"There are no words to explain my rage. These people were supposed to be our friends.”

--Missouri mom Tina Meier, quoted in a NY Times story reporting how her 13 year old daughter Megan killed herself after a relationship with an online boyfriend ended and she was subsequentlycyber-bullied.

The boyfriend turned out to be the creation of Lori Drew, a vengeful mom down the blog who was not charged with any crime.

Sarah Dopp just told me that when she googled "feminist tech geek" one of my posts came up first.. that is so cool.

One of my 2008 personal resolutions is to think through more what those words mean, and how, at this point in time, with feminism at a third wave I am trying to truly understand, being a feminist and a technologist and a person fit together.

--And what kind of open source and social change those words might suggest.

If anyone would like to get together in January and talk about feminism, technology, and where focus might be put, (outside of mentoring kids, etc.) LMK and I will set something up.

So AdBrite management Philip Kaplan, Iggy Fanlao and Paul Levine have gone and raised $23 MM from Sequoia Capital to build out their self-serve ad network. Like, wow.

AdBrite is pretty much a one stop ad placement shop for third-party publishers, with both display advertising and a product for monetizing Facebook applications . The SF-based company raised rounds of $8 million and $4 million in 2006 and 2004, so this is the biggest haul to date.

Note: TC reports :"In October, comScore ranked AdBrite as the 26th largest ad network after MySpace. Its ads reached 71 million people that month, representing a 39 percent reach of U.S. Internet traffic." Not too shabby.

""On USA Today's site, I can comment on articles, submit photos, create a blog that lives there, participate in forums on the site and interact with other users on that site. We're going to connect those interactions that are happening on these public Web sites back to the user's Facebook profile...the publisher gets an expanded reach of their brand ... to reach people who aren't necessarily thinking about their brand at that time."

--Pluck CEO Dave Panos, describing how the company will use the Google Open Social platform within a product called PluckSiteLife to--with the user's permission--embed and distribute personal info from users' accounts at social network websites such as a profile widget, article comments and other info across media sites owned by Gannett, Reuters, Discovery Communications, The Washington Post, The Economist Newspaper Ltd., Freedom Interactive Media Inc., Canadian Broadcasting Corp., Rodale Inc. and Meredith Corp.

Susan sez: Pluck is a former client of mine, and I have always thought they are great--this is very shrewd, exciting and a really solid extension of the services they provide to publishers starting with the RSS feed sundication products in 2005/6. Good work, fellas.

"But here's the thing no one ever tells you: you are not a slave to your attraction patterns. They can be changed. They were programmed into you in the first place, and you can work to reprogram them to suit yourself.
(snip...)

Virtually always, the person who “just isn't attracted” any more has completely accepted the young/thin/pretty ideal as the only sexually attractive one. Now, let's see why people do that. Could it be because that is force-fed to all of us from a very young age (and the younger you are, the more TV you probably watched as a child, and the earlier the force-feeding started). By the time we reach puberty, we've already been taught what we're supposed to like and respond to and, surprise! Our genitals behave accordingly."

-- Laurie Toby Edison and Debbie Notkin, Body Impolitic, discussing a Dan Savage advice column about a man who now finds his wife unattractive and doesn't want to sleep with her.

USA Today: Can widgets cure cancer? No, but they can pretty darn near revolutionize everything else, according to this seal-of-approval story with nice quotes from Jeremy Liew and Adam Rifkin.

InfoWeek: Cory Doctorow on FB, privacy, time wasting and stalkers--"Emails from Facebook aren't helpful messages, they're eyeball bait, intended to send you off to the Facebook site, only to discover that Fred wrote "Hi again!" on your "wall."

Valleywag: Is Julia Allison the woman Valleywag loves to hate? If yes, this fluff is a maybe amusing, in a lock your high school buddy in a locker for no reason kind of way. But maybe VW is digging deep for filler this week... Hmmn. I think Julia's a damn good writer, and that's what she's doing-- writing.

The original Rrriott Grrrl; Check out Horses and feel the energy.

I'm in New York with family, just as I was a year ago, in the same house as a year ago. The repetition offers a chance to reflect both on how social media and technology have evolved, and how I see myself as similar or different that at Turkey Day 2006.

On the tech side, my relative's house is now full wired, but since they can't remember the key for the security-enabled wireless--and they didn't realize they should write it down--I can't really log on. Instead, I am trying to scrape connectivity off neighbors' networks, not a good thing.

My 10 yr old nephew totally is into YouTube, which he barely knew about a year ago, and he showed me all the SouthPark episodes online and we viewed some favorites. He got the WOW videos of the Jon Coulton songs I love, and showed me his spiffy new Wii, which we played with.
His parents, however, haven't really increased their knowledge about digital media; neither one has a FB profile and they just don't see the point--even for finding and sharing photos and music.
So, no broad steps forward there.

On the personal side, I'm getting the opportunity to truly spend time with family I have not seen, but I am also missing friends and family on the left coast: Zack & Margaret, Andrew, BJ in particular, and others as well.

I'm thankful to have such great family and friends and the sense of community I do--there's a richness of experience in my life right now I deeply value (and try to work hard to maintain.)

As the holiday season kicks off with the usual frenzy, I am going to try to focus this year on living my values, eating less and exercising consistent, and being a loyal friend. Early vows I hope to keep.

"Bitch is a word we use culturally to describe any woman who is strong, angry, uncompromising and, often, uninterested in pleasing men. We use the term for a woman on the street who doesn't respond to men's catcalls or smile when they say, "Cheer up, baby, it can't be that bad." We use it for the woman who has a better job than a man and doesn't apologize for it. We use it for the woman who doesn't back down from a confrontation.

So let's not be disingenuous. Is it a bad word? Of course it is. As a culture, we've done everything possible to make sure of that, starting with a constantly perpetuated mindset that deems powerful women to be scary, angry and, of course, unfeminine -- and sees uncompromising speech by women as anathema to a tidy, well-run world."

Does exclusivity matter? This week's Blogher column is now live

"But curated systems will be gamed. Everything on the Interent will be gamed. And user generated content won't stay "user" generated forever. The pros will crash any party that's worth crashing and make it their own."

-VC Fred Wilson, describing how big media and indie group-authored blogs have gotten a larger share of presence on techmeme, formerly the clearing house for solo bloggers and consultants, including Jarvis, Calacanis, Feld, and Doc Searls.

Susan sez: I agree with Fred and wrote a similar post a few weeks ago.

In NYC, and reflecting on what it feels like to be back here after almost 10 months away, longest time ever.

On one hand, the city feels amazingly familiar, as it always does; in fact, I am surprised at how comfortable I feel. On the other hand, I see how much more of a Californian I've become; the subway is far more *urban* in feeling, people on the street look different than they do on the West Coast. Instead of blue(sky) and green (trees) the predominant colors seem to be black(clothing) and grey (sidewalk, buildings, streets, sky).

All that side, it's great to be here, great to know I will be here for another week and exciting to experience New York through somewhat fresher eyes than in the past. I also have a great sense of how I've changed by seeing myself back here, the old homestead, and noticing how my own focus has shifted (more techie, more feminist, more relaxed).

And yes, the dogs really are smaller, so they can fit in all those compact apartments more easily.

"A driving force behind my writing passion is political activism. Contrary to popular assumption writing can function as a form of resistance without in any way being propagandistic or lacking literary merit.'

--the amazing bell hooks, writing in remembered rapture: the writer at work, a powerful collection of her essays.

“People don't really want reality. They want surgically enhanced, scripted reality. The perversity of life today is so thrilling to me. It's like a circus out there. It's cartoon land.”

--Designer Marc Jacobs, quoted in the NY Times.

"A well-tended e-mail inbox and outbox can serve as a sort of diary, an evolving record of your curiosities, obsessions, introspections, apologies, and heart-to-hearts. Instant messages, on the other hand, are like Post-it notes, handy for a few minutes but hardly worth saving. While IMs and text messages have a throwaway quality, e-mail is for the sentimental. I still have some of the first flirtatious e-mails I exchanged with my wife in college. I have thoughtful monologues from friends in the midst of crises. I have e-mails from my parents that I envision showing to my children someday."

--Chad Lorenz, The death of email, writing in Slate.

Susan sez: Another velocity of change snippet--in the cycle of continuous revolution that technology serves email is to SMS as paper was to email, oh, 12 years ago--the air we breathe, the familiar medium we take for granted (and need to reinvent, regardless).

(Tom Evslin has a related post.)

Social networks and search tools are shifting my experiences in increasingly radical ways.

A year ago, I became best friends with someone I'd known mostly online, who lives in New York (I live in California); our connections through blogging, email, phone, flickr, twitter gave us real time linkages and asynchronous connections helped us developed a closeness and sense of connection amazingly real and solid, given the distance.

In the past week, I've had another new experience--being contacted by someone who was from out of my distant past. The first contact was from Nancy, who was my best friend when I was small--she found a post about my parents during a search and reached out.

Then, tonight, someone I knew when I was 15, and then again at 19 or so, found me on Facebook. Amazingly, while I don't much remember Lila that clearly, we seem to have quite a bit in common right now, including a couple of fairly unusual convergences, and a flurry of emails, photo exchanges and notes has ensued.

Yep, we spent a chunk of the night exchanging increasingly detailed emails; in what has to be dubbed cyber-discovery; I'm now hoping we can meet in real life--many years after my 19 year old self knew her 14 year old self--and share amazement at how small the world is and how the virtual universe brings people together again and again.

"Allowing machines to automatically act on personal data on my bahalf is the right direction for things to go. But important questions need to be resolved.

For example, what happens to my data in all the places I've allowed it to appear when I change it? How do permissions pass from one service to another? How do I guarantee that a permission type I grant in one service means the same thing in another service? How do changes propagate? How does consent get revoked?"

I'm heading to the city (as in NYC) for the holidays, and before I disappear into the family thing, wondered if anyone would be interested in joining me and a few friends for a meet up of drinks/dinner on Tuesday night, November 20th?

I will be working out of some mid-town offices, so we'd want to pick a place in Manhattan to meet, ideally somewhat central (and not Katz's deli, Dean).

If you are interested in meeting up, either send me an email or ping me on facebook where there's a similar discussion going on.

Ideas for places to meet welcome as well, thinking we'd start hanging out 6 pm ish and do dinner around 7.

Nichelle says Chicks & Giggles is also that night, so it is an option.

So, I started writing poetry again back in July, and it's still happening. I've written more than thirty poems, and this practice seems to be becoming part of my life, along with blogging, writing columns for Blogher , random projects and events I support, and my product developer/ Yahoo! life.

Does this mean I can pretend I have achieved balance?

I think I am too obsessive and too much of a geek/workaholic compulsive type to say this is balance, but I am totally digging how I am diversifying my free time.

Of course, the Q4 goal is to either start walking more or go to the gym, and I am so far failing miserably at both of these.

Skelliewag: How to turn readers into fans (via Darren R)
Marc Canter: Ads vs. Widgets, a well worth a read rant, uh, I mean well thought out post, that shows Marc always knows he's right (and is usually worth hearing).
Jason Goldberg: Al Gore joins Kleiner Perkins
Compete: Member overlap between FB and OpenSocial, or,. more accurately--what percentage of users share or overlap on which networks?

( Chart from compete)

There's alot of interesting posting today on Glam Networks--an aggregation of blogs, community, and a few tools--rolling up as a larger women-focused destination--and therefore a potentially superior destination--than long in the game (and long in the tooth) iVillage.

Jarvis uses Glam to beat the network drum; TechCrunch questions the Jeff's judgement; after all, Glam has has much hype as substance, and the whole game is driving targeted advertising and CT to quality prospects, something Glam has NOT proven it excels at, yet.

That's all well and good, but part of what these posts reinforce for me is the essential difference between the problems faced by magazines and cable services and by newspapers and news organizations. For newspapers, the issues are audience, advertising, and distribution-- for magazines and media--all of which occupy particular niches--the issues are advertising and distribution--the audiences are there--they just need to be grown a bit larger.

In other words, newspapers need all the partners they can muster to distribute their content across the net, to where their audiences are because not only do they need to target and monetize their content, they need to arrangement placements for what is, in large part, increasingly a commodity. (Can a reader really tell you if the story they just read was by an AP writer, a Reuters' team, or someone from the publishing paper? I think not.) For newspapers, they're dealing with a surplus of data and a lack of audience, so distribution is everything and ad targeting follows.

For magazines, niche media, cable services on the other hand--think sports, finance, gaming, women's interests, just to name a few- both the established meaningful brands-- ESPN, Lifetime, CNN Money--and the upstarts-- Blogher, Glam, Sugar, to name a few--are not considered commodities like news. IMHO, in these categories, the challenge is not to get audience, it's to get meaningful scale, enough to be the destination or starting service of choice for a big enough audience to make your reach meaningful (like, on the scale of YouTube.) It's also about having enough data about your users to make your ads deliver--but it's NOT about losing readers, or lacking community---au contraire, these categories are on fire--the business strategies to full take advantage of the large potential audiences are what have to be (and are) being laid in place (just like the tracks in those Western railroads).

Related comments: I agree with Mike A that networks focused on selling third-party distribution can be in a shaky position--after all, that was kind of what AOL was doing in the late 90's /early 00s with eBay and others back in the day, and as soon a other options at a lower margin opened up, everyone got out.

On the other hand, we all know that maintaining a sales force can be expensive and truly not scale, so I disagree with Mike's thought that niche players will find it more efficient to sell ads themselves...the winners will be the services that provide true advertising value to partners and enhanced navigation, cross linking, tools and relevant, customized content to their audiences...and that let the so called audience contribute heavily to the mix.

Is Glam the best at doing that? Is iVillage or the Sugars? There's more work to be done here, and opportunity lives.

"I would say the odds are that we are either in a recession today or shortly headed for a recession."

--Charlie Ergen, Echostar (DISH) Chairman and CEO, speaking in an earnings call quoted by Eric Savitz.

" After five years of working on Upcoming and two years after its acquisition, I'm moving on. This Friday is my last official day as a Yahoo!, after which I'll go back to being a lowercase yahoo.

In case you haven't noticed, Waxy.org went into cryogenic sleep shortly after we were acquired as all my energy went into building and growing Upcoming. I've missed writing and coding here badly, so I'm thrilled to make a second announcement:

Next year, I'm focusing exclusively on Waxy.org and related coding projects. "

Soon to be former Yahoo! Andy Baio, noting/celebrating his return to the wild after two years at Yahoo! post the acquisition of Upcoming.org

Susan sez: I love Upcoming, and I know Andy will come up with other compelling observations and most likely products in 2008.

"Somewhere in my life, I learned to reverse prioritize. It's probably the worse thing someone can do if they want to accomplish anything, but I find myself doing it still. I can't tell if it's some sort of really, really bad habit that I can change, or if it's a deeper coping mechanism that would need years of psycho therapy to work out. Or if I really just need a good, swift kick in the head."

--Russell Beattie, confessing to having some GTD issues that I can relate to--along with much of the planet.

Via Scott Beale, just found the marvelous Who Killed Bambi?, a wonderous daily post on significant art, images, video, graphics--all with this little edge.

Along with Hello Kitty Hell, this is a must check out.

(Image by Aiden Hughes)

"If all OpenSocial does is allow developers to port their applications more easily from one social network to another, that's a big win for the developer, as they get to shop their application to users of every participating social network. But it provides little incremental value to the user, the real target. We don't want to have the same application on multiple social networks. We want applications that can use data from multiple social networks."

-Tim O'Reilly, writing about the new Google API framework and why the key word here is Open.

Just saw this: "

Dan Gillmor, an internationally recognized author and leader in new media and citizen-based journalism, will be the founding director of the new Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Arizona State University."

Nice work, dude.

Okay, this is a little lightweight, but still--

Chris Pirillo, tireless tech meduia entrepeneur, saying: "The secret to a successful Internet video venture is… dogs."

--Meaning, the cute factor goes a long way, no matter how cool you are.

"Now we've had more time to look at the Facebook proposition, actually I think Mr Zuckerberg is being uncharacteristically humble as this is even more momentous - it marks the point at which Planet Advertising finally left Planet Earth. (At Ad:tech last month the plenary topic on Day Two was by Virgin's new Space Tourism business - see here - I wondered about the connection between space and Ads at the time, but know we know!). Even the usually fairly rational Forrester Research has fallen hook, line and spaceship for this one."

--Alan Patricof, q uestioning whether a transformed ad market--contained within Facebook--is really at hand...and whether consumers will accept these terms.

(Susan sez: Not without a helluva lot of trust and transparency and control, fellas.)

"Tomorrow, as part of a double date, I am going to see High School Musical: On Ice. I'm mostly (okay, completely) going for for the company of my friends than anything else, but let's go over that previous sentence again: I am going to see High School Musical. On motherfucking ice. Seriously, how old am I again? What gender am I?"

--ernie hsieh, little, yellow, different, explaining how every very smart people can end up in very silly places when friendship, love and real life are allowed to bloom (translation: it ain't web 2.0 all the time, no matter what anyone tells you).

The sharp knives of the tech pundits are sharpening on the cost-cutting flesh of Technorati, an early blog search engine that, somehow, managed to never get acquired (and is now being eclipsed as blogsearch integrates into general web search and search niches go off in newer directions like sphere.

Duncan Riley has an acutely insightful post, where he quotes new CTO Ian Kallen explaining that Techorati's no longer going to store more than a previous 6 months of data, thereby not delivering results older than 6 months either. Kallen says:

"We're in the midst of some economization, performance fixes and retooling that have required taking some data offline. The data is not lost but our priorities are to prefer keeping recent data online. Most people don't notice We'll probably be bringing that data back online but I don't have an ETA yet."

And Mike responds:

"The declining number of people who do regularly use Technorati for search will soon be jumping across to Google as they discover that Technorati is a shallow pool when searching blogs.

If Technorati wants to save money (economization) on their core product so be it, because the long term result will be less traffic for their servers to cope with which will result in data center savings, a good thing given that if rumors are correct they're quickly running out of funding as well."

Susan sez: There's the woulda, coulda, shoulda of the Technorati story, and then there's the reality that their system architecture and need for storage is immense, expensive and most likely unsupportable from a business perspective. Non-relevancy is approaching fast for this brand.

(thanks for the corrections, Oharabin..reading too fast early in the am)

"Silicon Valley (or thereabouts) was exactly where I needed to be. The fact that I tried to start an Internet company in Nebraska for three years before coming out set me back at least three years—three formative years, no less, for the Internet (and for me). There was no reason, at 22, with a sense the Internet was going to be big, not to get my ass out here and get whatever job I could until I knew enough to go on my own. By staying in Nebraska, I relegated myself to spectator, even though I was trying to be a participant."

--Blog pioneer and Odeo and twitter entrepeneur ev williams, explaining the Bay area's special sauce for tech innovators, web geeks, code monkeys and digital obsessives.

"We who rule content must start making decisions, the ones that deliver journalism for another generation of readers and viewers.

I've been inside many major news organizations the last couple years, and, invariably, I hear the same refrain. We know what to do, but we can't get it done. Or, sadly, we're in worse shape than we were two years ago because we're spending even more proportionately trying to keep the old model functioning. "

--A ssociate Press Prez Tom Curley in his lastest rally the troops speech about news organizations taking back control--and users--from other digital services.

Susan sez: This fine speech sounds kinda well-worn to me. After all, isn't every big company struggling with how to move away from keeping their old model functioning and into embracing--and serving--how their users are changing--and find ways to make money that support those changes?

Come on, Tom, you can do better than this one--how about you rethink your distribution partnerships AND your content generation--and maybe--buy Pluck?

Andy Beal: Avoid an online reputation mess, here's how
Hollywood Reporter: Endemol hooks up with bebo for Gap show
Privacy: Google and AOL highlight their policies. We know this is highly relevant right now.

"...who exactly am I supposed to be impersonating? Has it ever occurred to you, "Aubrey from Facebook," that whoever I am supposed to be impersonating could actually be impersonating me? In fact, a search for the name " Jon Swift" reveals 99 profiles, many of which seem no more "real" than mine. Why out of all those Jon Swifts was I singled out? And, by the way, searching for for film director " Alan Smithee" yields 85 profiles and " Jesus Christ" turns up more than 500. At least I can be assured that all of those have been vetted by Facebook's crack investigators and are certified as being "real."

--Blogger Jon Swift, on a high articulate rant again "Audrey from Facebook" deleting his account because she felt he was not *real* and the current FB policy of requiring what appears to be only given name accounts.