"got tons done today, feel much less overwhelmed, loving my new basecamp to do lists, almost through a couple of the big hoops."

"Usually the way startups die is that they launch something, users ignore it, investors are lukewarm, and they get demoralized and give up. Sometimes there are other forces encouraging them to give up, like the pull of school, or the push of founder conflicts. It's normal for users not to like what you first launch with, and for investors to be lukewarm. (Investors are basically permanently lukewarm.) So the groups who give up usually are looking at about the same information as other groups who keep going and succeed. Most of the time it comes down to whether they see the glass as half full or half empty." --.Paul Graham, writing at Hacker News, in the comments

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
     (right now please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
     (it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

--Richard Brautigan, 1967

(via Tracy Sheridan)

So I drove down to Santa Cruz and spent the day talking with some of the Web 2.0 tech and product folks there, including Margaret Rosas, Sol Lipman and friend and Yahoo! co-conspirator David Beach. 

In some ways,Santa Cruz strikes me as being like Shangri-La--it's beautiful, but isolated and somewhat remote, with the big hill being truly hard to get past sometimes in winter, when the rains hit. Recently, folks there have put an increasing focus on building ties to a Web 2.0 tech community--there have been geek dinners, talk about meet-ups and incubators, and a desire to make tech and web development perhaps a cornerstone of the economic development focus for the coming years.

There was lots of great talk--I learned that while the SC area has a pool of people who've been doing tech and web development for a while(no surprises there), there hasn't been much of an accessible community; folks have either left their work in the office, "over the hill," or they've kept to themselves (or both).  Margaret, Sol, Beach and others have made efforts, recently, to get more people out and connected--through planning a co-working space, doing informal co-working days, geek dinners, and so on.

There's alot of good activity happerning in Santa Cruz, many good geeky people, and I will be back.

Well-know Israeli blogger  Miriam Schwab was among the myriad people who have had trouble getting authenticated to post comments on my blog (sorry), so I am posting this note for her re my interview with Ayelet Noth:

"I'm sure Ayelet didn't quite mean what it sounds like she said, but in any case I would like to point out that women can have kids and be very entrepreneurial. In fact, giving birth can (strangely) act as a catalyst for making sweeping and exciting changes in one's professional life.

I got married really young, and had a bunch of kids by the time I was 25/26. Not only did I not quit and park myself in my kitchen, each kid pushed me to make changes in my career. I had three kids while in university. After the third was born I decided to get my first real job. The next one led me to quit and start my own biz. The next led me to discover and explore the world of blogging and social media, and turn my business into a social media marketing service provider.

There is enough of a stigma in the workforce against women with kids, so we women should watch our words and make sure that it is very clear that we can have kids and careers. Actually, the fact that we have personal lives, I think, contributes to our value at work. We don't mess around (too much), and are very efficient and focused.

As someone once said to me: "if you ever need something done, ask a busy person." Women with kids are busy, and we'll get things done. "

Like any app, twitter has a learning curve, and after about six weeks of active use, I feel like I'm crossing the threshold of being comfortable. What have I learned about successful tweeting, aka, rules to twit by? Here goes:

• Personality rules; voice and tone trump URLS
• It's the (cyber virtual) watercooler--ask and ye shall be @ replied
• Little links are useful, but not if every post is twit-linking to your stuff (ugh)
• Twitter is beyond transparency, this is a medium where truly being expressive makes a huge difference
• Feel free to be opinionated, it's not your blog
• Twitter is the small footprint of the Net; if it was a car, it would be carbon neutral.
  

"Two months ago, I was doing what I had to do. Now I'm doing what I want to do. And looking back, it was a change I'd always wanted to make, but as long as I was drawing a steady paycheck, I didn't see it as a change that I could afford to make-for me or for my family. Looking long term, I'm not sure it was a decision I could afford not to make. Getting laid off forced me to make the change that I'd always wanted to make anyways. And it may work out or it may not. But the point is that I've made that change now. I'm doing what I'm passionate about."

--Fellow ex-Yahoo! Ryan Kuder, who's started blogging, started a company and is seeing the brave new world, post Yahoo!.

Susan sez: It's hard to let go of complacency and choose risk, but well-thought out risk is one of the biggest adrenalin highs, and a place where both opportunity and productivity can flourish.

Mashable has a post tonight that Jajah has done a deal with Yahoo! to be the first client to use their Managed Services suite (based on a story by Alec Saunders, here). I've been a fan of this company since I first talked to them in late 2006, and it's good to see they finally have the Yahoo! deal they've been dancing around for a while. As Alex says : "JAJAH's network now spans over 200 points of presence all knit together by a global VoIP backbone. Using a combination of industry standard codecs, a proprietary codec of their own creation, and automated quality measurement tools, Mattes claims quality indistinguishable from the PSTN."

In other words, they've been building out considerable capacity and capabilty for a while and this deal gives them the large scale, name brand partner to take growth to the next level, and improve the revenue streams.

Nice.

I learned recently that my old and dear friend Rochelle Ratner died at the end of March. I have a piece about her posted at BlogHer, but I want to share these two poems I wrote for her on this blog.

I didn't send her this one--

Cancer Patient in New York

"There is no cure," you tell me and I think years, not days,
But I answer you calmly and say "It's just too soon to know."
Rose called it a black dog, Simic a plague, but it's cancer that's come
To live in your house, in your lungs and your brain, like a mildewed-streaked mold
That won't fade, no matter how hot the soapy water gets.

I listen to your voice on the phone, the tired edge and the dull complaints,
And I want to say this totally sucks, but instead I offer to visit next month
And I hear your voice brighten and you say "That's great," but we both know there is no assurance that when I get there you will even have the strength to walk down the block.

Old friend, friend of my youth, friend of my early middle age
I know you watch, perched high in your window above the city,
As the black hawk wheels above the park, the falcon poises its wings to dive.

Do you see the kestrel fly through Central Park on their way to nests in high towers?
See the lone eagle circle the meadow, his sharp eye looking for prey,
And the little starlings hop and scatter in the leaves as the school children parade?

On the phone to you in your room, I think of you, waiting,
Your ghostly reflection in the windows as you write of your own vanishing,
And how the city glimmers just beyond you in the looming darkness,  the night
.
(All rights reserved, Susan Mernit, 2007)

I did send her this one--
The Young Poet (At Twenty-Two)

You always wrote poems
At your desk, glasses perched at the
End of your nose, squinting down at
The yellow pad you'd pulled out
From the surface where it lay. Every few minutes

You read to yourself, images, metaphors, similes
Blooming between the lines
Like automatic writing your hands poured out.

You wrote every day, you told me, reaching for those
Stories just out of your grasp, the reconstructed tales of the past,
your grandmother in Leeds, your grandfather pulling a cart in
Atlantic City, your youth at the Steelcase Pier listening to
Frankie Avalon croon. You wrote and wrote,

Poems every day, binders and binders of them: tough-minded,
Confessional, archaeologies of what you learned and lost, precise,
Poetic hymnals that showed clearly the life you had escaped,
The dancing language in your unschooled brain,
The determined writer you would damn well become
No matter what your parents said.

(All rights reserved, Susan Mernit, 2007)

Rochelle,  I miss you. And thank you for everything you gave me.

Interestingly, I'm finding that twitter is in the lead as the most compelling guilty pleasure.

Facebook, MySpace, and every other annoying social network that just rolls over your free time--this slick little cartoon pokes fun at them all; it's not great, but it's cute (and about as annoying as a &&^&%$&* Funwall).

"In fact, if I were Microsoft, I'd be using a good part of that $40-odd billion to hire a SWAT team to help Windows Vista. I'm not talking about hiring more developers; I'm talking about finding folks who could creatively find a way to market downgrades to XP as a selling point. Microsoft should be far more worried about its Vista image problem than about outsmarting Yahoo, at this point."
--Mary Joe Foley, Microsoft Watch, writing about MSofties resistence to the proposed Yahoo-Microsoft merger

Susan sez: Nice to hear about it from the Seattle side; viewpoints at Y! seem so mixed, with lots of fear among staff about all the options (and  their sense Y! is getting itself together in terms of project focus, regardless)

So Web 2.0 is over, and now it's on to the next thing. For me, I didn't engage with Web 2.0 the way I meant to--it came right on the heels of coming back from Israel, there were lots of other business decisions about work and focus happening, some talk about moving (yep, I am heading for the East Bay later this summer), and whatever other time synchs distracted me,

Having said that, we had a kick ass panel on How to Create Successful Unconferences, BarCamps, & Meetups for Almost No $$, aka why not have an all women panel to help OReilly achieve the balance they so often (sadly) fail to achieve?

Topic was how unconferences, barcamps, and other grass roots conference structures have become powerful tools to develop community; virally market standards, tools, and ideas; and launch new companies and networks.Focus of the discussionwas be how conferences that are organized--or at least, begin, on an ad hoc basis as unconferences and barcamps--can actually generate powerful momentum in pushing forward standards, networks, and community. We went i to best practices, strategies for success, marketing tips, insider knowledge, and tales from the trenches with the amazing panelists:

• Tara Hunt, co-founder of BarCamp and lead organizer for BarCampBlock
• Elisa Camahort, co-founder of Blogher and lead for its conference series:
• Kaliya Hamlin, cofounder of She's Geeky, an unconference for women who identify as geeks

Sides are on slideshare, go get em and see what you missed (though we were so much better than these slides.)

I've gotten a number of informative emails from women bloggers and entrepreneurs in Israel who have point they want to make around the interview I did with Ayelet Noff last week. The red flag comment was--as I thought it  might be--was the following bit:

"Are there many women who do what you do?
No, not really.  For one thing, in Israel, many people marry and have babies by the time they are 25 or 26, so not everyone wants to be as entrepreneurial as me. Also, not everyone has the perspective I have; I'm Israeli, but I've lived around the world and am able to see different cultural and international points of view, particularly the American market; that and my fluency in English set me somewhat apart."

Since Moveable Type seems to have a hard time letting people register to comment(yes, I am addressing that), I want to post some of the feedback here--if you have comments and you have trouble posting, please reach out and I will post here.

One of the Israeli women who reached to me--and there seem to be many who feel Ayelet's point of view, while her own, didn't reflect their perspectives on women and tech in Israel, was
Or-Tal Kiriati, of www.lemino.com, who said

Okay, my new favorite blog clearly has to be Signal vs. Noise, cause I keep quoting them on this blog:
"That's why I like working with the family man or woman. They come in as a cold bath of reality. When people have other obligations outside of work that they actually care more about than your probably-not-so-world-changing idea, the crutches are not available as an easy way out, and you'll have to walk by the power of your good ideas and execution or you'll fall fast and early."

---David, writing about why start-ups should hire family people as well as the 20-somethings with fewer responsibilities if they want to build better products.

On the bus in Israel, I had a chance to hang over a more sustained chunk of time with Scoble and  Craig Newmark, two super well known bloggers (Scoble has1,600,000 links in Google; Craigslist has 28MM), and I learned something I didn't know before: these two A-listers are A-listers at least partly before they give some of the best customer service I've ever seen.

Yep, Scoble is online all the time with people who reach out to him: tweets, comments, trackbacks, posts. He pitches and catches with hundreds of people around the world, commenting and engaging in a way that means each person feel recognized.

And Craig, it's no different--Craig's passion is customer service, as he likes to say, and while a chunk of that is scrubbing the myriad forms of Craigslist, I'd bet he's just as committed to responding to the non-profits, the community folk, and the local folks who have something to say to him.

In other words, one of my take aways here is that these guys have intensified their stature through the one to one exchanges they have with people, and while these touches are not neccessarily visible, they make a huge difference in building and maintaining the connections.

Interestingly, I heard the same things about Mike Arrington from Israeli entrepreneurs when I was in Israel--Over and over again, Mike's name came up as someone people had spoken with, engaged with, learned from--so much so that I started to wonder how much Mike really sleeps.

In other words, in watching these folks in action, I realized while you build your reputation and your network through doing great blog posts, you can solidify and deepen it through true engagement with your audience, a lesson the best customer service reps--and the companies they support--have know for a while.

I had coffee a couple of days ago with a friend and former co-worker still at Yahoo!, no longer at Personals, but on to the next adventure. He was pretty psyched about his role, felt he was having a good impact, was at a project core to the company, etc. and as he talked I felt amazed at how, over the past two months, I'd moved so solidly from us to them.  Or, in other words, to use a relationship metaphor, babe, I'd moved on.

Looking around at friends and co-workers who exited around the same time, it looks like most of us have moved on, even if some have not settled into new staff jobs (I know some great people still out there, DM me if you need product managers, SEO experts, and content types).  Interestingly, more than 50% of the folks have gone to start-ups, often their own; another chunk went to other companies, and a not small number went to new roles at--surprise!--Yahoo.

As I said yesterday, I'm not really ready to share everything that's next right now, but life is starting to take shape and form. Thanks, Yahoo, for giving me a shove out the door that's been a catalyst for what should be a year of challenges, growth and continued change, as well as a whole boatload of stuff to figure out.

There is so much going on in my life right now, most of which I can't talk about yet.

Sorry for the teasers, but it's the only way to explain both the lack of blogging and my non-show to date at Web 2.0; got the pass, but have been hunkeringh down down at home on some critical things.

Short version: Israel was a great (working) vacation, I feel refreshed and diving into the next set of adventures feels so energizing--and stressful--I always find changes really hard, even good ones.

"If your idea for a web business is more along the lines of the mundane "product * price = profit" (3P) variety, I think the culture of San Francisco and that famous 20-mile radius around Stanford is anything but helpful. I might even go as far as say it's downright harmful.

The flush availability of other people's money is simply too tempting. When you're not spending your own money, it's easy to splash on a big open office on day one, a staff of 10+ in no time, and have few worries about paying the bills on the 1st of the month. It takes away much of the urgency to make money that I think is critical to build sustainable businesses. It gives you too many resources to be satisfied building simple tools for niche markets. Everything becomes about catching that huge wave."

--David, Signal vs, Noise, writing about start up stuff, like where to locate your endeavor

Even in a big world, human impulse is to make it smaller.

Valleywag may make derisive snorts about the "250," meaning the preening, self-congratulatory elitists they imagine as Silicon Valley's blogging core, but the truth is that the early adaptor crowd is really global, not local, and there's more like 3,500  of' em.

Having just spent a week in Israel with a gaggle of geeks, all using EVDO cards to stay connected on the travel bus, I observed a couple of things that I hadn't known before:

a) People from all over the world are talking to one another online, 24/7
b) Many of the people talking have formed strong ties and virtual communities.
c) Twitter is a key tool in supporting a & b, but blogs, friendfeed, IM, skype, email, and flickr all contribute as well.

During my week in Israel, I met folks, like the wonderful Orli Yakuel, who said she started techn blogging because of an influential blogger friend she'd met online, in the US; she and this person exchanged messages daily and had done so for a couple years.

At the same time, I saw Scoble, the most relentless and genial of bloggers, conduct conversations simultaneously with people all over the globe.

And I myself, of course, kept my my ties current and shared info daily with my friends and family in California, my business partner in Boston, and a whole gaggle of friends, family and colleagues in New York (and as I am now doing with a couple of people I met in Israel.)

The conclusion here, of course, is that it is human nature to make the world small.

Fueled by Twitter and skype, distances become smaller, discourses become more informal, and the global village gets larger, pulling us of us into the same virtual town.

"And even if in the face of this derision I decide I am going to bother, there arises the whole vexed question of getting it right. Is eating local or walking to work really going to reduce my carbon footprint? According to one analysis, if walking to work increases your appetite and you consume more meat or milk as a result, walking might actually emit more carbon than driving."

--Michael Pollan, writing in the NYTimes about going green behaviors.

Photo by Jon Fravelavel, flickr, cc license

"We have people calling on a weekly if not daily basis. If somebody engages in the use of an application compulsively, we get calls about it. There isn't one application that's good or bad, but if people are unable or unwilling to stop using it, that's what we look at as a red flag for an intervention."

--Libby Smith, corporate clinician for the Illinois Institute for Addiction Recovery, which helps treat internet addicts, quoted in a WIRED story on the likely failures of trying to avoid sever information overload at this week's Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.

Christine.net: The Freeloader's Guide to the Web 2.0 Expo: Forget lobbycon, here's the free stuff, the parties, and the sponsored sessions.
Ian Kennedy: The Lifestream Algorithm will be the next great algorithm war. "The huge opportunity ahead is a filter to bubble up the things you need to know without missing anything you want to know."
reportr.net: Why are we will asking if blogs are journalism? "When I graduated from journalism school in 1996, no one knew what a blog was. Heck, we still haven't decided if blogs are journalism."  Susan sez: There's a minute born every sucker, eh?
Go2Web2.0: Orli Yaukel interviews Miz Sarah Lacy, author of the forthcoming "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good."

If Ayelet Noff were to be played by a Hollywood star in the movie version of the Israeli web scene, the actress would have to be either Scarlett Johansson or Uma Thurman.  Ayelet's blend of authentic charm, warmth, web savviness and marketing smarts is so high-wattage only an Oscar winner could do her justice.

A former New Yorker, Ayelet is one of those bi-cultural Israelis who grew up in the US and then moved back.  Fluent in English and seemingly effortlessly bi-cultural, Ayelet offers a much need broad perspective to the high-tech start-ups that seek her counsel--she offers advice on product development, marketing, partnerships and brand positioning; my sense is she often provides a valuable and more savvy focus to Israeli teams wanting to reach a global market.  In addition, Ayelet is a born connector; she truly knows everybody and relishes introducing people to one another; the dinners, meet-ups, coffees and conversations she helped created for the Travelling Geeks crowd on this last Israel trip were wonderful.
During The Marker's COM. Vention; Israel's equivalent of Web 2.0 Expo, I sat down with Ayelet and asked lots of questions. Here, some of the answers:

When did you start your blog, Blonde 2.0?  What made you dive in with it?
"My background is in marketing. I worked for TBWA Chiat/Day in New York for a while, then came home to Israel and worked at ICQ and with some start-ups. 18 months ago I started Blonde 2.0--there was a need for a marketing business that could explain Web  2.0 tools and help them use and integrate them in the Israeli market; the name was just a way to brand myself.

Are there many women who do what you do?
No, not really.  For one thing, in Israel, many people marry and have babies by the time they are 25 or 26, so not everyone wants to be as entrepreneurial as me. Also, not everyone has the perspective I have; I'm Israeli, but I've lived around the world and am able to see different cultural and international points of view, particularly the American market; that and my fluency in English set me somewhat apart.

How do you get business?
Well, I'm pretty visible, between my work and my blog/brand. Clients often come to me, either through word of mouth, or via my social networks.  Often, they're at an early stage where they need a web site and lots of positioning, or they're farther along and they need to really focus on the marketing.

What are the rules you try to run your business by?

• Always remember people who have helped you; be helpful in return. Build a good support network
• Do a good job -there is no replacement for that!
• Work with really smart people; use the best
• Don't use your personal social network to promote stuff; you'll burn people out.
• Never speak badly of anyone.
• Work with companies whose products you'd use yourself and that you believe it.
• Write about clients  in your blog, but discreetly--don't over promote

For me, meeting Ayelet was great because she's someone, perhaps like Deb Schultz in the Bay area, who can bridge Israeli tech culture and the US Web 2.0 scene. Smart and motivated, Ayelet is both a pivotal part of the Israeli scene and an interesting contributor.

Excerpt from blonde 2.0:
"...bloggers today have a dramatic effect on the outcome of startups. Bloggers are the opinion leaders of today. I would be more inclined to try a service or product if a specific blogger that I admire recommended it as opposed to a journalist. But we're not only talking quality. We're also talking quantity. 120,000 blogs are opened each day and startups can receive a great deal more coverage through blogs than through traditional media. In addition, there are niche bloggers that write about specific topics and turning to those bloggers will of course get you much more targeted exposure for your service/product."

Links:
Blonde 2.0 blog
FaceBook
twitter

The boy is late teens, handsome and fair, and his eyes are earnest as he talks: "In One Voice we don't call it peace anymore; we want to bring about an a agreement that will bring bout comfort and a more stable situation than they have now. It's not peace, it's divorce...the metaphor says now we are pre divorce and we need to balance the situation...this is the difference between one voice and the normal peace movement that talks about peace and friendship."

It's a weekend morning, in Tel Aviv and Craig Newmark, JD Lasica and I are meeting with the director and a group of student leaders from One Voice , a powerful, grassroots peace movement that has engaged Israelis, especially college students, from all over Tel Aviv, Ramallah, and Gaza, as well as drawn in members from the US, the UK, Canada, and other parts of the world. The group is bright, committed, and right now, engaged in making sure this group of American bloggers and funders (Craig is on their board), understands how they work and what they have to offer.

Basically here's what I learn:
The universities are flash-points for OneVoice recruitment, as are the occupied terrorities. The movement tries to educate through lectures and events, then recruits at various levels of engagement, from signing up for a newsletter (over 100K people in a country of 7 million) to attending events, to joining as an organizer.  For the students involved, One Voice clearly offers a change to discuss, a change to create change, but mostly importantly, a means to hope.
 
Here's some of what the students tell us:

Marina:  This movement involves the public so they can have an opinion for themselves and think about what they support.
 
Tal: We try to enrich student understanding with lectures and knowledge; we also take the message of OneVoice and careful optimism and take it out on the streets, where we want to mobilize the students and the city residents.

Another student: We ask citizens what would you do to end the conflict? People can become policy makers, instead of just consumers of policy
.
Talking with this group, they make it clear to me that what engages them so deeply is the feeling of being empowered in a frustrating situation where it is so hard to effect policy changes. Because OneVoice is a participatory culture, with youth councils, leadership councils, and local action, it provides a means for these bright engaged students to avoid dispair, as well as to educate and inform.

Listening to the talk flow around me, and seeing the passion in these fresh eyes, it strikes me that like the African National Congress (ANC) for South African Doris Lessing and her fellow progressives in Johannesberg, so long ago, OneVoice provides a means to survive and hang on in an impossible situation by becoming a force for positive change. It strikes me that OneVoice is a great group, not only for what it offers in terms of the conflict, but the positive vision it offers Israel and Arab youth, and through them, their parents, families and neighbors
.
Learn more here:
Blog
Web site
YouTube videos
Facebook
Flickr
Imagine 2018  campaign

On April 23, the MacArthur Foundation and Common Sense Media are hosting a free public forum at Stanford University on "how digital technologies and new media are changing the way that young people learn, play, socialize and participate in civic life."  Julia Stasch, the Vice President of the foundation, will talk about  MacArthur's $50 million digital media and learning initiative; danah boyd and Mimi Ito are among the funding recipients who will present research.

Teen Socialization Practices in Networked Publics
danah boyd, University of California Berkeley
Drawing from interviews of teens across the U.S., boyd will explain how social network sites such as MySpace and Facebook have become an integral part of how youth relate to one another and develop their social identities.

Understanding New Media in the Home
Heather Horst, University of California Berkeley
Looking across a range of case studies, Horst will examine how families of varying backgrounds negotiate the changes and challenges of incorporating new media into everyday family life.

Hip Hop Music and Meaning in the Digital Age
Dilan Mahendran, University of California Berkeley
Based on his study of youth hip hop production in the Bay Area, Mahendran will describe how young people learn, mobilize, and develop meaning through collaborative digital media production.

New Media from a Youth Perspective
Mimi Ito, University of Southern California and Principle Investigator of the Kids' Informal Learning with Digital Media project
Ito will conclude the research presentations with an overview of project cases studies, ending with a discussion of what parents, educators, and technology developers can learn from youth engagement with new media.

I am super excited about this...and have one extra ticket...email if you want to go--and if I know you, please.

Rafat Ali's got an unusually animated post about Adam Penenberg's big wet kiss (with Rolling Stone quality photos) to Ning, Gina Bianchi and Mark Andressen.

Rafat: "FastCompany has unloaded the biggest piece of Turducken shaped in the form of a cover story on Ning, in the latest issue. And for once, Valleywag is actually tame in its skewering of the story. In terms of hype, this is of BW-cover-story-on-Digg proportions (hence the similar headline in my post). Keep in mind this is a post about the lameness of FC's story and the hype its journalist spews in this story...Ning has all the right to hype itself however it wants."

Valleywag's Owen Thomas does an elegant pile-on: "According to figures in the piece, Ning is making roughly $1.7 million a year in the $20-a-month subscriptions some social-network creators pay. The rest of the money they make comes from Google's AdSense ads, the familiar fallback of hopeless startups."

Marc Canter calls em out:"Wat can Ning do with $44M?  Now what can they do with another $60M?  Well since they're not profitable - lets see - they could lost $10M a year for 10 years and still sell the company for $100M."

Susan sez: Nothing like blue chip founders and fawning journalists to get hard-driving startupistas in a twist--but is Ning really a mass market tool?

Me do not think so, regardless of stats.

This week's piece is about dating, money and boundaries.( I'll also be posting a set of women and tech in Israel pieces over the next few days, here and at BlogHer.)

Somehow, I managed to not actually see the She's Geeky videos from October 2007 until today--and they are powerful. If you care at all about women and tech, geeky women, dreaming in code, etc, play this video--it is great.

Bonus link: Interview with Miz Kaliya.

Steve Hodson's got a smart post up that presents the point of view that the Mashables, the TechCrunches, the RWWs, the GigaOms have become so big and so pervasive that individual tech bloggers have to either join the or fight for attention to be heard.

As someone who's been blogging since 2003, mostly as a part-time thing, and not as a means to make $$ from writing (though it's definitely helped my consulting), the concept that newer bloggers feel that they have to fight to have a voice seems interesting.  I'm not sure it's true, but I know that there are people who believe it's true, and their experience fighting to be heard is probably quite different than mine,

One thing I've started to see and wondered about are the people who seem to make informal agreements to promote one another, to informally create networks if you will. I don't know that I had ever heard of Corvida/She Geeks until Louis Gray started linking to her relentlessly, along with Steve Hodson and SarahinTampa and ParisLemon /MGSigler  (A quick look at Technorati links suggests that these folks are linking to one another at least 50% more than anyone else is linking to them.)

Interestingly, it turns out that all of these folks are part of a new blogging network called Grand Effect that aims to share ads and boost traffic.And clearly, though they don't seem to have sold any ads yet, the network effect works.  Coming off a week in Israel on the bus with Scoble, Craig Newmark and Sarah Lacy, it's interesting to see folks joining forces--while Scoble's certainly done his share of linking to the uncles, these other folks are more independent sorts; Sit would be fun to hear what Sarah, who's also a journalist, thinks about the fight to be heard .

So, the "real questions" are:
1. Do you have to form alliances to get traffic, beyond what the big sites throw out?
2. Whose rise in the states supports this idea--and whose doesn't?
3. Does it matter, aka, does this kind of recirculation push yet other voices down (and isn't that the law of continuous revolution, anyway?)

I'd really like to hear what you think..either in the comments or on your own site. (And let me just add these people I am talking about are voices I value, so this ain't throwing down no glove.)

"I've noticed the biggest bottleneck stopping me from efficiently accomplishing the tasks I've set up for myself is just my mood. I'll have a clear definition of what needs to be done, full confidence in where I'm going with things, and I'll sit down and just think "aw, damn, I feel like shit." Then I'll generally waste time until it's 1am and I need to sleep. This happens 1-2 nights a week.

I'm looking for news.yc folks to try to get some rational insights on on the irrational problem of keeping your mood in check and focusing on what matters, when you're just one guy.

How do you guys deal with emotional problems?

How do you avoid ruminating on things in your day that have pissed you off? This is my biggest issue."

--Hacker News community member and start-up entrepreneur Dan Grover. writing about issues solo founders of companies need to manage in a post called "How do solo founders stay emotionally efficient?"

Susan sez: Seems to me this is a great question for everyone-how do you keep your brain and feelings in check long so you can get things done when you need to, and with optimal output and performance?

I'm back home; it's a nice day in the Bay area, and my body thinks it's evening tho my brain says midday. This of course will lead to the inevitable crashing out that jet lag often delivers.
Meanwhile, fellow Merry Travelling Geeks Crankster JD Lasica has published the very cool survey of the even cooler tools that the Bay area blogging crew on the israeli-based travelling geeks bus (and it was a very intimate bus) would confess to using.

People, that means you are about to hear what useful toys and shiny web implements Robert Scoble, Sarah Lacy, Craig Newmark and the rest of us fire up every day. Here are some highlights from the list.

• All 8 use Firefox, Facebook and Twitter.
• 5 use Friedfeed daily, 6 use flickr daily, and half said they used Gmail daily.
• Blogging software has the greatest fragmentation: some folks use multiple platforms, principally Typepad(5), Moveable Type (3), Word press (1, with one planning to switch.)

Most obscure (and retro) tools? SSH (secure shell)  & Pine (email client). Who? Uh, Craig.

"In the last week we deployed new code to Flickr 50 times, including 546 changes by 16 people. We issued over 2,000 new API keys, and third party developers made an average of 704 API calls per second, across 109 public API methods. We added 1 new API method, and updated 7 others. There are approximately 10,000 lines of open source code in our public subversion repository.

And our new developer site, code.flickr.com, is where you keep up with all that."

--flickr staffer kellan elliott-mccrea, writing on the flickr blog about the ongoing, useful development work the team keeps doing (oh, and there's a new developer blog here).

Susan sez: Isn't this what good web services do..keep empowering and working with their users?

Blogher's done a  survey of US women and the blogosphere with some cool data points. The message, from Elisa:
 " We are losing trust in the government, politicians, the media and many corporations. But as it turns out, we trust each other. The blogosphere is increasingly becoming the digital 'kitchen table' where individuals can sit down to have an authentic conversation about all the topics that affect their daily lives - from household products to presidential candidates."

The stats:

• Approximately, 36.2 million women actively participate in the blogosphere every week with 15.1 publishing at least one post a week and 21.1 reading and commenting to blogs a week
• More than 40% of women surveyed consider blogs a reliable source of advice and information
• Half of women surveyed say blogs influence their purchase decisions
•  Women are so passionate about blogging that large percentages of women said they would give something up to keep the blogs they read and/or write:
•  55% would give up alcohol
• 49% would give up their PDAs
• 42% would give up their i-Pod
• 43% would give up reading the newspaper

Susan sez: The Blogher ladies checked in on how many bloggers would sacrifice chocolate for blogging (20%), but no one asked about sex. Does wondering make me a pervert?
--

On Tuesday, had a chance to talk with a broader range of Israeli women bloggers and tech VCs and entrepreneurs. Some pictures in advance of real words.

I have about six posts about this Israel trip I need t finish and post. JD has a summary of the activities here, but there's no quick way to capture the many conversations, connections, moments that have happened for each of us. I'll post some pictures today an d filll in over the next few days..lots here to talk about.