Today was kind of a tough day; there was a death in the (extended) family, lots of work to get done post weekend, and some hard choices to work through. I'm also getting ready (or trying to get ready) for an out of the country trip next week.)

In many ways, I feel like leaving Yahoo! has brought me to this new inflection point in terms of where I really want to put my time and what I want to focus on.

One way to look at that is to ask "What do I want to work on in the next year and how can I have the most impact?" Another way is to say "What do I want to have accomplished 18 months-2 years from now?" A third is to say "What will most fully use my skills and my best talents to create meaningful product, experiences, business, change?"

Of course, asking the questions is easy; the answers are always guesses when you start, and you hope you don't regret the choices you've made as they become realities, later.

I'm about to make some big choices about what I focus on in the coming year, and like those relationship choices on Facebook, "it's complicated."

(Or, to look at it another way, it's crystal clear and it's just time to stop dancing around and get in line for the future.)

Happy April Fools, everyone. Let me see you keep laughing.

The latest Blogher column is up; it's a roundup of some new(er) voices in the sex and relationships arena.

Jason Calcanis has a post today about how the launch of Shine suggests that Yahoo is not taking care of its media partners. Jason's point is that it's crazy for the Yahoo Developer Network to solicit the business of media partners to deliver services (and sell ads) at the same time Yahoo is launching a site that is going to seek advertising from the same sources (like consumer packaged goods companies).

He writes: "Maybe this is Yahoo's plan to save itself? Maybe if the launch media properties and kill off search and the adnetwork they can convince folks they are Newscorp 2.0?"

Couple of responses here--Jason is right in that there is double dipping going on here--Yahoo wants to sell services to the people they are also competing with for ad dollars, but that's nothing new. And not unique to Yahoo--MSN has been selling ads for partners--and filling MSNBC.com with similar ads--for a while, for example.

What is more relevant in Jason's comments. IMHO, is the question of how aligned the senior teams at Yahoo are. One wonder to what extent the Developer Network execs, for example, actually talked to the Media Group exec about how these strategies fit together.

Will Shine succeed? Only time will tell.
Will publishers get pissed off? I doubt it.
Does Jason have a point? Well, yeah, but....not enough to keep anyone up at night.

Yahoo's Shine, helmed by former print editor Brandon Holley, just launched this am, after weeks of beta testing. The goal here, if it isn't obvious, is to create the most compelling start page on the web for women, all ages;to that end it's a riotous tumult of soft lifestyle features with fashion, parenting, home, dating, relationships and just about any other *female* topic you'd see on a magazine news stand laid out prettily on the home page. In other words, there's no finance, instead it's Work + Money; there's no news, there's a cheat sheet on top news items.

It's going to be interesting to see how this site does. On one hand, it's nice to see the multi-year discussions of women and their value to Yahoo (4o million of their users are female)turn into something; on the other hand, I wonder how useful it is to create a site is that specifically is for women, rather than women friendly--and which such broad scale(pun intended).

You see, Shine feels so fluffy that for me, I can't see it becoming my daily start page--in truth, it's so niche, or so mega-aggregator niche--that it feels not that smart, or not smart enough for me, my friends, or any of the women I know to use as the destination site. I think The Huffington Post would be a great site for Yahoo's team to take lessons from--that site is clearly women friendly, carries great news of interest to women and yet isn't a pink ghetto for the home maker (which Shine kinda feels like on Day 1.)

More compellingly, Shine is encouraging female bloggers like Back in Skinny Jeans Stephanie Quilao, to contribute content; in return the site will send traffic back, a powerful reward from the Yahoo Network people powerhose(or is that firehose)? There's also going to be third party content--more girly, girly stuff, of course--from lots of magazine publishers, including Glamour, Epicurious.com, Style.com, InStyle, Cosmopolitan, Harper's Bazaar, Women's Health, and Good Housekeeping.

So the question is-who is going to use this thing? Or who will it take traffic away from (besides Yahoo's old school front page?) Will the women who use PopSugar come over here ? (Nah.)

The HuffPost ladies? (Nah). Blogher women? (Surely not.)

Conclusion: Yahoo needs to cannibalize its own traffic to retain audience it is losing. Will that strategy work to make Shine a success? Only if canned-magazine style content is what women actually want, vs. the true user generated content and authentic voices Shine's audience can find elsewhere on the web.

Susan sez: Get those advertisers in there quick, before the audience dwindles.

"I just write and talk about sex. But every woman on the Internet gets called slutty and ugly and fat (to put it lightly) no matter what; all we have to be is female. In dinner conversation, my friend Lori reminded me of the Oscar Wilde quote, "Give a man a mask, and he'll tell you the truth." I restated it for the Internet, replying, "Give a man a mask, and he'll slit your throat." The application here is, "Give a man (or a woman) an anonymous account, and he'll eviscerate your self-esteem.""

--Author, blogger, columnist Violet Blue writing about how internet trolls, especially those who think porn star ideals comprise what beauty is, screw up women's self-image, sexuality and self-esteem if they buy into that bullwash.

(Susan sez: The whole column is worth a read, enjoy.)

Just heard Scott Karp has gotten $2.75MM in funding from Velocity Interactive Group to build out Publish2, his social bookmarking service for journalists. This is thrilling news for me for two reasons:
1) Scott is a super bright and talented person
2) It's inspiring, proof that the force of an idea and the courage of acting on it can lead to success (not that Richard McManus and Mike Arrington didn't show me that earlier).

A nice quote from Scott:
"I've come to see the experience of bootstrapping a company as akin to marathon runners who train at high altitudes, where the air is thin, which forces their bodies to increase the number of red blood cells and improve oxygen delivery to their muscles. Having trained their bodies to achieve a high level of performance with very little oxygen, returning to oxygen-rich sea level can yield significant enhancements in performance.

It's time now for Publish2 to come down from the mountain."

Scott, this is a race well worth running.

"There are no more boundary any more between "species." What's a cat is a dog and vice versa. All media is social and all social is media. End of story. Whether content is created by the Pros or the Joes it all has influence, even if it's small."

--Steve Rubel, writing about how all media, these days, is social.

Susan sez: I agree with Steve on this, but it's important t note that while all media is social, the way we access media has completely changed. IE TechCrunch may have rthe authority nce reserved for John Markoff in the NYTimes, but it got that way through the wisdom of crowds, not because Mike had a decent product and controlled or had the best distribution in the region, which was a critical factor in making newspapers succeed. This is a profound shift.

Also, in the past year, we're shifting again, so the influence of friends recommending stories to one another has become more significant--these referrals have shifted from the automated meme of Techmeme to the hand-rolled links that FriendFeed and FB notes offer, among many others.

In other words, similar destinations, different journeys.

It's in the middle of the Web 2.0 Expo, but the conference danah boyd, mimi ito and others put together to share their findings from their McArthur-funded research on youth and digital media is going to be just too good to miss.

Called From My Space to Hip Hop: New Media In the Everyday Lives of Youth--Silicon Valley, CA, it's billed as a public forum on how digital technologies and new media are changing the way that young people learn, play, socialize and participate in civic life.

Here's the link to the f ree conference.

Louis Gray did me the kindness of including this blog in his stats review of well-read tech blogs.
Not surprisingly, but a bit to my chagrin, my blog's the laggard in a fast-growing category.

However, now that I'm one month out of a demanding job at Yahoo!, I've been putting more effort into the blog and would like to see the readers grow--Louis, hope you'll check back in a bit and see how we've grown here.

Coming up: A redesign, more frequent postings, and some news about future directions and interesting things going on.

A koan of questions:

• What makes local community sites successful?
• How do news, activism, and information fit together?
• Will as many people read as post?
• What makes local community sites and services sustainable (Besides the passion of their founders)?
• As news media fragments, fails and consolidates (think about how almost all the newspapers in the Bay area are currently owned by Dean Singleton), what will take its place?
• What is difference between information sharing and news on the local level?
• Are communities adequately served in their need to share information with those who are part of them? Are their opportunities for discourse?
• How can online tools empower more people in more communities?
• What does empower mean in a local context--are there a set of key behaviors to support?
• Revenue and business models--What will fund quality local online news and communities?

  Folks, what are the other questions you're asking about local online news and community? What are the best case studies you're seeing? Please post here.

Came back from 36 hours or so in LA with the feeling the time had been well spent; Re:Public was an energizing conference for me, with lots of smart people to talk with.
Some of the themes and thoughts that stand out:

Academics, journalists and community organizers all acknowledge that the definitions of news are changing.

Richard Sambrook of the BBC gave a great speech that included the idea that in the future, news will be valued for being accurate, but not for being objective.

Solana Larsen asserted that by 2013, we wouldn't have foreign correspondents parachuting in and out of countries to report news, like we have today.

David Cohen and Paul Steiger each talked about the shifting marketplace for quality reporting and the web as a market disruptor.

Good conference, great people, more thoughts to follow.

“No man goes to IKEA willingly. 70 of us standing around asking, "Why are you getting THAT?"”

--Chris Brogan, via Twitter

This is the eight person panel with Jonathan Krim, Solana Larsen, Paul Steiger, Lisa Williams, Dave Cohn, Jon Funabiki, and some others. Folks are talking about the future of news and Krim is saying that publications are more identified with a particular point of view in the future (in his opinion).

Placeblogger's Lisa Williams (flickr slides here) is saying that newspapers are going through the crash high tech went through ten years ago; we're headed to the place where code and news merge.

More of Lisa's list points: Community is shared lived experience; News is a tiny fraction of that experience (Susan sez: This is a critical point).

David Cohn: Right now, news institutions have space that is closed off; I couldn't visit the SF Chronicle, for example. Why can' the business model for news also become more open and distributed? (Susan sez: I adore this guy's ideas.)

Paul Steiger--ProPublica can redistribute content and get the long tail for content, give writers additional reach...Dave says, Yeah, the mantra is how do you take the process of collecting, filtering and distributing information and make them more open and more distributed (ie the new journalism)?

Jon Fubaiki-- SF State prof--some ideas around the question "What will be happening to our communities as news changes?" Passion will be an organizing principal for local community news--There are over 200 ethnic media outlets in the Bay area that many people don't see.
In addition to diversity, we're seeing nonprofits and community orgs using journalistic storytelling and narrative to communicate and talk about their work and try to move their communities in certain directions and this is fueling a civic change--align this with ethnic news media and community momenteum and it's powerful and of note. You can expand community to communities of interest as well--religious and spritual focus as well. Alot of the media coming out is more passion driven. (Susan sez: Yep!)

Solana Larsen, mg editor, Global Voices, previously with Open Democracy: (Tells story about needing outside newspeople to talk to locals...) In 2013, there will be no foreign correspondents; we will no longer have this parachute style of journalism where people jump in and pretend they know what is going on, then leave--Well have a world where journalists will understand the language and be able to read the local paper, speak, communicate and be able to give you analysis, along with the local people. If the mainstream media applied some of this to their coverage, it would be better--look at what is happening in Tibet where a CNN correspondent can file a story and never talk to anyone locally--we see the pull there.

David: Solana is talking about a distributed and open news room; it's a false assumption to say opening it is going to result in crap. (Susan sez:I agree and am amused at how nervous some folks are about this...)

Dave Sambrook--We need to evidence-led journalism that isn't based on trade but data.

Just learned via NYTimes that Internet Archive & Alexa and WAIS founder Brewster Kahle has arranged for low-income housing projects in San Francisco to get high-speed fiber into the apartments.

The test project is Valencia Gardens in the Mission; Brewster said: "“We are pleased to be the first non-profit organization to bring public housing online. We are excited to see much faster access to the Internet as a way to experiment with advanced applications, and are pleased that the underserved get first access to advanced technology."

Susan says: I met Brewster back in 1993, when I first started to go online, and the work he was doing with WAIS literally changed my life for the better--and made me want to leaving media for technology, especially search. (Of course, the fact Brewster had a letterpress in his kitchen also showed me he got where I was coming from.) In the 15 years since then, the way Brewster has used his success to be a force for good has continued to inspire, this is yet another effort that makes me feel proud to know him--and encouraged to think about I can help make technology more accessible for low income people.

Jan Schaffer moderating; Margaret Duffy presenting a study on exploring citizen journalism; they discovered the sites often have gatekeepers in the web site builders.

She and her team have built New news media, a beta site to bring together "people who have solutions for community journalism in a networked world."

Next preso is on the Media Habits of Poli-fluentials--Carol Darr and a large team did a study that
assessed the internet audience and showed online users were the most active and plugged in members of their local communities--they promote candidates and causes. This in turn, she says, educated the campaigns and the news media about the wired political influentials and their impact. Her new research loks at the media habits of poli-fluentials and what activities correlate with this label:
More likely to be a poly-fluential

• 1.46 read daily newspaper
• 1.92 watch Sunday morning talk shows
• 1.51 read news and opion in magazines
• 2.16 watch news of PBS
• (translation, these folks are huge news and political junkies)
• Other critical behaviors
• 5.51 pltical schwag on net
• 7.37 Belonging to local organization
• 9.12 Advocacy group member
• 10,.54 Letter to local officials
• 73.3 Contributing to a political contribution in 3004 election and being an independent

Discussion:
Dan Gillmor: "Where there is no barrier to entry, gate-keeping becomes irrelevant. Bloggers are solo tenants."

Circling back on metrics of success and measuring:
Quoting Jeremiah around posts as an engagement metrics
Measure against your goals

(Susan sez: I am a metrics junkie and this soft, fuzzy stuff drives me nuts.
Here's my 2 cents--want to measure engagement? Now the rest of this is my digression--

Measure some of the following to assess your own site:

• time spent on site
• frequency of visits
• # of names acquired (registrations)
• * of content items contributed per user
• number of comments overall month to month (track trendlines)
• Increase or decline in end of period active users
• Number of new users (registrants) added per month

Also assess the following:

• Links to your site/posts
• Page views
• Comments in the blogosphere about your site/posts/content

Many smaller sites don't have the means to do sophisticated click steam data and complicated pathing, but these data points should be within reach with Google Analytics and other accessible metrics packages.

Editor & Publisher just posted NAA news that as revenues for newspaper--we're talking print here--have dropped below the lowest levels of the 2001 bust.
Data points from the E&P story:

• Online revenue now represents 7.5% of total newspaper ad revenue in 2007 compared to 5.7% in 2006.
• Total print advertising revenue in 2007 dropped 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006 -- the greatest decline since the association started measuring advertising expenditures in 1950.
• The drop-off points to an economic slowdown on top of the secular challenges faced by the industry. The second worst decline in advertising revenue occurred in 2001 when it fell 9.0%.
• Total advertising revenue in 2007 -- including online revenue -- decreased 7.9% to $45.3 billion compared to the prior year.

Susan sez: Is there any way news organizations won't have accelerating layoffs? This seems like another nail in the coffin.

Question: How does the collapse of print revenue models--and those good profit margins--affect newspapers' ability to maintain their core value as investigative news entities as they try to move online? I suspect that we'll see more independent networks for harder news topics spriniging up as news orgs cut back.

Update: Here's data on how the Microsoft brand is dropping as well, via ITWorld:
"According to the CoreBrand Power 100 2007 study, which polled about 12,000 U.S. business decision-makers, Microsoft dropped from number 12 in the ranking of the most powerful U.S. company brands in 2004 to number 59 last year. In 1996, the company ranked number 1 in brand power among 1,200 top companies in about 50 industries, said James Gregory, CEO of CoreBrand."

"Looking at the *newsroom* of bloggers:
Columbia grad student and smart person John Kelly is describing how his project does statistical analysis on bloggers and clustering/affinities and then links that with attentive clusters to understand information flow and movement within news organizations and the blogosphere--in 5 languages(!) Russian, Arabic, Persian, Scandinavian and English--He's describing the political bloggers in English on both sides, and looking at the values and Middle-East focused bloggers on the right, and then the inside the Beltway, feminist and African-American bloggers on the liberal side. Kelly's project is analyzing the semantic structure of tagging and who uses specific tags--and which tafs are *biased*--via "moonbats" and "wingnuts"; "Milblog" and Islamofascist."

"Unique as a snowflake the shape of each blogosphere has to do with different things."

Susan sez: I would love to get ah his data and see the actual studies; right now, there is so much information being shared it's going past as a set of showy card tricks.

Looking at how bloggers look out at other sites and links--a visual map--the clusters of outlinks and what is linked to--dominate relationships and clusters are revealed and you can see where the linking centers are--this data is great, but the talk is rolling over me a little, other twitters think there are too many small dots on the slides ("eye exam").

Susan sez: I wish John Kelly could tutor me in his stat magic; I love this kind of research. If I got to play, I'd ask him to see if he could build a predictive model of what is viral for specific segments. That floats my boat bigtime.

Finale: He mapped the bloggers and the org--but Miz Squinty here can't see a damn thing.

Dr. Dave is up now @Re:Public; Dave Weinberger is one of my heroes--such a brilliant man, and a ClueTrainer, of course; his other two books are marvels as well-- Small Pieces Loosely Joined and Everything is Miscellaneous.

Talking about the web, what are the metaphors and frames we use? Let's look for the uncomfortable ones....
The web is an ecosystem--this is a little too comforting

• Pro-AM: Passion of amateurs and the partnership between Pros and Amateurs, but money is the vector right, and that's not it at all! The issues are about quality, not $$--disparity is HUGE. Also, this frame is a sports metaphor, ugh.
• Info flow: Useful idea, but people don't read news to get information; that's one reason, but the reasons for creating news and reading news are actually different
• Abundance: Here's the one to talk about a bit more--Control doesn't scale well, so we end up in a system that has an abundance of both thegood and the bad--we focus on the bad of course--so we focus on protecting people from the bad--but the crap is scary and the abundance of good stuff is TERRIFYING--we don't know how to deal with it!! Way too much! Experts, editors, curators--we started with those people and it worked, but now--hey,we've gone waaay past the front page of the paper--we're now at the place where the front page is our inbox; the recommendations we get from other people, totally unconfined--The new front pages are the mailing lists (Susan sez, and friendfeed, twitter,FB notes, etc...), tags, and so on....There's a huge cost to reducing information to index cards..Waay too much metadata (how true, Susan sez).
• The abundance of metadata leads to tagging;then there's a socialization of knowledge--people you know and trust, and then there's the semantic web where you break things down to show the structure of the ideas and meaning in that domain. Dave says the semantic web has been oversold, and yet it allows computers to do some finding and possibly represent knowledge structures....a useful way to add metadata.

• hese new tools all affect our understanding of the data they touch--they are all tools that unsettle knowledge; the info is more up for grabs than we thought, more contextual.
  
• We're in this great unsettling of meaning that is now in our face--and which in term leads to needing more transparency and with fallability, because we see the info sources are humans.
• So our own Publics are being created in public (Susan: not sure what he means here...)

Susan sez: Dave is soooo good.

"I often tell my wife to plan on having wireless Internet on trips just like you plan on eating on trips because the Web has become such an intertwined part of everything we do. That some services and sites have risen to the top for me doesn't mean I've acquired an addiction, but instead, a preference. Now, I'd prefer people stop calling their newfound digital lifestyle an addiction. It's silly."

--Louis Gray, talking about internet addictions.

(Susan sez: Louis, I am both with you and--addicted.)

Roberto Suro at Re:Public discussing participatory journalism and the journalism of participation, aka democratic governance (Susan sez: this is a good distinction). Suro talks about journalism as a form of social action, knowledge, civic mobilization. "These two concepts of participation are sometimes confused. The act of participating in journalism is not the same as effective participation in civic progresses..if you are weighing journalism's role as a social actor you have to weigh the outcomes, not just the means."

Suro is doing a tremendous job here; this is a powerful talk...but how about where we are right now with how journalism, media, and community are shifting? I want to hear more about that.

Suro is discussing how does journalism fit with civic engagement--do we focus on creating informed elites or mobilizing the citizenry (Susan says: And why not both? I do not think the
elitist gatekeepers" he is discussing are relevant right now to anyone but themselves...those dinosaurs in the elephant graveyard, again...)

Are we really aristocrats or Jacobists? Suro says yes, I question that. Strongly. Broad participation will come because of the tools--look at YouTube--no discourse was needed, there.

Starting up at Re:Public with about 175-200 attendees, many from the non profit and progressive media worlds, many from academia, a few from big media ( Guardian UK, BBC), and many from the hyperlocal and citizen journalism worlds. Totally missing in action: big news portals ( Yahoo, MSN, NYT, etc), tech platform companies, and trade press (no GigOm, Paid Content, etc.) Of course, this is not about building and flipping media companies, so no one seems to care; the attendees are bright, engaged, and trying to think about the future of news, media, community and information exchange.

Sociologist and Professor Manuel Castells, an expert on identity and USC Prof, is talking about democracy and media and power and how politics and emotions are linked. He's doing an academic rundown of others' research, but I feel removed from his talk, seems very abstract (though now that he is referencing George Lakoff I am perking up). Good quote: "Social movements act on the mind and are cultural revolutions that act on changing the way we think, for example, the environmental movement has transformed our consciousness to let us think we have a relationship with the planet beyond obtaining resources for material well-being." More on how media drives these changes; he's talking about the past 30 years of feminism and pariarchy and says this is a revolution for women, more than for men, and that the changes are profound in how women think about themselves. (His sound bites on feminism are not impressively worded). More on wireless, always on behaviors, mass level of communication systems totally integrate into society. Also, endless capacity for hackers to create new levels of communication that big media has to adjust to.

Paid Content: Congrats to Rafat and Stacy on hitting this latest stage of staffing and growth.(Looks like the server might be down.)
Om Malik: What I learned since my heart attack. ("I was reading a review of the Macbook Air over on Macworld when I realized that the machine and post-recovery me have a lot in common.")
Wired: Detailed and absorbing piece on futurist Ray Kurzweil and the singularity (and his medical regime). "Kurzweil predicts that by the early 2030s, most of our fallible internal organs will have been replaced by tiny robots."
Doublebassist Jason Heath has a cool post about using friend feed and twitter. (Via someone whose link I lost, sorry)

David Cohn: On Ryan Kuder's Ning network for Willow Glen.

"According to interviews and recent surveys, younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well — sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one."

--Brian Stelter, writing in the NYTimes on how social media tools are shifting information sharing and distribution.

( Matt Ingram says: the piece "...does a great job of describing how digital “word of mouth” — in other words, social networking of all kinds including Twitter, IM, Facebook and so on — has become a dominant means of news delivery for young people in a way that I'm not sure old geezers like myself quite grasp, no matter how often people describe it."

Had dinner with a friend last night who is an ex- Yahoo. Heard this week that Matt McAlister and Greg Yardley are both leaving/have left Yahoo (along with about 10 other people I know.)

Just read this in Wired on Googlers leaving the Big G: "Googlers may as well have targets on their foreheads. The nature of recruiting is that you go after the big companies that have been successful. So any company that wants Google-like success is going to try to hire away from Google."

So, do you think it's that recruiters are also calling the Yahoos and hiring them away? (Meow.)

Six weeks since I left Yahoo! and what a journey it is turning into. As painful as it is, there is something to be said for the forced disruption of routine: I've gotten a renewed sense of how the world sees me and what I really want to do because of this experience.

One of the things I am struggling with now is the buy vs. own dilemma. It's not whether I should acquire a start-up; it's whether I should let a start up acquire me. In other words, what size conmpany do I want to be at and am I better off just doing my own thing? Risk, reward, adventure..they're all in the mix, along with compelling options for teams of colleagues and friends.

I have pretty much resolved that my next focus will not be a another largeco; I love solving probems and shipping software too much to go anywhere where the focus is conservation and small steps. On the other hand, I see both the strengths and weaknesses of doing my own thing--the opportunity is to go for it and have either a success or a well-intentioned failure--but then, on the other hand, would I have that if I joined someone else's start up?

And then there's my interest in working on things that circle back on specific passions: community, tools, local, social networks, search and social search, and, of course, conversion, transactions and the funnel--specialized knowledge I acquired at Personals and want to make use of.

And my interest in blogging; I'll have a new template here, soon, and some very interesting things coming up to write about-more on that later.

Folks who struggled with Your StartUp vs. Someone Else's--how did you make that decision?
What factors drove you? Comments, please.

Jemima Kiss has a story about Matt McAlister heading off from Yahoo to work at the Guardian, UK. Matt's going to lead a new developer network and make more of their data and APIs available for use by developers.

Susan sez: This is very cool and a great fit for Matt--smart move on the Guardian's part.

As someone who is both interested in progressive movements and in mind-mapping and concept-mapping software, this note about a new map from the Progressive Strategy Studies Project of the Commonwealth Institute in Cambridge, Mass got my attention.

Made with The Brain, it's a visual organization and map of the American progressive strategy within the broader context of progressive politics. The creators says "It includes, but is not limited to, individuals, organizations, issues, concepts, and ideas. "

Susan sez: Neat.

Mike's got some sharp words for WePlay, the kids sports network community play that just raised some new funding. He says that kids aren't actually going to want to be on pages their parents control, pointing out "...Ah, but kiddies are going to want to social network on a site that their parents are using to manage the team, and not MySpace, Facebook, ClubPenguin, Habbo Hotel, EA-Land, Bebo, Friendster…."

Thing is, being a local athlete is alot like using a dating site or a job site--people add a unique identity on a site like this because it allows them to focus on an aspect of their persona specific to that thing--the teen self on MySpace and the up and coming athlete on WePlay are two very different aspects of the same person.

In addition, when founder Steve Hansen says "“Two hundred forty million people in America are one degree of separation from youth sports. Youth sports is held together by e-mails, phone calls and clip boards," he is right. As a former local & community news person, I've seen this same truth.

Tell me this is serious...just can't be.

My new column went up at Blogher last night.

Fast Company is truly re energizing itself and this article on AOL is excellent. One of my favorite quotes:
"Neither Time Warner's now-CEO Bewkes nor Falco or Grant would agree to speak with us. But in extensive interviews with dozens of current and former AOL insiders (many of whom would speak only on background), what emerges is a tale of failure on multiple fronts: short-term thinking, bad technology, bungled product development, a dramatic miscalculation of what drives page views on its own site, and a risk-averse culture more prone to imitation than innovation. "Pretty much everything we worked on," says a former AOL manager, "executives pointed to someone else's product and said, 'We want that.'"

Assuming this is true, AOL isn't the only wanna-be company out there, but clearly, copy cat strategies are fatal.

The other quote with lots of relevance: "At the simplest level, AOL's troubles in the past couple of years are the story of a business without a vision and therefore without guiding principles to clarify which risks are worth taking -- and which are worth sticking to."

Update: AOL's reinvented itself several times, but it a case study in missed opportunities and arrogant senior managers and civil servant like rank and file, both persistent problems--this piece does a good job on ringing the changes on why reinvention is so difficult.

"The recruiter scheduled a phone interview and gave me advice about how to prepare for it. First, review algorithms, data structures, and Big O notation. Second, read the Google papers on the Google File System, Big Table, and Map Reduce. I didn't mention to the recruiter that the first part, the "review" of algorithms, data structures, and Big O Notation, wouldn't be a review for me; it would be my first formal study of those topics. I was a liberal arts major, Ancient Greek and Latin (an armchair adventure). If I were to be around hard-core computer science majors discussing algorithms and data structures in precise academic language, it would be like me being among the Eskimos, with their many words for snow, me having just a few terms like "snow", "slush", and "powder".

I understand the concepts and apply them daily, but I don't know the words for them. I don't know what the concepts are called. For example, although, I've learned to call a big array that only has a few of its slots ("slots"?) filled in a "sparse" array, I don't know what to call an array where each element is a linked list. I bet there is a formal name, but I haven't learned to speak that language. And I can't read or speak Big O, even though I have experience applying the concepts that Big O notation is used for. My software development skills are solid, but they are ... rustic."

-- Corey Trager on his Google interview.

(Susan sez: Read the comments on this piece, they are priceless.)

Note: More Google interview stories here, here, here and (kinda) here

So my new thing is to get up, hit FriendFeed, then twitter, then facebook, then TechMeme, then my gmail, then the NYTimes. On the way through this process, I'm making del.icio.us posts (I am turning into a big user, finally), thinking about items to blog, and laughing my head off occasionally.

Noteworthy items here:
1) Look how social information gathering has become with our cool new tools.
2) Look how much more discursive it is. I am long past the efficency of caring what was on the front page of Google News, the NYTimes or anyportal.com. My news is contextual and it takes much longer to absorb.
3) Email has gone down the list because it now carries only personal messages, not news (and because I have always on email on my Blackberry, so there's less of a time gap.)

Observations:
1) 'm doing great on the news through friends and experts filter, but is there a way to get top news headlines without having to get a NYTimes tweet (ugh?)
2) Commenting becomes another way to leave a foot print, as on friendfeed (a favorite feature there.)
3) Matching and referral happen slowly and organically as I see friends of friends posts on FF; would the experience improve if there were people matching/attribute matching tools to speed it up?

Update: Josh Kopelman has a related question: How do all these social feeds scale? Is it a dashboard, simple user selection or wha? (Susan sez: I have an idea. .Josh, am writing you.)

"How do I deal with email now? I scan the from and subject fields for high payoff messages. People I know who don't waste my time, or who I have a genuine friendship with. Or descriptive subject lines that help me understand that I should allot a minute or more of my life to opening it and reading it.

A journalist recently complained in a comment on another blog that he sent me multiple emails asking me for an interview, which went unanswered. But an email that he sent later suggesting some drama between AOL and Yahoo was instantly addressed. He was a little angry about that, which I understand. But what he doesn't understand is that when I see an email asking for an interview, my brain says “this is not urgent, deal with it this evening,” whereas the possible breaking news has to be dealt with right away."

--TechCruncher Mike Arrington, describing how he prioritizes the communications messages that bombard him.

Susan sez: The important thing to realize here is that many people, not only those as well-known as Mike, are hit with multiple information streams requiring responses--Mike's post is great in that it explains a somewhat reactive way of functioning that is common when you are time challenged.