"There's nothing new to that fact that people play a direct role in how we discover what may interest us on the Web. It goes back to Yahoo!'s earliest days. Back to links.net, back to the NCSA What's New page. It goes to the heart of what blogging is all about.
People have been way too hung up on Digg's voting algorithms and forget that what makes Digg, Digg is its community of participants. "
--Karl Martino, paradox 1X, writing about human editors, search, and the social web.
In the middle of the craziness of getting ready to go away for a bit,and the fact I'm going to spend part of my vacation writing, I've been thinking about my job and what I find rewarding about it. Being a product development lead for a Yahoo! business unit is a great fit for me because it's a role where the business requirements, the customer/user value, the strategy and ultimately the execution all intersect...and I love creating software.
When I describe my job to non-techie friends, I like to say it's like being the executive chef in a big restaurant because as big piece of my job is deciding what to send out when, and another is to review and roll up all the possibilities and then recommend what we actually build and empower the teams that build it.
In my world, we work on applications, along with HTML content pages, and one of the great pleasures has been my ever-deepening knowledge of databases and back-end systems and platforms. This is a job where my true geekiness can take root, along with my consumer focus.
One of the other aspects of a product lead's role which I relish is maintaining what I think of as a product portfolio. My site is huge, and there are so many things we continually work on and improve, so one of the interesting responsibilities is to help the team maintain the balance and/or sequence the work. There are continual improvements to order flow and user experience, new features we can marketing, edit and programming, and so on. Keeping the engines stoked to handle all of these is really critical...it's a balancing act where it's thrilling to be one of the people involved.
Also, I love the creative problem solving. Both quarter by quarter and from a year over year perspective, we need to have road maps for how product will address business and customer needs--and ideally, at least a good chunk of what we do will be deeply useful, satisfying, and sometimes, even innovative.
And of course, I dig the team. Smart, nice people--yeah. We have a great group who truly get things done and take pride in what they do...and take responsibility for their areas, actions and work. And did I mention we're all competitive as anything and want to not only meet the biz goals, but do a great job for customers and help them be happy (and get great dates).
And finally, most importantly of all, I love that we ship what we do. Isn't that what product teams so--build and release? Get the stuff live and out there to be used? We ship like mad, and as only people who've done development can understand, there's a special pride each time we have a successful release.
"Generally speaking (strong women) seem to live their lives to the fullest they know how. Doing the things that bring them joy and fulfillment without trampling others in the process. They create friendships and connections that are genuine, honest, and open. A strong woman will be upfront with you when you have pissed her off. Rather than avoiding the situation or pushing it aside in order to prevent conflict. She will address the situation at hand, speaking her truth while being accountable for her own experience."
--Shashta Gibson*, Stiletto Diaries, writing * about what makes a strong woman strong (with some great rules to live by thrown in there, too)
*Note: Stiletto Diaries is a sexually-focused blog; if this is NSFW or potentially offensive, keep that in mind before you click on the link.
Smashing Magazine: Well designed blogs
Jeremiah: Goes to Forrester as an analyst--welll-done!
The Economist: Semantic webs gets practical with trip organizer tool Tripit.
Everyone--from the New York Times to the entire blogosphere, has commented on Yahoo's latest reorg. For people in my corner of the world, one of the biggest points, of course, is that our business unit-- Personals--moves to Jeff Weiner's group. It has been great working with Hilary and the team in LMC, but I've also looked over at the Audiences teams, as they have been called, and thought about some of the synergies we have with them as well, so this move, for me, is exciting.
So I became an avid Facebook user on May 24th, the day FB announced the full-blown API. Why? The chance to experience a full-blown social network ecosystem (that wasn't MySpace) was irresistible--especially as hundred or thousands of other tech heads like me did exactly the same thing.
So, here it is 3 months later, and I am still going strong. The facts:
So what do I think?
Facebook support community. The site does a good job supporting my notions of tribes, or kieretsu, , the idea of people--and companies who share certain connections/links/affinities supporting obne another. Since I see myself as part of a free-floating crowd of a couple of thousand people with similar and/or compatible interest/beliefs/ties, the FB friending application is a great way both to friend and connect with people and to have easyaccess to them. S(ame for LinkedIn in a more formal sense.)
Facebook is also fun. The variety of information is entertaining. Kris Krug and Cory Dennis post videos, Joel Postman is clever, a whole host of old friends and distant acquaintances allow me to peek into their lives and I get to see aspects of people I work with that humanize a big company and teach me about who they are.
Facebook will be passed over in time. Unfortunately, at the end of the day, FB is just another social network (YASN). Even though it is the best one at the moment, it strikes me that just as eBay and Amazon taught us all about ecommerce and storing private info securely online, FB is teaching us how to share publicly--and yet, as soon as the technology develops that allow us to share anywhere we are--rather than have to log into a web site to do so--we are all gone from this place. (Yes, I am talking again about structured and unstructured data, Open ID, FOAF and more sophisticated sorts of widgets and badges that can dis aggregate community and treat it as another for of data (MY FB status feed anywhere, for example..mixed with your Twitter stream.)
Meanwhile, it's fun, and a helluva of laboratory.
" I am 53 years old and have been working for internet companies since 1996. I live in the Bay Area. I don't confuse myself with most of my generation – my friends who work in other industries, and who live elsewhere, are not nearly as comfortable with online networking as I am. The numbers are dramatic: 75% of baby boomers are online and my generation looks just like younger people in online shopping, in research, in news…we even outdo younger people in email, product research and booking travel. But networking is something that hasn't yet penetrated my generation, even though research indicates that the top attributes we want from technology are staying connected, saving time, and making life easier.
In talking with investors, the choice is really clear: you either believe that networking has passed my generation by…that we will never adopt it, or you believe (as I do) that people in their 40s and 50s will network when the right product comes along."
-- Robin Wolaner, founder of TeeBeeDeeBee an online network for boomers, posting at American Ventuire Magazine
Paid Content reports that BabyCenter, under new prez Tina Sharkey, has bought Palo Alto parenting community Maya's Mom. This is newsworthy for several reasons:
Rafat says: "MM will stay as a standalone, but the backend social software will be used across BabyCenter's network of sites in 10 countries."
"I still feel the weekend in my bones...I think we all had a bit more of the weekend in our bones this morning. It could have something to do with the fact that Summer will be over before too long. Or it could simply be that many of us had enjoyable weekends. In either case, I couldn't think of a better way to describe the cause of our restlessness."
Yep, it was another weekend offline, with not even the treo in play. A friend asked if my RSS feed was updating..or had I actually gone offline?
Proud to say it was the latter. Yep, 3 days with on online access and didn't miss it that much. (Okay, I did check my email when I could get the bars..but that was mostly, never, out in the woods where I was staying.)
Back to regular posting starting tonight.
43 Things/Robot Coop launches Should do this, another listy/taggy community site as suggestion box.
Knight News Challenge: Enter and win funding for cool participatory media projects and newspaper disruptors/extensions.
Renegade Goddess: Midlife discovery (and sexuality) from an old friend...a great read.
Sex 2.0: Atlanta unconference on XXX is really happening and gaining some cool people/participants.
Via Amy Gahran. a tremendous interview with writer Lisa See, feminist must-listen, as Amy says.
Sugar Delirium: Dating the only child(thanks, Alana)
"Rather than purchasing goods made by overseas laborers—who are often forced to work in unsafe conditions for low wages—I have kidnapped and enslaved a group of neighborhood children and chained them to a bench in my garage, where they make my clothes and build my gadgets. ¶ I carpool or ride my bike to Klan rallies. ¶ And I give public transit passes to my suicide bombers. ¶ I flush the toilet once a month. ¶ I avoid wasteful, ecologically unsound packaging by stealing."
--Paul Ford, ftrain.com, from "I am Making a Difference," about--yeah, sustainability....
"So many people pitched in to help, and they worked incredibly hard. I really do love that feeling, which I often had at the big housing co-op I lived at for years. Burning Man has spread that idea very well among my generation. For me it comes from being a commune-loving freak at heart. I enjoy reading socialist poetry about the beauty of wheelbarrows, and I like to do hard satisfying work while other people are also working."
--BarCampBlock organizer Liz Henry, writing about the experience of organizing BarCamp Block, an unconference that mushroomed to over 900 attendees.
"I want to live a more ordinary life, not one where I feel like a celebrity. People already expect too much of me, I never seem to live up to their expectations, that's because they think I'm running for office or want them to buy my record or watch my TV show. I want none of that. Mostly I want to just be a normal schlub, sitting in the audience, maybe contributing something once in a while, and publishing my art on the Internet, for my own pleasure, and that of anyone who happens to be looking in.
Why mention this now? Why should you care? Because soon you're going to have to decide whether you're a celebrity or a schlub. And you may not have a choice but be a celebrity."
--The never-boring and often wise Dave Winer, writing about how digital tools give us all our 15 seconds of fame.
I was only at BarCamp Block for a couple hours, but the energy of the event and the diversity of the people was impressive. Tara and Chris, Tantek, Ross, Liz and others deserve much kudos for setting up something so vibrant! Wow.
As some one whom who has been one of 3 women in a room of 2o men far too often, the gender balance and the range of ages and appearances was a nice side benefit--or maybe it was a central benefit--one of the core reasons--along with every one's brains and passion--that the event had so much zip.
The was a great day, an event I wished I could have spent more time at, and something to totally support in the future..nice work, everyone.
Brian Solis has good coverage and a neat picture gallery.
Being in the middle of Silicon Valley, amid the start-ups, the big and little acquisitions, the big tech companies and the emerging media and social networking services is making me think--a lot--about the twin sets of information and technology and the two poles of audience and revenue.
What I am noticing is that, for some of the bigger companies, it is challenging to maintain the right balance between their audience focus and customer commitment, and their technology innovation and revenue growth.
Or, to put it another way, how do you deeply fund innovation at the same time you support competitive toolsets? Is innovation a PR play to keep the press happy, or part of a sustained commitment to a diversified portfolio?
When you want to make bold moves, address a market opportunity, solve a customer problem, and/or just jump over that "we're just chipping away at our issues" type of product development, one strategy is to bet the farm, marshall all resources and go for it. Sometimes, the brute force is the only way to get things done. But getting to that focus is challenging for a big company, where there are lots of established business and values to maintain. The biggest challenge is to balance what you do with what you lose when you don't do something else.
Every company of any maturity makes these decision every day. It's what strategic focus is. There are never enough resources to go around, and the biggest skill is to decide how much of any one thing to build and ship at one time, and in what sequence. The brilliance of the product strategy team is how they can both support the business goals and the users by maintaining a portfolio of projects--big, medium and small--to drive the business--and the customer value--forward on multiple fronts.
Dave Sifry's announced that he's leaving Technorati (okay,going upstairs) and allowing three of his senior team to manage the company by concensus--oh, and BTW, 8 staffers are being let go as well. I don't need to flag the loud red alarm bells that go off when a founder leaves without the succession plan staffing locked down; we've all heard Technorati's been struggling in some ways for the past 20 months or so, but this is kinda scary.
I love search and I remember meeting Dave and Dan Beldy when I'd just moved back to California in August 2003; these were the days when I was a consultant mostly for big media in NY and Richard MacManus, whom I'd met through blogging, was my analyst and researcher. I was entranced by what Technorati was doing; I didn't think I'd seen anything as exciting since I'd discovered WAIS and Brewster Kahle back in the day. In truth, Technorati was one of the only companies I thought about leaving consulting to work at--obviously, that didn't happen.
The point? Going from a start-up to a sustainable company is amazingly hard, as hard or harder than developing a production and customer vision for an engineering-driven set of features. And Dave deserves tons of credit for getting the team to where they are now.
And yet, at the same time, merciless Mike Arrington says what others might not, that Dave should have taken a different approach--" Perhaps a blog post lamenting the layoffs and the disruption in people's lives would have been in order. And then an ending saying that he takes responsibility for the problems which led to this and will be stepping down, too."
Technorati has something very valuable and unique right now; this is a chance for the board to both dig in to protect their value and take a leap in finding someone really good to craft the future...or get trashed trying.
The MacArthur Foundation just announced an open competition to encourage innovation and knowledge-sharing surrounding new digital media and learning.
There are two types of awards:
- Innovation Awards will support learning entrepreneurs and builders of new digital environments for informal learning. Winners will receive $250,000 or $100,000.
- Knowledge Networking Awards will support communicators in connecting, mobilizing, circulating or translating new ideas around digital media and learning.
The announcement and the competition homepage have the info. Applications due Oct. 15.
Hmmnn...
(Via danah)
It looks like bolt.com has skidded to a halt. Richard MacManus pointed it out, Rafat Ali has a note, and yes, the site is shuttered. This news is in sharp contrast to the NY Times story yesterday on NBC-i Village and how it's hung on for so many years.
Back in the day, say 1998/99, bolt.com was a well-funded teen network and I was running react.com, another service for teens (owned by Parade Magazine). bolt had ads in the WSJ every day, big reach and everyone thought the IPO was thundering around the corner, and if not that, the big sale--but it never did happen, did it?
RIP, dudes....ugh.
“What if our strongest wish was to be praised . . . not to be loved or understood or desired? . . . What would our relationships be like? . . . We might find ourselves saying things like: The cruelest thing one can do to one's partner is to be good at fidelity but bad at celebration. . . . Or it's not difficult to sustain a relationship but it's impossible to keep a celebration going. The long applause becomes baffling.â€
--Adam Phillips, a London shrink, writing in Monogamy, quoted in the NY Times.
"My gut feeling, and it's nothing more than that, is that there's a 20 percent chance we're living in a computer simulation.â€
-- NickBostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford , quoted in a trippy NY Times article that posits a new version of the we're just living inside an illusion theme and that wars happen within our game because 'Peace is boring, Dude.'
(Susan sez: I think I am going to skip taking whatever he's having.)
So, some great things--completely unexpected--are happening in my life.
I've started writing poetry again, for the first time in years, and it's amazingly rewarding and exciting. I'm also getting more interested in writing about feminism--both technology and feminism, and, possibly, sexuality/social politics and feminism.
These are topics I don't see as part of this blog and I am debating options on where else to post.
If you have suggestions, preferences, warnings, please post here and let me benefit.
It struck me this morning that the shift toward user-generated media and away from main stream media as the primary or only information/entertainment driver--the shift away from newspapers toward YouTube, for example--is now well-paralled in the conference world, where what I'd have to call user-generated conferences--and unconferences--are taking hold.
The two events on my brain right now are
--the upcoming BarCamp Block, which Tara Hunt, Chris Messina, Ross Mayfield and others are arranging for this week
-- She's Geeky, an unconference with a demo/workshop half-day which Kaliya Hamlin, Mary Hodder, and about four other folks, including myself, are planning for October, and which is a conference for women who self-identify as geeks.
These are both conferences (like the ongoing Meshwalk series)that come very much out of both the passion of the organizers and the Open Space/unconference format.
But then there's also the enthusiast conferences--conferences started by someone in a sector who's embedded in the category-- Blogher, YPulse Mashups and Gnomedex all come to mind--these are all quite different than the big, expensive conferences that have been such profitable moneymakers for their organizers (and so challenging to market).
The point here would be that conferences--just like media companies--are being nibbled at by the grassroots, the user base, the audience--and alot of what's going on is much ore interesting that what the old school is doing.
Update: As I add the links for these conferences to this post, I am asking myself if these UGC conferences also have a higher percentage of female organizers--and speakers--and the answer is definitely yes. Interesting but not surprising, huh?
My sex & relationships column--which happens every Friday--is live over at Blogher.org.
Mike Arrington's got a piece wondering if Jason Calcanis' Digg-insipired Netscape.com redo is about to get yanked. The comment by Maricien Jenckes says:
"Community has been a core element of both AOL and Netscape since their inception and will continue to be. As the text on the site explains, we wanted to give a more traditional portal alternative to the Netscape users who requested it. You can rest assured that social news will continue to be an important part of what we do."
I spent a few years at AOL and Netscape and my translation of the above would read:
1) We've already decided to stop putting resources into this and redeploy them, we just have to decide how to spin it in a good way.
2) The site isn't making the money or getting the page view and uniques growth we hoped, so why not go back to the traditional portal that our older users want and that's so much less expensive to pipe a bunch of feeds into?
3) Social news is the albatross around our neck, but we've embraced it as the only hope we have to muster any attention at all from the 18-34 year olds who are no longer focusing on AOL email. If they quit AIM, we're dead.
I give it till September when the change over happens.
“When a guy sits down and eats something fatty and big, you wonder if they eat like that all the time. It crosses my mind they'll probably die early.â€
--Brice Gaillard, single freelance design writer, in a NYTimes article on how real single women--especially the writers-- order steak.
"Everyone wants to be the girl who drinks the beer and eats the steak and looks like Kate Hudson. Being a vegetarian puts you at a disadvantage. You're in the most basic category of finicky. Even women who order chicken, it isn't enough."
--Sloane Crosley, a writer and publicist at Random House, quoted in the same article.
Congrats to my good friend Mary Hodder, whose video search, indexing and sharing business, Dabble recently hit its first year anniversary--and even more recently, Dabble hit the mark of having indexed 17 millino videos--a truly hefty sum.
Mary says: "When we started building Dabble in 2005 it was hard to imagine the video search market getting this big as quickly as it did. But we knew the conditions were right for a site which would use the best technology to map videos no matter where they were hosted and deliver users the most relevant search results and best experience."
Congrats, Mary and everyone!
It's been interesting to watch former client Hearst Magazine Group find its feet with a full-borne web strategy; of course, for the former i-Village partner, that involves lots of catch-up and rebuilding, along with new ventures.
Recognizing that Hearst was buying itself a platform to finally move into contextual and reader-driven e-commerce with the WSJ reported imminent purchase of Kaboodle made me smile this morning; why wouldn't a major publisher of womens' and shelter magazines,with an audience of millions, want to have a way that not only editors--but readers and peers--could recommend products to one another (think stylehive or thisnext)?
This is a smart purchase by Hearst, and evidence that they've learned alot from their recent acquisition of several teen--focused properties...it is going to be fun to see this brand integrate--and power--new aspects of their big brands--as well as get an infusion of marketing for Kaboodle itself.
Fun. And shrewd. And a way to hold off Glam.com and other like it from pulling an Engadget on their categories
'Will global warming catch up with us? Is that irreparable? Will technological civilisation collapse? There seems to be some possibility of that over the next 30 or 40 years or will we do some Verner Vinge singularity trick and suddenly become capable of everything and everything will be cool and the geek rapture will arrive? That's a possibility too."
--Author William Gibson, author of the amazing Neuromancer(1984), in an interview about Spook Country, his new novel, the first in 10 years.
Bonus quote--Gibson on Neuromancer today: "Any imaginary future as soon as you get it down on screen starts to acquire an instant patina of quaintness - it's just the nature of things.
If I were a smart 12-year-old picking up Neuromancer for the first time today I'd get about 20 pages in and I'd think 'Ahhaa I've got it - what happened to all the cell phones?"
"I definitely have enough. I'm not stressed out about never earning an income ever again.â€
--Engineer Brian Wilson, quoted in yet another NYTimes story, describing the humbler millionaires in the Valley.
"I'd be rich in Kansas City. People would seek me out for boards. But here I'm a dime a dozen."
-- Wink staffer and Silicon Valley computer programmer David Koblas, describing how his $5 million bucks is small change in Silicon Valley where everyone has big bucks, at least according to this *(yet again) breathless NY Times story about the amazing, unique Valley and the extraordinary people who live there (yes, I am striving for sarcasm.)
This was one of those social, relaxing weekends--saw several friends, and also got to see a documentary called Gumby Dharma, a documentary about stop-motion animator and caught up in the 60's Gumby developer Art Clokey and his family and life--an amazing flick and well worth seeing.
In addition to this big fun, did some coastal walking in Half Moon Bay, had lunch with an old friend from NYC , and started planning--and getting some more folks to work on October's She's Geeky--more on that in anothe post later today.
Also worked on some poems, planned two essays for Blogher, and contemplated how fortunate I felt this weekend--friends, fun, the Bay area--I am grateful for all the creativity in my life right now.
"(Aggregators)'re all motivated to keep you on their own platforms for as long as possible, rather than giving you absolute freedom to take your identity wherever you like. Right now, it's hard to make money without owning the user's identity in some way; user lock-in remains the strongest business model, even though superficially they exist to hand more control to you."
--Pete Cashmore, Mashable, writing about Web 2.0 social , the competition between FB and Netvibes, and what's being called lock-in--another way of addressing engagement, attention, and plain ol' scale.
(Susan sez: And yes, this all goes back to a portable, open ID standard--those folks at my company whose work it is to set standards and strategy--I hope this is high on your list.)
By spending just a few hours per month, Chloe earns through Google AdSense between $20 and $30 per day -- and it's sometimes even as much $40. If you do the math, that's somewhere around $700 to $900 a month for very little work. If Chloe wanted to earn a similar amount of money through a part-time job -- at her age, this typically means flipping burgers, babysitting or operating a paper route -- she'd have to work somewhere around 25 to 30 hours per week (assuming minimum wage). "
--CNET SEO columnist Stephan Spencer, describing his teenage daughter's ventures into profitable SEO.
"“Let's get out in the streets and march and protest instead of sitting at home and blogging.
“I do think it would be an incredible experiment to shut down the whole internet for five years and see what sort of art is produced over that span. There's too much technology available."
--Elton John, sharing his views that blogging, technology, and the net take away from what really matters--professional musicians releasing lots of CDs.
“I have observed its mutation into a somewhat different kind of site. There are now some troubling aspects to its features and culture that were absent before."
-- Ralph Blumenthal, Connecticut attorney general, quoted in a NY Times article on how Facebook is now experiencing--and needing to find ways to cope with--the false identities, scammers, fake profiles, pedophiles and edge cases now active on the site.
