now is integration--universal search--and specialized search engines are limited in that respect--and Technorati's challenge will be to use these new, enhanced capabilities to build yet another set of new products and services that can go both broad and deep.

" Our entire culture in Silicon Valley is based around technology and entrepreneurship, and all the talent is imported from around the world. It doesn't matter what color you are, what God you worship or who you choose to sleep with. All that matters is the products that are built and the technology behind them."

--TechCruncher Mike Arrington, demonstrating yet again that SV is the new Hollywood, at least for us geeks who live here.

Well, the trip to Peru is over, and it was amazing. I'll be posting pictures and info in a series of travel posts, either her or at Vox.
Short version: It was a great vacation, and Peru is a place I will definitely return to.

Now, psyched to be back!

Short version: I am loving this trip, and loving this country.

We flew into Lima from San Francisco and headed out early the next morning for Cusco, a mountain town that reminds me of Boulder(Colorado) , Granada (Spain) and Lisbon (Portugal) ans yet that is totally unique and of itself.

Now we´re outside of Urubamba, in the Sacred Valley, staying in a guest house, doing yoga, sight-seeing and hiking. Later this week, we head to Manchu Picchu.

The folks on the yoga trip are all interesting, and it is great to step back from everyday life to have new things to think abou´--and more time for physical activity.

Heading back outside now to check out the Incan ruins--have to work off the lomo saltado and jugo de papaya.

I am in Ollyantyambo, a small town a few hours outside of Cusco, Peru. When I get to a better connection, I will post some pictures; meanwhie, I just want to describe how my mind´s being blown.

Imagine this--We´re staying in a guest house miles from anything, where people hoe potatoes and drive mini bikes to eek out a living-- And it´s Mother´s Day and I am texting with my kid 5,500 miles away....and then I decide to call him--and the cell works--so then I call a few people I love, just to say him- only I am on a dusty road somewhere in rural Peru--and yet we´re connected via cell towers.

Wow.

So, on one hand, I recognize this is a story of haves and have nots--the little store I am posting in right now probably has more computers--and more reliable electricity--than is available to local residents--but on the other hand, it´s amazing to me that I can be so far away--both physically and emotionally--and drop into my (virtual) life.

Don't have time to get into this in depth right now, but dug bubblegum generation's take on the Parsons/Custer anology on old media and web 2.0 portal type platform companies.

Time Warner's Bob Parsons said "The Googles of the world, they are the Custer of the modern world. We are the Sioux nationThe Googles of the world, they are the Custer of the modern world. We are the Sioux nation."

And umair says: "...From a strategic pov, Google is the one who is hyperflexible and capable of mounting quick yet disproportionately devastating forays into new markets and new value chain segments.

Finally, note the fact that if strategic thinking seems almost impossible for today's mediacos, that's because, well, for many, it is - they are trapped in an ever deepening value chasm. "

Umair's dead on, IMHO...and Parsons is just talking big.

"Here are a few of the tech/startup things in the bay area I can think of that I would like to do:

• Attend sf.rb meetings and meet all the SF rubyists
• Go to a TechCrunch BBQ
• Attend a blogger dinner with Dave Winer
• Meet Kevin Burton of Tailrank (just because I think what he's doing is cool)
• Meet the Powerset crew (hopefully this won't be a problem because of my affiliation with Google, but I'm curious what they're up to!)

What other tech/startup things should I be doing? I've been reading about the SF startup scene with envy from either NYC, Denver, Seattle, or Orange County for years. "

Susan sez: I love how the Bay area is to tech innovators as Hollywood is to screenwriters--ground zero for the moth to flame nexus.

World of wow! Just read on CNET that Yahoo! has hired Duncan Watts to head up/be part of the research group focusing on social media, community and connections. This is GREAT!! (Remember The Small World Project? I played...and learned from the research.)

CNET says: "Duncan Watts, professor of sociology at Columbia University, where he was director of the Collective Dynamics Group, and author of Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, will lead Yahoo's research in human social dynamics, including social networks and collaborative problem solving. He received a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of New South Wales and a doctoral degree in theoretical and applied mechanics from Cornell University and will be based out of Yahoo's New York City offices."

One of the great things about working at Yahoo! is access to these kinds of folks to advise on strategy and product development. Yahoo! has some other academic researchers my team has spent time with, with productive and stimulating results, and I know we'll want to connect with Duncan Watts--who wouldn't?--at least in the realm where my interests and my work responsibilities intersect.

Congrats, Prabhakar, on this hire and others!

"They don't say it as an absolute. But they'd prefer to meet someone, if they're an actress, who's not an actor. If they're hiring me, it's to expand their possibilities."

-- Samantha Daniels, NYC matchmaker and former lawyer, quoted in a typically breathless NY Times story on how Hollywoods celebs are turning to non-LA matchmakers (yes, you heard right) to help them meet dates outside of the entertainment business.

"Read/write widgets are the new black!"

--Blogger and fellow microformat and widget geek Richard MacManus, describing the Flash-driven joys of the new 2-ways widgets, also known as badges, created and distributed by RateItAll, which are similar to the eBay to Go applets in that they allow users to embed and display transactional--and interactive, dynamic data--on their blog, web page or whatever--and get updates--without ever leaving their own page.

Given that the whole premise of Web 2.0 is providing tools to users, embeddable widgets and microformats are what should come out of new APIs and smart uses of structured data companies arethinking about.

Susan sez: I just feel like it's taking everyone too long to get there...If I ran the asylum I'd make sure my users could take tools and services with them and embed and distribute them elsewhere--isn't that one of the key things platforms are supposed to power?

Usually when I go on vacation, I just keep blogging, but this time around, I'm not sure how much I'll be posting over the next two weeks.
You see, I am leaving the country--for Peru, as in trip to, and the plan is to do yoga, hike, hang out and disconnect from this beloved machine (can I really do that?)
So, here's the fair warning, and while I know there's an internet cafe down the street from the spot in the Sacred Valley where I'll be for most of the trip, I'm hoping the call of cyberspace isn't too strong--and I'm offline for most of the trip (bringing a huge pile of books).
(Just to show you what I am hoping to see, some pix from flickr folk.)
And hey--if you have suggestions as to things to do and or see in Lima, Cusco, the Sacred Valley---please let me know. I have a day in Lima at the end of the trip I am still planning.

A friend just sent me a copy of the Phillip Lessen chat with prodigy and wise man Aaron Swartz, who started doing cool things in tech early on. Aaron's got the clear sight of a (much) older person, and his comments on sexism in tech made me snap to attention.

Some snippets:

• If you talk to any woman in the tech community, it won't be long before they start telling you stories about disgusting, sexist things guys have said to them. It freaks them out; and rightly so. As a result, the only women you see in tech are those who are willing to put up with all the abuse.

• But even the people who are quite social and competent misbehave and, furthermore, they support a culture where this misbehavior is acceptable. I don't exclude myself from this criticism.But even the people who are quite social and competent misbehave and, furthermore, they support a culture where this misbehavior is acceptable. I don't exclude myself from this criticism.

• I think all censorship should be deplored. My position is that bits are not a bug – that we should create communications technologies that allow people to send whatever they like to each other. And when people put their thumbs on the scale and try to say what can and can't be sent, we should fight back – both politically through protest and technologically through software like Tor.

Aaron, your comments rock.

"If you're writing about Boston sports, what's more valuable to you, $25 or a press pass to the Red Sox? Or a backstage pass as a music writer to interview the band you've always wanted to interview? It's something they can't get but as a newspaper we could."

-- BostonNow editor John Wilpers, editor of local free web daily BostonNow, which is publishing items submitted from local bloggers, quoted in a NYTimes piece on their service.

Susan sez: This quote leads into the what is appropriate pay for bloggers discussion, but alsdo acknowledges that money isn't the currency for everyone--sometimes credibility and community are the sought-after factors.

A just-released Newspaper Association of America report says that newspaper web site are adding unique visitors and growing faster than web site audiences overall.

The press release says "An average of more than 59 million people (37.6 percent of all active Internet users) visited newspaper Web sites each month during the first quarter, a record number that represents a 5.3 percent increase over the same period a year ago, according to Nielsen//NetRatings NetView custom analysis,*" and "During the same time period, the overall Internet audience grew just 2.7 percent."

John Sturm, NAA head, says: "The fact that the newspaper Web site audience is growing at almost double the rate of the Internet audience as a whole validates the industry's investment in digital innovation, and the ongoing attraction consumers have to newspapers online. Newspaper publishers have aggressively transformed their business models, continually providing ground-breaking content to consumers with their expanding digital portfolios."

Susan sez: This is a lovely sound bite, great to tell advertisers, but it would benefit from some context. For example. Nielsen also reported this year that the online dating space grew about 16%--far more than the newspaper category's 5.3. And Facebook grew, what--300%? So ratio of growth is relative--comparing you category to ALL of the web has only relative merit.

Also, one wishes for more data on who these visitors are--I suspect that if all the data was available, it would reveal that newspapers' big challenge--how to replenish their stock of visitors and engage the 30 and under category, would show continued decline year over year. NAA's release of numbers that show that only 19.4 percent looked at online movies or movie clip audio and video suggests this is not a very youthful or Web 2.0 group.

On the other hand, the stats do suggest that the audiences NAA members are courting are doing a MUCH better job that in the past at meeting their needs--viz these stats:

• Nearly 42 percent of those who have visited newspaper Web sites have viewed streaming video in the past month.
• Traffic to blog pages at the top 10 newspaper sites increased more than 200 percent in December 2006 when compared to December 2005 (Nielsen//NetRatings, 2007).

And then of course, there's the kicker, the reason to read these stats at all:

• Newspaper Web sites capture the majority of local online revenue in more than 95 percent of U.S. markets (Borrell Associates, 2007).

I'm a huge fan of local, always have been, and am heartened to see the pace of change at news sites accelerate--but hey, for all the self-congratulatory releases, 5.3% growth just doesn't sound like enough to kvell...even as a means to keep your advertisers happy.

"Today, students have a choice of technologies and ownership of them. They bring their own cell phones to campus and use them for calling, often choosing not to share the phone numbers with the institution. They bring their own e-mail and IM accounts and their own computers. And that last bastion of institutional communication—the .edu portal—has arguably given way to social sites like MySpace, Facebook, or Daily Jolt. College and university administrators no longer own the communication channels central to student life."

RAVE Wireless co-founder, Raju Rishi, in an article in Educause Magazine entitled Always Connected, but Hard to Reach that offered great insights into how students-and therefore many others like them--use technologies to communicate and manage their lives.

(Via SmartMobs)

• Yahoo! Publisher's Network blog: Cat Seda, SEO guru, How to Win Sales and Influence Spiders: Boosting your Business & Buzz on the Web
• Trashonista: Judith Levine: Not Buying It--My Year Without Shopping:Could you give up high-speed Internet access, Q-tips, any soap fancier than Ivory, and new clothese for a year? Judi Levine did and tells the tale here.
• Smart Mobs: Visualization of the 100 most viewed Wikipedia pages--fascinating.
• Minority Report: Facebook is stickier than email--"Abandoning Facebook is like you flattening your house, burning your photos, changing your name, skipping town and not telling your friends."
• TechCrunch: Hotornot goes free.

"I have become the complete narcissist. My book launched on May 1, and in the run up to it, I've become completely self-involved. Everything from the real reason Alberto Gonzales hasn't resigned to those new constellations that spell out my initials (they're really there! I'm not making this up!) all center on me and my new damn book.

It's all about me, baby!
Isn't it?

--Author David Weinberger, writing about his sudden attack of self-tracking upon the release of his interesting new book Everything is Miscellaneous, The Power of the New Digital Disorder, which I am just starting to read.

(Susan sez: David is one of the people I consider really wise, as well as kind and interesting, and I an anticipating a great time...more when I actually have some impressions to report.)

"Many bloggers prefer to remain anonymous and with good reason. The content of their sites is so moronic that even their best friends would disown them if they knew they were the authors. As with most things in life, something that costs nothing is usually worth nothing and that puzzles me."

--South African Sunday Times columnist David Bullard, proving that even today journalists sometimes live under rocks of their own devising, leading to the state of simultaneously holding strong opinions and not having a god damned clue.

Update: More commentary on this silly column from Vinny Lingham:
"If I had to paraphrase what Bullard is saying, then basically Michael Arrington, Om Malik, Robert Scoble, Jeremy Zawodny, Danny Sullivan & Matt Cutts wouldn't ever get hired by a print publication - (like hell) - but even more to the point, why would they want to write for a bunch of anally retentive middle to late aged complacent publications that are in a declining market. Most of the CEO's and editors of these publications are hoping to retire before they go bust and Web 2.0 becomes and entrenched way of life ."

Wow, nothing like ending the week with a hot story!

Seems like everyone on the planet is writing about a potential Yahoo/Microsoft merger/acquisition.

As a bigco vet, the thought of losing momenteum with yet another re-org and re-setting of the strategy is a little chilling--after all, just dealing with all the tech platforms and dividing those pies would be a major undertaking--and yet there's no question the twinned team would have a strong run against the competition.

Since, like Zawodny, I (fortunately) don't have a clue, let me leave you with a couple of the comments that hit home:

Skrenta: "Anyone who has worked in a bigco knows what this nonsense does to productivity. Imagine every single one of your employees spending hours today talking about this."

Scott Rosenberg: " If Microsoft acquires Yahoo, the companies' stock will initially prosper and the media will cheer on a new round of the War on Google. But seven years from now Yahoo will be as much of a shell as AOL is today. The talent will flee, the user base will stagnate, and Yahoo's ability to innovate will wither under the weight of Microsoft bureaucracy and the pressure to serve Microsoft's software interests."

Charlene: "...there is one major reason why I don't think Microsoft executives have the stomach for any sort of brand rationalization -- the continued dual branding of Windows Live and MSN. Each time I have a conversation with Microsoft about Windows Live, I get a different explanation of what it is and how it fits with MSN. If the company can't event figure out its branding strategy with existing properties, I don't hold out much faith that they could do so with a premium brand like Yahoo!"

More news and speculations on this one to come, no doubt.

Update: 5/8/07: Here's the tarot analysis, courtsy of Rashmi.

Ever notice that your pets have an amazing sense of time?

My dog and cat unfailingly wake me up every morning around 6:15--the cat, in particular, has an almost uncanny ability to approach at within 10 minutes of the same time every day.

One of my favorite authors, Rupert Sheldrake, writes about domestic animals' sense of time in Dogs that Know When their Owners Are Coming Home as an internal clock partly set by bthe sun cycle, but also as an in-tune vibe with their owners.

What do you think? Anyone have animal alarm clock stories to share?

Check out the charming Shorpy.com , the “100-year-old Photo Blog."

The site says: Shorpy.com is the 100-year-old photography blog that brings our ancestors back, at least to the desktop. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a boy who worked in an Alabama coal mine near the turn of the century."

It's compelling.

(Via Peter Merholz)

"All of us have to continually renew our business in order to renew our brands, because audiences have the upper hand and show no sign of giving it back.”

--Anne Sweeney, Disney exec, quoted in a Kara Swisher post about candidates to run Yahoo's Audiences unit.

One of my favorite sex and relationship blogs, The Riverdale Goddess, shut down yesterday.

This personal account of a 40-something long-married woman who allowed herself to adventure around sensual touch, erotic self-expression and all sorts of edgy stuff--while remaining faithful to hubby and bringing him along on the journey--seemed like a classic Baby Boomer tale of rediscovery--and "Kate's" joy in her transformation was charming.

Nevertheless, as of yesterday, the blog went down, with the author explaining:

"Today I received a phone call - and was asked to participate in a conversation where I was basically told that if I wanted to keep my job -That the Riverdale Goddess Blog needed to be taken down. I was outted......out of fear.....I was shut down out of fear....and because I care very dee