I've been reading Melissa's various blogs since I met her at BlogHer in 2005, but this post in the latest (and my elegantly designed blog) stands out for the kind of hazy, evocative writing she's dedicated to creating, writing that feels like an afternoon in one of those lost world Asian city Marlene Dietrich movies, where both the fans and Sidney Greenstreet creak with the memory of a lady's lost virtue:

"The hazard of all this writing-in-the-moment, right? You live for a story, but if you write about your life, how do you not write about the story of your life? How are you not that observer, wondering how this will “play” later? You think I have a hard-on for the web because of some greater virtue? Fuck no, it's the story: it's that my story is there now, and I didn't even have to do much but show up. Scores of photos, other people's blogs, videos and videos I don't even know about, and people, people who may wish they were never there with me, but there it is, there it's been told, there we're all told it, and even when all parties haven't been recorded, the absence is just as telling."

The way use social media tools to tell their own stories and create community is endless fascinating to me. I told my friend BJ, who's just started using Facebook and blogging to think of it as a reality show, all about her, and the same thing is true for the artful Melissa, who's conscious of voice, vision, affect at every step of the way.

Okay, I've been an active Twitter user for about 3 months. As with Facebook, I hopped on when lots of people I knew started using it (or when I finally became aware they were on it, more accurately.)

At first, twitter was fun. Hella fun. Fun to chat with friends, real friends, almost real time, but more bi-directional than Yahoo! IM.

Then, it was interesting-lots more folks jumping on, the social media marketeers friending everyone.

Now, it's a pain--I have never seen a medium turn so relentlessly into the online equivalent of leafleting--50% of the people from people I follow are link-whoring--and only linking whoring. 3 people, two of whom I really like, will do 5 twits in 3 minutes, each with their blog links of the moment,.

Ugh!

Clearly, the social media marketeers are out there spreading the message this is another hot marketing medium where the social spam filters don't exist.

Here's my deal: If you're a friend and your big purpose for twitter is to push links to glorify your blog, I'm probably going to stop following you, As interesting and as *valuable* as you think this public service is (hah), I'm not interested in yet one more medium for folks to pimp out blog links.

Nope, not my thing.

On the other hand, if twitter's a place to chat, and to share interesting links that don't always come from your blog, you're my kind of twit.

--And the rest of you, ugh.

"My favorite part of the community is Techmeme, though. Despite the recent snark on the algorithm, Techmeme is the cornerstone of the Web 2.0 community and what is being said and written and talked about at the events. While people might not want to admit it, Techmeme does run the news of the community."

--Jeremy Pepper, writing about West Coast Web 2.0 community, aka my little town.

PS Here's Jeremy's PR tips wrap-up aty the end: "...That's the point, though: if you are doing outreach, it is about becoming a part of the community, working with the community, respecting the community. And, the communities are verticals, and are everywhere ... you just have to look and move beyond the insular circle."

Huffington: Bush and McCain's displaced ardor for war
Darren Barefoot: Fronm 0 to 2000 blog subs in 90 days-here's how
Max Levchin: Developer incentives in social networking platforms
Ben Metcalf: MySpace developer platform opening soon
Jeremy Pepper: The question of community-how PR is making the transition (good post!)

Bonus: The beefsteak-great NY Times food piece on meat, men and stuffing yer face, Jersey-style

New essay up at Blogher: "I was going to write a post, at my friend Viviane's urging, about women sex bloggers who are persecuted and their blogs shut down because their frankness offends members of their extended real world community, but I think the real issue we need to talk about is the high price women are made to pay, again and again, both for being sexual and for speaking their mind.

It's not about the blogs, you see, it's about the right for complete self expression. In other words, it's about being silenced."
--More here.

"Friends, photographs, and other objects of meaning are essential parts of the social web. We're much more inclined to physically move from one city to the next if our friends, furniture, and clothes come along with us. The interconnectedness of the digitized social web makes the moving process much simpler: we can lift friends from one location into another, clone your digital photographs, and match your blog or diary entries to the structure of your new social home. Each of these digital movers represent what we generally call "social network portability" or, more generically, "data portability."

--New Weblogsinc staffer and general smart social media guy Niall Kennedy, writing about data portability and identity management, two of the critical topics of the moment.

Kent Brewster: My bloglog API and social data integration Great to see these APIs evolving!
Jack Lail--Didja notice how watch sales decline as people tell time with PD
Howard Owens: How to engage Luddites, newspaper edition.
Jeff Birkeland: Web speak vs plain straight talk.

Every so often, you hit a crossroads, and I think I'm at one right now.

For the past two years, working at Yahoo!, I've been careful not to share ideas on my blog that were in any way related to intellectual property or value Yahoo! could benefit from in any way. This meant writing more quotes of the day, and few posts that commented to where social media and social search, for example, should go as they develop. The logic of holding back ideas was that it was only fair to save them for my employer, since I was getting paid to both develop strategy and build products.

Now, two years into the Y! gig, I'm rethinking what's appropriate to put on my blog. I'm also questioning how much I've allowed having a staff position to become an excuse for writing with the focus and courage that marks what I think of as my best (writing) work.

Have I allowed my job at Yahoo! to become the equivalent of my old role at AOL, where I was so busy and heads down I lost my voice in the community, the commons?

To some extent, I think I have.

It's easy to become so careful about disturbing corporate that one says very little at all—and yet, Yahoo! is so non-corporate that this practice is starting to strike me as Susan's self-censorship, a lack of courage. I've been quite focused on building my voice as a feminist and a post-divorce midlife woman over at BlogHer, where I'm posting sex and relationship columns every week as a Contributing Editor, but very quiet about my tech and related interests over here, on SMB.

And so, I'm in the middle of re-thinking that.

I still don't plan to write about Yahoo! (not appropriate), and I'll avoid sharing strategies or competitive intelligence related to my category and business unit (Personals), but I'm thinking it's time to super-charge my blogging stance, once again. Given the hyper-focus of my job, there's no reason not to write more broadly here—finding the time for more in-depth posts may be challenging, but it will be a great intellectual exercise, and a focusing device for articulating what, beyond Personals and structured data, interests me.

Once again, I plan to write more about the themes, people, and products of the day, and while I am not interested in breaking news— Mike and Richard and Rafat and Peter do that amazingly well—I do want to step up how I talk and write about what's going on, and restart my voice as an more active member of the mix (and yes, this is very much the equivalent of telling your friends you're going to go on that diet and NOT have that chocolate cake and then be obligated to actually follow through.)

So, while we're still in January and resolution land, here's my own new blogging beginning—to write in more depth, more broadly, abut whatever is engaging me--more often, and with more flavor.

I'm a huge Jon Coulton fan--especially when there's a cool WoW UGC video to go with. Laughing tonight over Code Monkey, all too true.
Play it and see--

( thanks, sarah)

"Print media is wonderful, and it would be a shame to ever see it fail. But these are businesses that need to sustain themselves in one way or another. Looking for a government handout to perpetuate a quaint but outdated way of life is the last resort of the desperate."

--Tech Cruncher Mike Arrington, commenting on an elite white men's conference (oops, I meant Davos) where the President of Columbia University apparently suggested that print media should be subsidized by the government if it's not economically viable in the future.

Susan sez: Is this an assertion that's just too easy to kick aside? Or a real point in the Davos play?
Either way, it hit my knee-jerk free speech reflex.

I love this look of this image, presumably public domain and vintage, and found on ffffound.

"It's going to take more than one company to rebuild the local newspaper from the ground up."

--VC Fred Wilson, writing about Adrian Holovaty's just launched hyperlocal aggregator and service, EveryBlock, and about his investment in Outside.In.

(Susan sez: This is a Knight News Challenge grant project and it's exciting to see how it's refining ideas from Craigslist, Topix and others.)

Latest column is up at BlogHer; it's fun to have another writing outlet for something so completely different that the obsessions I chronicle here.

Great post on Max Levchin's blog on how to engineer the social conditions that make people want to build on and into your platform.

Some observations from his list:

• Visiting and engaging the CTOs of pre-launch partner companies will create instant camaraderie between the platform development team and the developer community.
• Treat developers equally, but leverage the best ones by letting them closer in. Plan and manage a community, and introduce a community manager early – ideally, these are pretty technical people that gain fast credibility with hard-core developers. Introduce a few colorful personalities to make developers feel welcome, pre-launch.
• Shift the support/documentation load onto the early developers.
• Respond very quickly to platform issues, and take the early scaling problems seriously. The feeling of “this must be really important to them” will carry a lot of weight with the developer community in the early days.
• Emphasize the money-making nature of the platform.

There's lots more, all shrewd and all true. Talk about getting a fence painted.

“You're forced into, kind of, respecting yourself more. You learn more about yourself through your child, I guess. I think you also look at death differently. It's like a Catch-22: I feel good about dying now because I feel like I'm alive in her, you know, but at the same hand, you don't want to die because you want to be around for the rest of her life.”

--Actor Heath Ledger, quoted in a story about his death in the New York Times.

Susan sez: This is so sad.

Credit: Photo: Janelle Cleary

There's a story today at RealClear Markets describing why Google should/could buy the New York Times.

Interestingly, I wrote a post about how Google could/should buy the Times back in October 2006--and bought YouTube instead.

Still worth a read. And not unthinkable, now.

"The reason I believe that Yahoo can become the jewel of Web 3.0 is that it already has strong or interesting positions in multiple verticals, among them news, sports, finance, jobs and photo sharing. My entire Web 3.0 thesis is based on the web becoming verticalized, and therefore, to do justice to its potential, Yahoo needs to win in the verticals, and monetize them."

-- Sramna Mitra, writing at GigaOm about the upcoming layoffs the medias is reporting at Yahoo.

David Beach is one of the people helping to create Citizen Santa Cruz, a new local site that's meant to be the nexus of a community and co-working space endeavor.

Up in Napa, Mick Winter has the Napa Valley Herald, another local site.

It does beg the question--is there a local community site for your Bay area neighborhood?
If yes, who uses it? If no, why not?

Please post other Bay area local blogs--not newspaper sponsored sites, please--in the comments.

Just saw the news that CraigsList and UC Berkeley will endow a chair in digital media--this is wonderful news!!!
Ken Goldberg, director of the UC Berkeley program, says : ""The Berkeley Center for New Media and craigslist share a fundamental respect for alternative thinking in the public interest. Our mission is to critically analyze and help shape developments in new media by facilitating research with unorthodox ideas, designs, artworks and experiments."

Can't wait to hear more about this.

Hot on the Net -- Steve Jobs tell Violet Blue she's rude, denies photo op

"So, I saw that Steve Jobs was just hanging out on the Macworld expo floor, not in conversation, not talking to anyone, and poking at his phone in the middle of the public so I walked over. Thinking a girl -- in this case, a fangirl, me -- will never get anything if she doesn't ask for it, I lightly touched his arm and said "hi". He looked at me, and I blushingly asked if it would be okay for me to ask if I could take a picture with him."-- Violet B

"A new class of jobs (and workers) is creating a different sort of worker, though. This is the person who works out of passion and curiosity, not fear.

The passionate worker doesn't show up because she's afraid of getting in trouble, she shows up because it's a hobby that pays. The passionate worker is busy blogging on vacation... because posting that thought and seeing the feedback it generates is actually more fun than sitting on the beach for another hour. The passionate worker tweaks a site design after dinner because, hey, it's a lot more fun than watching TV."

--seth godin , writing about how work and play blur out of conviction, commitment, control.

Susan sez: If big companies can nurture this spirit, they have amazing workers, but often, they kill it. If you can find, hire, and retain passionate workers, you can do well, but they have to be able to have impact in your company, or it's game over--they move on, often to their own thing.

(via sarah dopp)

"...Out of some 14 million prints, photographs and other visual materials at the Library of Congress, more than 3,000 photos from two of our most popular collections are being made available on our new Flickr page, to include only images for which no copyright restrictions are known to exist. The real magic comes when the power of the Flickr community takes over. We want people to tag, comment and make notes on the images, just like any other Flickr photo, which will benefit not only the community but also the collections themselves."

--Matt Raymond, announcing Library of Congress participation in Flickr's The Commons project.

Image: LOC

Some great points from Jobster founder Jason Goldberg today around making your start up work. Read the whole thing here, but some specific observations:

• The CEO's job is to create value. Determine early on what the keys to value creation are in your industry and map a path for value creation for your business.
• Try to ride some powerful existing waves vs. just creating new waves. Find some big and important industry trends and ride on top of them.
• Technology companies are all about the product. Getting the product right is critical before aggressively going to market.
• You must get close to your users and customers and live their personas.

These are good points for everyone growing business and building products--substitute GM or Product lead in #1 and it's still on target.

Last week, two friends of mine sent an email to everyone on a shared list announcing they were no longer lovers, but planned to remain friends. Yesterday, two well-known west coast tech folks, Tara Hunt and Chris Messina, did something similar but far more public, sharing on their blogs and on their twitter streams that they had ended their romantic relationship.

Each post drew more than 30 comments within hours, and tons of responses on the twitter stream.

This is interesting to me for multiple reasons--

• Tara and Chris have chosen to live and work with a specific degree of transparency, and these postings are consistent with how they conduct their lives
• They're part of a global, self-identified community of people who know and n"follow:" them, where virtual ties have weight along with real world ones.
• There is a strong reality TV component to digital media/Web 2.0 these days, where everyone is the center of their own drama, and interesting personalities stand out.
• I like and respect these people, their work and the honest of their communication--and their deep ties to community.

I'm sure people have shared their parting on the web before and will again, but this may be the first for the 2.0 crowd--definitely, it's one of the most publically graceful.

New voices, new viewpoints in sex, relationships, gender column live at BlogHer.

"We need to become more social, and we need to become more open. There is a huge opportunity to become more relevant to people.”

--Yahoo! EVP Jeff Weiner, quoted in the NYTimes in a story on content publishing, open platforms, search tech, the new mail ecosystem and customer focus.

Susan sez: Given that I work at Yahoo!, how could this quote not be of compelling interest?

Side note: Congrats, Kim, pic looks great!

I'm impressed and hopeful that the amazing talent pool at Gawker Media's new SciFi site i09 will make this more than a sci-fi media site.
Hiring the west coast troika of Annalee Newirtz, Kevin Kelly and Charlie Anders was a shrewd, exciting move on Nick Denton's part--but I'm still waiting for those corner cases of the mind to show up in what they're covering.

Right now, i09 is sweet if you're a 22 year old sci fi fan and MLS grad student type, but I'd like to see the coverage more closely reflect the obsessive, glittering subversiveness of so much sci fi--and the ways that Sci-Fi can spin off philosophies, sexualities and lifestyles.

How about Bruce Sterling and that steampunk thing, and Heinlein and polyamory, and Japanese sci fi meeting J apanese soft porn/erotica, and those never-ending Trekkies?

Sci Fi and fantasy are two genres that for so many people represent potential, escape and vision--show me some of that, you brillant writers corralled into this new daily--and you'll get me as daily reader from then on.

January is always a reflective month for me--not only is it a new year, but it's my birth month and a month of resolutions, and, historically, new directions.

January is also the month, back in 2003, when I got into blogging, discovered RSS, and started playing with social media tools like those then newfangled social networks.

So, a quick trip down memory lane and a glimpse how how the world has changed.

January 2003
I've just been laid off from AOL. Living in New Jersey, I moved back east from California with the family and they miss the left coast. And hate Jersey.

• Blogger is the dominant blog software and I read dave winer and doc and halley every day and decide to start a blog myself. I start a couple. They don't stick. Yet.
• Jason Kottke and Meg Hourihan are my heroes. They're real bloggers and seem so cool.

• Social networking is this idea no one quite knows what to do with. To check it out, I join Ryze. I am amazed when I actually start to meet and have useful conversations with people--who knew?
• I take a writing class--maybe I want to be a journalist again? And write this piece about Kevin Sites and Xeni Jardin and CNN--and set off a firestorm.
• David Winer invites me to the first bloggercon; Kevin Marks is in my session and basically sets up the first ever podcast.
  

January 2004.

Back in California, running 5ive, a digital media product development and business strategy consultancy with Steven Madoff, my East Coast partner. Blogging away, meeting Mary Hodder and the PubSub folks; totally obsessed with RSS, blog search and social media.

• Working with Chris Alden, Kevin Burton, Mark Graham on building Rojo--we thought a newsreader that could share info would be sweet
• Obsessed with RSS--why doesn't everyone grok this is the future? (Soon, they do)
• Obsessed with Technorati--the early days.

• Blogging daily and totally into it; the more my personal life stresses, the more time I spent blogging...this is good for my blogging, tough on everything else.
• Work on BlogOn with Chris Shipley and Mike Sigal; invite this new blogger named Steve Rubel to come and speak.
• Meet this geek from the other side of the world who keeps writing about the same things I do and hire him to do work for my consulting company--it's Richard McManus from read/write web.
• The bi coastal travelling thing kicks in big time.

January 2005:
Still in California, still consulting. Doing really cool strategic projects with big media companies around using RSS, newsreaders, microformats. etc and working with small cos on social media tools.

• Obsessed with Technorati, and PubSub. Pluck, Eurekster. Bloglines.
  
• Trying out Orkut, friendster and FOAF services.

• Conferencing and consulting like crazy--this is the start of the on the road year--and my life as a single.
• Get involved with BlogHer and women in tech stuff.
• Keen on hyperlocal--and watching Bayosphere, Backfence and Bakersfield.
  

January 2006
Anna Zornosa recruits me to join Yahoo! as a product developer which I do in January, on my birthday. Deep dive into how online dating and social networks fit together. Total immersion into learning the funnel.

• Y!P all the time
• Blogher, blogging
• LinkedIn, LI groups, checking out MySpace, flickr

January 2007 At Y!P, still blogging, watching podcasters and vlogging, deep in product development, lots of work behind the wall.

And here we are at January 2008--I'm still blogging, still using social networks, still into search structured and unstructured data, media and tools and starting to go back out and engage more with the community (or try to find the time to). More on this yet to be written, eh?

"Just like the keyword "sustainability" has been applied to everything from economics to food to energy, I think it must apply to the work/life/community balance that MUST exist for each person. You currently contribute to the community. Where are the 2, 4, or 6 extra hours *per week* that you said you can commit to going to come from?

OK, maybe I just have bad time management. I just want to underline, again, that we need people to actually *do* things. Just loading more tasks onto the already busiest members of the community isn't going to scale."

--Boris Mann, writing about his involvement with the Drupal Association, but his words about making things work apply to lots of bootstrapped efforts.

" as the excitement surrounding new forms of media begins to wear off a bit, there will be a renewed appreciation for the power of a highly flexible, portable, shareable, high-definition technology known as print."

--Jonathan Weber, publisher of New West.net, who is launching a print mag to go with the digital media properties, writing in the Times, UK.

(Via Rex Hammock)

"Somewhere circa 2006 the tech blogger mindset shifted - at least among the majority. People who used to work hard creating and spreading big ideas resorted to simply regurgitating the same old news over and over again, often with very little value add. It's almost like we stopped the real work of reading, thinking and writing in favor of going all herd, all the time.

My blogging New Year's resolution is to quit The Lazysphere. I can't go cold turkey reading it, but I aim to avoid using my blog to perpetuate it. "

--Steve Rubel, micropersuasion

"“I was a corporate lawyer and an entrepreneur, and I know about working all the time. But now, you're always worried a big story is breaking in your e-mail, and if you wait an hour, you'll miss it. Every morning when I wake up, the panic hits and I have to see my e-mail as soon as possible.”

__Mike Arrington, Tech Crunch empire, quoted in a NY Times story on the stress of high-profile tech blogging.

Susan sez: This is a hoot! The Times reporter wanted to explore whether tech blog entrepenurs--who break news as much as they can--feel stress. Surprise! They said yes.
LOL at another breatheless and somewhat naive NY T Monday morning piece.

Check this vid out from Amit Agarwal showing techmeme changes~
(via Solis)

Marc Andressen's statements about porn on Ning are as follows: "
In a nutshell, we aren't pro-porn, but we are pro-freedom."
and

"We're very comfortable with the approach we have chosen, because we find it comfortable to be on the side of relative openness and freedom, along with AOL, Yahoo, and Google."

I applaud Marc's honest and measured comments on this very sensitive issue--for more detail, read his entire post.

(Via Calcanis)

So, I've decided this is the year to spiff up this tired, old blog design and add a fresh look and feel and some new features. Yeah, it's redesign time.

I'll want to maintain this URL, probably also add a redirect to another one, and create a richer, fuller site.

Who should I work with? Designers,. coders, tech geeks who want to talk about working with me eagerly solicited--yes, there will be some $$ involved. Imagining this is a fairly small job, but bigger than just setting up a WP domain or a pre made blog skin(though I am open to suggestion.)

If you have a suggestion for someone I should talk with--or you want to show me your work/past projects--drop an email to me at susanmernit@yahoo.com

Posting every Monday at Blogher--forgot to share this link.

In debating whether to buy tickets to the Crunchies--the awards show and party for the TechCrunch/ReadWriteWeb/Venture beat event in SF on Jan 18th, I went to the web site to check out the details and was amused to see that there's a live participants list/aka social network as part of the ticket site software/feature package.

Yes, you can see who's purchased tickets and how many of the 450 have been sold (about 90).
For me, seeing friends already signed up was a definite selling factor( Dave Winer has two seats, according to this, for example), but it also struck me that this experience applied a very wiki-like experience to event ticket purchase, which I think is cool--and a good fit for this event, which is all about capitalizing, even savoring, the flash of the moment.

Problogger: Types of blog posts that get the most traffic (Darren is spot on).
Mr. Product: Beach's got a brand new bag, I mean, blog.
Coudal Partners: Link to super inspired Xmen poster (Via Scott B)

"Coming from CivicSpace, where we had a beautiful website before we had working code, to working on Flock, where the mockups never quite matched the software that was released, I feel like I've seen enough of these fruitless cycles to take for granted that design and open source development are simply incompatible, or, to be clear: the expectations that one has with open source software development cannot be the same expectations that one has for open source interface/interaction design."

--Chris Messina, writing about problems with open source design