"...The real issues do not lie in the individual users giving consent to the platforms they use to share (some of) their data with the outside world. The real issue is: If this data is about social relations - friends, colleagues, contacts etc. - everybody of their friends would have to agree to have the information shared, as it is also about them.
(snip)
This is basically what the idea of privacy as "contextual integrity" is about. Professional networks are built at LinkedIn or Xing, party and music related networking happens at MySpace, and students connect to each other at StudiVZ. While most of the information in these platforms may not be secret or sensitive, there is a reason people do different things on different platforms. I mean, when I go out for a beer with my friends, I also dress in a different way from a professional conference. Nothing is secret about this, but we play different roles in different contexts, and the kind of relations we build or the ways we express ourselves are different

--ralf bendrath, writing about The Social Graph and Google's OpenSocial announcement in a terrific post that both highlights comments on Google OS from other bloggers and advances thought around aggregating and distributing identity-related user-generated content and person data.

Much as I love to blog(and I do), finding time this week has been a challenge--just amazingly busy at the moment--back to daily updates very soon.

"Let's face it, we're skunk drunk and it's because of money. It's almost like we all need to enter Betty Ford Clinic 2.0 together. This time, it's not stock market money but private equity, M&A, VCs and to some degree the reckless abandonment of logic by some advertisers who are perpetuating what is sure to end badly when the economy turns. "

--Longtime blogger and PM guy Steve Rubel, calling out the B*S of Web 2.0 build and flip psychosis.

So, we're not having what's been the usual Friday am S he's Geeky planning call this week.
Reason: The conference happened this past Monday and Tuesday.
Emails and notes are still coming to me, but I definitely want to share some of what I learned and observed.

First off, lessons about the women in tech community based on this conference experience:

• There is a huge age diversity--Two retired women who were coders/programmers in the late 60's/early 70's came to the conference to see what women in tech were like today. There were women still in school, and just out of college, along with the twenty-thirty-forty-and fifty somethings.
• Race and class and gender identity contribute to the mix--I saw more diversity around race and gender identity than at many conferences.
• Feminism lives--especially in that third wave of younger women.
• The impulse/need to connect is powerful--and there is some real pent-up demand to get outside one's usual circles.
• There is a spirit of sharing, acceptance, curiosity--but no bullshit, please, we're time-deprived.
• There's definitely momentum to do this conference again--and again--in more locations as well as in the Bay area.

Observations about women at conference in aggregate:

• Many people want mentoring--help and support from those further along the twisty path
• Many want leadership and personal development--I think 40+ people came to the session I facilitated on "Owning Your Power" and the room was filled at the session the next day with Liza and Adina on Leadership development.
• People are becoming self-employed and entrepreneurial at younger ages--and want support and guidance for uncharted paths.
• Community really does matter.

Finally, I have to say that, as much as I beat myself up 100 times about my viability as a fund-raiser, or consistency as a planner, working with Kaliya and the organizing team was amazing. In many ways, while it took real solid work and time, this was one of the least stressful events I have ever worked on--the levels of communication and concensus were just so high among the team--and Kaliya and Laurie did amazing work in the background.

So Techmeme, Gabe Rivera's addictive aggregator, launched roughly two years ago. Boy, things were different back then. As I remember it, Gabe was crashing at Arrington's house, TechCrunch was a way to study start-ups and Edgeio took off,and Scoble, Winer, Kos and kottke were among the fellas who ruled the blogosphere. Ross Mayfield was a huge influence.

Here we are in 2007, and Techmeme's much more fully featured, TechCrunch is today's CNET, and the top blogs on the lists are mostly commercial ventures with scads of writers.

This is a post about some of the changes and what I've noted:
1) The top 100 blogosphere seems even more male than it was in 2005. We don't see many women in the top 100 tech links these days--and the ones who used to have great play-- Shelley Powers, Halley Suitt, Mary Hodder--have dialed in way down-- Halley's blog is invite only. Shelley is still writing, but seems less linked to, and Mary is running a company--and posting less.

2) Many of the top blogs are commercial ventures--the Lifehackers, Engadgets, Read/Write Web, GigaOm--often spawned by good bloggers who saw a business opportunity in their passion.

3) Tech blogs today--especially those on TechMeme--tend to be more about breaking news stories--truly replacing CNET--and less about tech insights and reflections. Dave Winer, Fred Wilson, get some play as commentators (as do I) but the prevalence of bloggers with observations--as opposed to those playing the role of the tech press-get much less play now on TechMeme--or are just outnumbered.

4) Have the commentators become a smaller part of the tech blogosphere? Or is it that the new-driven folks, sensing the great ability to get ad dollars and audience, have stepped it up so much those other voices seem quieter by comparison?

5) And what is the balance of women's voices on TechMeme? Does the service (which I love) reflect the best commentators and bloggers out there in the best and most diverse way? (Yes, when you love something you ask more of it--Gabe--the service rocks, so these are in the search for perfection questions...)

6) And how about that sk-rt? Anything there?

"The big challenge for Facebook, as it has been for AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple and everybody else who ever ran a walled garden, is to make their “platform” something that sits on the Net and the Web, not something that substitutes for it."

---Doc Searls, stating the obvious quite eloquently in a post that explains why the Facebook walled garden requires time and effort that just ain't worth it to him.

Susan sez: It is more and more obvious that FB is the new AOL, integrated applications and all. Remember that power that AOL had for the populace and how much progress we've made in open standards, distributed data and so on and wonder what's next. Ask yourself what open platforms will arise that benefit from training us all to use the FB tools but will lack their constraints?

'.... Loic said that Mike told him that we used to be best friends. I couldn't figure out what that meant, because our friendship was the business kind of friendship not the personal kind. What does it mean to be best friends in that way? And how does that relate to having a blog? It never occurred to me that friendship meant that (here's the epiphany) that I would only say positive things about Mike's business."

--Dave Winer, hitting for the fences once more as he writes about the 10,000 words for snow that signify friendship in our culture-and in our little digital Valley

CN Networks: San Diego fires links and stories.
Doc Searls on the Live Web here.
NYTimes: Good piece on Lee Miller, muse and war photog.
Om Malik: A new way to view news.

For me, it's been great. Liz Henry has been l iveblogging the sessions and also taking photos--I am going to post some of her photos and gratefully link back.
More photos here and here and here--
And another day--the unconference--tomorrow.

I'll be at She's Geeky all day today and tomorrow, and I'm getting notes ready for an opening talk that will reflect the views of the women working on the conference, notably Kaliya Hamin, Mary Hodder, Julia French, Laurie Rae, Mary Trigani and Melanie Swan. We met yesterday to do some planning, and sets of themes emerged that are well worth capturing.

First of all, we are in a shifting environment. There is no question that more women are working in technology and that there is a shifting gender balance. Nevertheless, that doesn't mean tech communities are gender-balanced--basically, they are not. Going from one woman in the room to three out of twenty doesn't constitute a quorum (What would be a quorum, you ask? In my opinion, seven out of twenty is where we want to end up in the near future. Fifty-fifty down the road and that means greater change in our education system, right?)

At the same time that the balance is shifting, women are still feeling, in many cases, like they are entering into, having to adjust to, and sometimes just being tolerated by, a community that has been used to being all male (again, these are broad strokes, clearly not true in every case.)

This means that many women feel like they have to cope by developing and or accepting a role that doesn't match their authentic, at work, self. For women I've talked with, this can mean

• Being part of the team as the 'Mom' who takes care of everyone and resenting it but staying in the role
• Striving to be seen as accomplished and attractive
• Feeling stigmatized for being accomplished and not caring about being attractive in a traditional sense
• Not being seen as a leader in a room of men
• Being seen as a leader by everyone but feeling defeminized
• Wishing you were not the only women in the room every time

And so on (there are dozens of examples and instances here, add your own if you wish in the comments.)

It also means that people in the tech community, men and women, are able to get away with comments like the following, which sting the women that receive them (who usually just bitch about it later but who are looking for ways to educate so these comments go away):

• "Wow, you're so smart for a woman, I mean, you know the really hard back-end stuff."
• "You're not just a PR girl (aka 'tight sweater'), you really know your stuff.
  
• "You'd better put your name on that, cause you're too attractive for anyone to think that you actually did the work."
• "The only other woman in the Valley who is as smart AND attractive is you is X."
• "How does your husband feel about your success? Are you married?"

It also means that women working in tech, who fill roles in so many disciplines, doing exactly the same work men do (as I had to remind a reporter who asked whether the women did the *fluffier* jobs, like the lifestyle editors do at his newspaper), haven't had the chance to come together across disciplines and affirm what they share.

Blogher and other groups do an amazing job of building community and networks, but we haven't seen anything that focuses on bringing together and creating community for women in tech who self-identify as geeky--as everyone at the conference does--which is why Shes's Geeky was born.

What's needed--and what we hope this first Shes Geeky conference will provide--is a chance to women to come together to talk and meet, to share and discuss issues and from that, if they wish, create an ongoing frame work of power and support that will both make everyone's lives a little easier and provide an environment for talk, action and community going forward. In other words, we want to celebrate and support what we share, discuss what we hope to change, and explore where we can go--all in a day and a half of pre-planned talks, unconference sessions and unbounded and welcoming community.

Hats off to Kaliya, Mary and everyone involved for making this conference happen, and greetings and salutations to everyone who's attending and speaking today and tomorrow--
Welcome to a safe place to share and perhaps, to grow.

My new column is up at Blogher.
Topic: Can your best friend be your life partner?

"Even though much of my brainpower is currently yoked to parts of our project that are not yet fit to blog, I know there are things that we should be talking about. Perhaps the most important is this one: As journalism becomes a high-tech profession, one essential skill will be learning how to be an effective partner with programmers -- even if you're not a programmer yourself. (Yet)."

--Placeblogger founder Lisa Williams, writing about the next generation of her local directory service and what it delivers in terms of making it easier for people to find hyperlocal news and information about their city or neighborhood through promotion of "universal geotagging" in blogs.

(Note: I am an advisor to PBL.)

She's Geeky, a conference for women who self-identify as geeky, is happening this coming Monday and Tuesday, October 22-23rd at the Computer History Museum in Santa Clara.

There are going to be some great talks on Monday afternoon, including one on privacy and technology and sexual issues by Violet Blue, and another by me and some other folks on Claiming Your Own Power (full schedule here).

Tuesday is an unconference with an amazing group of people already on the wicki and others registered.

Registration is still open.

I am really psyched about this one...and looking forward to seeing and talking with everyone. I will try to do some live blogging from the conference as well.

We're in the middle of a very busy time at work, which is how I like it, but the ebb and flow of the days--the business plans being made, the objectives set, the product visions turned into decks, concept docs and PRDs to be executed, on budget and on time, make me think more about the role of a product development lead and how it's different from that of a product manager.

I was talking with someone on my team yesterday about work flow on her (big) project and how to provide both direction and autonomy, and she said "The product manager owns the execution of the strategy; the product lead owns the business strategy."

I smiled and gave qualified agreement, saying "There's truth there, but the product lead also needs to set the vision and decide how much to do when."

The reason I put 'setting the sequence" into the title for this post is because there's an inseperable link between crafting a product vision to serve a business goal and then deciding how much of it to execute to get the greatest return and customer value for the littlest cost in the shortest time (Are there really projects that don't have those requirements? Introduce me, please.)

What that means is that a big part of the product lead's job--in specific, my job--is to take the great ideas and the feature concepts we've developed and to decide what exactly has to be in the first release, what's a phase 2 and what's--uh--never gonna be built. It's also my role to work with my colleagues to figure out which of the big five projects we have on the dock has to go out first, which is next and when do we come back to phase two of the first one(often before we've gone on to building that next next big thing.)

We have some amazing people on the team who actually figure out how we can put all these projects together (we sometimes call it making lace because it feels so complex and intricate), and we have other people who work on the forecasts, pricing, and overall strategy, but one critical component that drives tons of business impact is this fairly straightforward and yet somewhat complex question of how much of each project to do when. (The problem-solving for that question is definitely one of the most interesting parts of my job and something I relish working on with other in the business unit.) At the end of the day, I own this sequencing--both the business side rationales for driving impact and the operational process for getting things done well, on budget and on time.

We're at point, right now, where the work we're focused on involves both planning and execution, and in the next 2 weeks I'll be diving deep into the sequencing pool --along with our senior project lead--as we create estimates of work based on the PRDs and work with the team to translate features both into user impact and into resources required. This is truly one of the parts of my job I relish the most--seeing all the planning and analysis and vision we have turn into well-thought out, carefully focused execution.

Barely Political is rocking the house (and just got acquired): See
Obama Girl: I have a crush on Obama

and the amazing I like a boy,which manages to support soldiers who fight in a war nobody wants.

(Yes, I just crawled out from under a rock --but I am in awe of Leah Kau ffman.)

Valleywag: Rumors on the AOL Layoffs--4,000 to go?
NY Times: Paper Tiger: The joys of shredding.

Polyvore.com: Put together clothing outfits on FB and share with friends--the fashionista's FB app.

"If Facebook's technology is everything its engineers promise -- and granted, that's a rarity, but supposing it is -- then Facebook needs to escape the Microsoft trap and start selling its own ads, beyond just the sponsorships its small sales team focuses on, as soon as possible. That technology, and the data it generates, could well make Facebook a permanent player in online advertising, the expert in hypertargeted, personalized ads.

--Valleywag's Owen Thomas, being serious for a change, discussing the rumor that FB has high-ticket term sheets from Microsoft, Google and Yahoo in hand.

" A social networking tool becomes a publicity tool when "I speak, you speak, I reply, you reply" becomes "I speak, you listen"."

--Allan Stern, writing on how the powerful communication and viral distribution tools of Facebook, twitter and other SNs can be used for PR and promotion,.

My new weekly column is posted at blogher.org as ti will be every Monday.

Face Reviews: How do users spend time on Facebook? *("Interaction with Facebook Profiles, Photos and Applications are the 3 most common activities....It is important to note that facebook photos is the the biggest photo sharing site on the internet.")

Read/Write Web: The Structured Web, A Primer. ("Among the evolving aspects of the new web are Semantics, Attention (Implicit Behavior) and Personalization. Regardless of what we are decide to call this next web, the information in it is going to be more meaningful, more automatic, and more tailored to each of us.")

Planblog: Wiki Meets Facebook

Beth Kanter: How Nonprofits can use social media--If you're an NGO, start here.

“I felt like I was a pariah. For me, it was a choice between life and death."

--Elderly lesbian Gloria Donadello , quoted in a NY Times story about aging GLBT people and their challenges of finding appropriate elder care facilities-and her own struggle to find acceptance and a community as she needed more support.

The always literate and witty Kara Swisher recently said (like, yesterday): "While Facebook–with a cleaner and more strict look and a better navigation–is surely less goofy than rival MySpace for anyone over 12 years old, and its video, photo and email features are nice, the vast majority of its apps are still mostly as dumb as a box of hammers."

Kara goes on to complain FB is a network without a purpose, that is if you consider tossing sheep and displaying BFF a waste of time, but her eloquent post, which makes the point that purposeful utilities are what matter, still manages to getFacebook's power wrong.

What makes FB work, IMHO, is the way it manages to allow people to demonstrate connection. It is the central digital clearing house to manifest relationships (I am not going to say social graph) and the utilities offer an ever expanding set of ways to support maintaining and displaying those connections from the highly userful--news feeds, posts, roups, invites, to the silly--throwing sheep, sending drinks-to the interactive and entertaining--sharing books, playing risk or scrabble.

That digital hub--people hub if you will--is what everyone else wants to find ways to mirror and achieve and is what flickr, perhaps, could have been if the team had chosen to build in that direction (which it did not).

One way to look at all the fun FB apps is that while they offer third-party developers somewhat cheap ways to acquire audiences (value unproven), they also offer FB a means to hold users as they themselves build out the kind of integrated platform AOL was once, only on the web--with a superior set of mail, groups, bookmarking, IM and search tools, either their own or integrated from third parties in profitable business deals based on user acquisition bounties and ad revenue splits.

Yep, it is kinda AOL redux, ain't it--only this time on the web and with something just as of its moment as AOL was back in ol' '1992.

".... it is that very community, not the site per se, that has attracted MSNBC's dollars. Should not the community, therefore, be entitled to some of that money?

Of course, the community itself, by not being party to the discussions with MSNBC nor beholden to the deal, can just up sticks and leave if it doesn't like the outcome. And that's where the other illusion kicks in: MSNBC can't buy the community, although it may feel it has. It can buy the site where that community has built its camp."

--Loose wire blog, writing on the acquisition of news community site Newsvine by MSNBC , another demonstration of mature media's efforts to address how citizen journalism and user-focused content have moved to the fore.

I have been laughing for the past three days since the Techmeme Leaderboard launched. Why? Guys, gotta love em. Read the quotes below and guess the gender of the people who wrote them:

1. "On Techmeme, I am 59th. Only 3 behind Scoble whose OPML file was used to build the service if you buy into the lore. I feel pretty damn good about that too. I think I am the sixth blog on the list done entirely by one person (not sure about that). Dave Winer is the first in that category, and deservedly so.

2. "A pragmatic question for people who want to follow the TechMeme LeaderBoard -- it's clearly not practical to look at it as frequently as it could change, every 20 minutes. So what kind of tool do we need to tell us about change? Email notification? An RSS feed for each site? I'm interested in knowing what people think."

3. "I should point out - not that I pay attention to such things, of course - that on the very first publicly released Leaderboard, which was published yesterday by Dave Winer on his venerable blog Scripting News, Rough Type ranked Number 34. (It's also probably worth noting that Rough Type was actually Number 1 among "real blogs," as defined by Robert Scoble, who wrote the book on blogging)."

Fellas, fellas, fellas! Sheesh.

Brad Stone, NYT: Industry Standard may be brought back (Susan sez: To beat TechCrunch, eh?)

TBDB: Robin Wolaner writess about her eyelift (good piece).
Allan Mutter: (Old) media's brain drain (aka does anyone cool under 3p want to work in print?)

"According to research firm Compete, it ( The Huffington Post) has an audience almost as large as the online version of the Philadelphia Inquirer. As a part of a larger newspaper organization like The New York Times (NYT) or Washington Post (WPO), that audience could probably be much bigger. NYT and WPO need a Huffington or two. Their internet revenues are under 10% of their total and not growing fast enough to keep up with falling print sales. Huffington has raised $10 million in VC money. What is it worth? $100 million. Maybe more. Worth it for The Times or The Post."

-- 24/7 Wall Street blogger Douglas A. McIntyre, writing about potential media acquisitions by, uh, big media companies.

Susan sez: This post caught my attention because
a. It demonstrates the belief large ad-driven properties with fairly broad audiences are effective advertising vehicles
b. It demonstrates the recognition that big companies have huge trouble investing and and building new media products that scale and, even in media, buy not build appears easier.
c. It's just as true for any successful niche product as for TechCrunch or HP--if it's true.

So whaddya think? Is this a QTD you'd agree with?

Somehow, I've managed to get beyond busy. Amazingly busy. Can't recall what I did over the weekend by Monday afternoon level of busy. And the awful thing is, I kind of like it. The unreformed adrenalin junkie creeps out when I have this much to do and has a great time killing snakes, as one former boss liked to say (only the a.j. thinks she's entitled to scarf doughnuts as fuel, and no ma'am, , that's not allowed.)

On the other hand, part of being so busy is being more rigorous than I used to be about doing things besides work. Like go for a walk or a hike. Blog. Write poetry. See a friend or multiple friends. Read. Walk my ever-patient dog. Have adventures. Work on some help the world do better project for a friend. Be a friend. Get away for the weekend once in a while.

My most *famous* days as a blogger were during some of the darkest moments of my life, when I either was going to sit at the computer and blog and write, or put my head under the pillows and cry. Whenever people talk to me about the traffic this blog gets, I think back to those days and just smile.

You see, compared to back then, I think I am probably a little closer these days to almost getting it right.

• NYTimes: Use my photo? Not without permission: story about f lickr, photo-sharing and digital rights. As in you need permission to repost, dudes.
• Howard Owens: 12 things journalists can do to save journalism. Susan sez: Are there many journalists left? (Okay, I didn't mean that.)
• Kara Swisher: Yahoo's big Friday meeting gets an A. K sez: "To my mind, that means cutting deadwood and allowing employees to feel empowered. It means saying yes a lot more than no. It means making some big, bold and maybe even dumb moves in the areas targeted to shake a few trees. It means laser-focus on the promises made."
• TechCrunch: Mike's got the scoop on TechMeme's new Leaderboard of blogs:"...To be exact, top blogs will be ranked on presence - “the percentage of headline space a source occupies over the 30-day period.” (Congrats, Gabe.)
• Scripting News: Winer's post of the TechMeme 100. Not that guys are into size or anything.