"Enthusiastic Republicans don't see the choice of Palin as affirmative action, despite her thin résumé and gaping absence of foreign policy knowledge, because they expect Republicans to put an underqualified "babe," as Rush Limbaugh calls her, on the ticket. They have a tradition of nominating fun, bantamweight cheerleaders from the West, like the previous Miss Congeniality types Dan Quayle and W., and then letting them learn on the job. So they crash into the globe a few times while they're learning to drive, what's the big deal?"

--Maureen Dowd, surpassing herself in sarcasm as she comments on McCain's choice of Sarah Palin for VP nominee on the Republican ticket.

A few years ago, I sat in a meeting with Jeff Jarvis, Brian Oberkirch, Grace Davis, Andy Carvin and others and listened to everyone talk about how to handle disasters post-Katerina--and how we nerds could possibly help.

That memory makes it especially sweet to see the Gustaveinformation center and tools many of the same folks--and others, including my friend  and web site builder Deanna, have pulled together in anticipation of the need might Hurricane Gustav might generate.

This time, seems like towns and cities across the country are preparing to help--online as well--hope it all makes a difference.

"t is conceivable that some people will think John McCain picked Sarah Palin to be his running mate because she is a woman. I know you find this shocking, but I swear I have heard it mentioned.

McCain does not believe in pandering to identity politics. He was looking for someone who was well prepared to fight against international Islamic extremism, the transcendent issue of our time. And in the end he decided that in good conscience, he was not going to settle for anyone who had not been commander of a state national guard for at least a year and a half. He put down his foot!

The obvious choice was Palin, the governor of Alaska, whose guard stands as our last best defense against possible attack by the resurgent Russian menace across the Bering Strait."

More from Gail Collins right here.

Arse Elektronika 2008 -- "Do Androids Sleep with Electric Sheep?" -- will take place at CELLspace (San Francisco). September 25 thru 28, 2008.

My friend Viviane and I will be presenting a talk at Arse Elektronika 2008 -- Sept 27th at  CELLspace (San Francisco).

Here's what we're going to discuss--Avoiding the Emily Gould Effect
"Oversharing", sex blogging & erotica. How to successfully manage your online identity, whether you're pseudonymous or right out there.

As the legions of bloggers sharing personal stories of sexuality, erotica and adventure grow and as sex & relationship blogs become big business we hear both stories of bloggers who regret what they've shared (Emily Gould) and survived a tawdry outing (Zoe Margolis), and those who've parlayed sex & erotica blogging into far more mainstream careers (Rachel Kramer Bussel, Melissa Gira Grant, Violet Blue. How do you manage your online persona so you're in control of your story? What to do if you get outed?  Join Viviane, leader of The Sex Carnival, and Susan Mernit, sex and relationships contributing editor at Blogher, in a discussion of sharing, oversharing, and the best ways to put it out there. A hand out of tips for beginners and getting started will also be provided.

I'm excited about this panel and think it is going to be fun, and a complement to the BlogHer 'Coming Out Via Blog" panel I moderated in July.

Working this am, then heading to Slow Food Nation in SF for the afternoon. Everything is sold out, but we are going to go explore the markets and soak up ambiance. Somehow, going to Slow Food after watching Obama last night seems just right.

Watching the acceptance speech, it struck me how much America has changed in the last 15 years, how much more bi-racial, integrated, and diverse the mainstream has become--and how little the administration of the country has recognized this (though our media programming has).

Not only is Obama a product of a mixed marriage, with strong ties to the (white) Midwestern farmland (they poured that on kind of heavy), he's a New Deal progressive who is able to take the higher moral ground because of his short tenure in government and his relative inexperience (When he slammed McCain's voting record, I loved it, but I also felt it was the trick only a junior Senator could pull off).  His position--that we are better than the past eight years and we want to be better--was highly moral, but it struck me as accurate in that many Americans are ashamed of many of our government's choices--even if they are not unanimous on which ones are most embarassing.

My concern, though, as as we have become more progressive in our personal lives and how we are reflected in the culture--more diverse relationships, tolerance and acceptance for homosexuality, more unmarried couples and single parents, more single people, period--it doesn't mean that we are any more progressive in our political views and policies, or that we, as a country, are more likely to embrace progressive politics.

 In fact, if you look at how badly the so called left and the progressive movement have fared in the past 5 years, it's pretty depressing. There seems to be no center to progressive politics in the US, no coherence to anything we might call the last shred of the left, and no platform or vision to change any of that.

What I find fascinating about Obama is how adept he is at selling hope.  The man is a brilliant orator, and he's amazingly able to make the feelings flow--watching him speak is as moving as watching the Yes We Can video that stirred so many people.

 But does hope translate into more progressive policies and true change? Somehow, I think it will take more than speeches to reawaken progressive action in America.

Last year I was a reviewer for the Knight News Challenge; this year I am helping to manage and evangelize the program. As you hopefully know by now, #KNC08 gives people around the world a chance to apply for and receive funding for projects that support local online news, community discourse and information-exchange in a specific geographic locale or community. The garage--an incubator and mentoring site for prospective applicants to get help--is open now; applications open Sept. 2nd and close Nov 1st.

So, we're planning a set of meet-up in different cities and an online Webinar to give people a chance to learn about the program and develop  innovative ideas to put into the Garage for mentoring and peer review, and then submit as applications.

The online webinar is September 9th at 11 am eastern time--its free, but you need to register here.  Two Knight winners, Nora Paul and Amy Gahran will join Program Director Gary Kebbel to talk about this program and who should apply (and how to get great ideas to apply with).

Some observations about social media..and my own shifting use of it, right now.Back in the day, say 2005, blogging was the main way to do the following:

• make your voice heard
• be part of a community
• establishe a reputation for your ideas
• influence thought and community

Needless to say, in those days I loved the blogosphere and participated avidly in my corner(s) of it.

Fast forward 3 years and we have a much more bifurcated set of ways to communicate:

• twitter--a great community tool--chatter with people you know and feel affinity with; be part of a virtual community
• friendfeed-post your lifestream links, influence others through comments on their links, and be part of a community
• blogging--all the of the above, but at a slower pace
• tubmlr--all of the above, only visual
• seesmic and 12seconds: join a visual video community

Point here is that I find myself using twitter to maintain community, blogging to share ideas and influence thought, and friendfeed for reputation (in that I take pride in the links I post and the comments I make on others' streams).

What is interesting about all this is that the only one of these tools that is bi-directional for real--ie there is the ability to communicate in something more closely resembling real time--is twitter. (Thought video comments on seesmic are great). 

Everything else is a publish and subscribe model, which I think is becoming less powerful as watching and commenting on lifestreams (the friendfeed model, again) becomes a way to  mimic being bidirectional (and as friendfeed keeps speeding up their crawlers, may truly become bi-directional, which would be amazing)



.

So my Peoples Software co-founder Lisa Williams drove back from Boulder to Boston. It took 4 days and it was l--o-o-o-n-n -n-gggg. Lisa's home now, tho, and she did a post about Family Dinner, a weekly supper she used to make back in the day (when I also posted my family dinners).
Couple of things:
a) Lisa, glad you made it home
b) Loved seeing Family dinner again
c) You cooked!! Back in Boulder, we rarely cooked after week 2, just like we rarely hiked, biked, or went to the movies after a while (start-up mania, folks).

I of course am crashing at my friend's house, and since she is a chef, I get to eat what she cooks, which tonight was leftover rare roastbeef with aoli mayo and watercress on pugliese bread (these leftovers are not hard to take.)

The third year of the Knight News Challenge begins right now, did you know that?
This is the third year that the Knight Foundation, based in Miami, is running an open competition to award roughly $5MM to a group of projects that support innovative online journalism, social media, community discourse and information exchange, all with a specific geographic focus (ie within a specific place).

Applications can be submitted starting September 2nd, and there is a mentoring/incubator site called the Garage where you can submit ideas for peer review and 1: mentoring before you submit them for funding.

After spending the summer talking about investment dollars, the Knight program seems amazingly cool, not only because of its visionary aspirations and desire to support innovation, but because this is funding that does't require you to sell a percentage of your company (though it does require some open source development or other free access to technology).

Andrew Hyde got the TechStars teams to take a break right before Investor Day and spend one hour making a LipDub video. We did The Wombats song, Lets Dance to Joy Division and it was a blast.

The joke is that when people who don't know me are going to ask what I did this summer, I am going to point them to this:

TechStars LipDub from Andrew on Vimeo.

"...And yes, I know, I'm a flash in the pan and I'm getting a big head and this will all be over tomorrow, but here's the thing: it's been going on for three years now. It slows down after each video (praise be to Allah), but it hasn't really ever stopped. I've been busy the whole time. It confounds me and it confounds my friends and family, but for whatever reason, people keep on watching the videos and crazy offers keep coming my way."

--Internet-famous dancing guy Matt Harding, writing in his blog about becoming a CAA client. Matt's around the world travels doing that joyful little dance everywhere remind me of the community--and humanity--we all share (which is the point, right?)

I'm at my friend's house in the North Bay, taking a deep breath after 12 weeks of TechStars and working flat out, so I didn't make it to Gnomedex this year, but I wanted too.

This morning, looking at Josh Hallet's photostream from the kickoff, it strikes me that Gnomedex, like many good conferences and meet ups (including BlogHer), is a community, self-assembled and on the fly, but a community none the less.I'm psyched at the greater diversity of the conference attendees this year (totally due to Chris and Ponzi making sure that happened), and eager to watch more of the talks.

Vicarious thrills iz me today, drinking coffee and doing relaxing in the gray, cool North Bay, a great countweight to two days of driving highway to get back from Colorado. Ugh. Sigh. Coach potato face. Hello, my people,

(Tags to track are on twitter, flickr , friendfeed, and Google...presos are starting to go up at slide share. this is one of those proof cases for social media & remote access.Live feed here.)

"America's back in the cold war and W.'s back on vacation.

Talk about your fearful symmetry.

After eight years, the president's gut remains gullible. He'll go out as he came in -- ignoring reality; failing to foresee, prevent or even prepare for disasters; misinterpreting intelligence reports; misreading people; and handling crises in ways that makes them exponentially worse.

He has spent 469 days of his presidency kicking back at his ranch, and 450 days cavorting at Camp David. And there's still time to mountain-bike through another historic disaster."

--Maureen Dowd, op-ed piece in the New York Times.

Sites aimed primarily at women, from "mommy blogs" to makeup and fashion sites, grew 35 percent last year -- faster than every other category on the Web except politics, according to comScore, an Internet traffic measurement company. Women's sites had 84 million visitors in July, 27 percent more than the same month last year, comScore said.

Advertisers are following the crowd, serving up 4.4 billion display ads on women's Web sites in May, comScore said. That is more than for sites aimed at children, teenagers or families."

--NYTimes article on the popularity of Dooce, and the rise of women-targeted media.

"Just read in various places that people are getting messages from Twitter saying that there's a limit of 2000 followers per account.  

Lots to say about this of course! 

1. My first take: Probably a good idea. 

2. Is this a problem for people? "

--Dave Winer, commenting on twitter's new follow limit.

Susan sez: New sport: Whale watching--tracking social media stunts of those writ XXX-tra large. Fail Whale sized,

Winston loves toast, Colorado and twitter. If you don't believe me, here's the evidence.

Okay, it's been a couple of weeks and I don't like what Facebook did to my network. Getting close to the hating it part, in truth. What's wrong? Ponder these:

• Pages are so wide, the layouts are amazingly cluttered
• Thousands of tiny bits of text cancel one another out
• It's all about the news feed, but that makes it so hard to get to anything else
• I don't want it all about me. Pushing data like Notes into a tiny icon in a corner of the page doesn't reflect how I use FB, which is to check in about other people (and which is a great reason I have gotten progressively more engaged with friendfeed.)
• Doesn't feel fun. (Yep, fun matters.)

Switching back, even as I use it less (One year and six months from the release of the API).

"On Saturday, Mr. Stelter's wonderful article in The New York Times on how people were working around the blackout on the Olympic ceremony began as a post on Twitter seeking consumer experiences, then jumped onto his blog, TV Decoder, caught the attention of editors who wanted it expanded for the newspaper and ended up on Page One, jammed with insight and with plenty of examples from real human experience.

How much more powerful is that networked intelligence than a reporter with a phone, a Rolodex and the space between his or her ears?"

--David Carr, writing in the NYTimes on news as a viral and networked process, with the open ceremonies of the Olympics as his example.

Susan sez: This is a good article, because it reflects the crowd-sourcing that makes social networks and the Net so useful to so many people and attaches it to the venerable traditions of news-gathering in a way print people (are there any left?) can relate to.

• Elisa C: Which panels @SXSW to vote for (yeah, mine is there, but so are many other good ones--thanks, Elisa/LazyWeb)
• Svetlana/Profy: Her list of tips on pitching coverage of your start up to tech bloggers
• Jeremiah O:  4 tenents of the community manager
• The Truth Seeker: Are blue jeans a feminist, lesbian uniform?  Via Tess(NSFW), a viewpoint from another part of the blogosphere, suggesting to me that so many of my guy friends are truly lesbians trapped in a man's body and that their jeans prove this.

"The web is turning into one large gated community where, if you don't have the right credentials (cred), you'll always find yourself on the outside. This way of thinking is inherently exclusionary, and in my mind, flies in the face of the open spirit that used to exist in the early days of the web.
(snip)
...this isn't the social community I want to be a part of. I want to be part of a community where people are willing to share their expertise so that we all get better. I want to be part of a community that mimics that hoary old cliche about rising tides that lift all boats."

--Librarian and wise woman Cecily Walker, writing on her blog, cecily.info

(Susan sez: I found Cecile through Jason Toney, George Kelly and links on FriendFeed and recommend you read her,  she is great.)





Cecily Walker

Picked up news from Scott Anderson's blog about Michael Silver being named lead to work with the Newspaper Consortium and Yahoo to "develop new opportunities for the Consortium across the digital media landscape, as well as to grow the Consortium's existing relationship with Yahoo! across content and advertising." 

Translating from the corporatespeak, I'd read to mean his job is to:

• Watch the fox in the henhouse
• Deliver more content to Yahoo! for clicks back and new uniques from newspaper partners
• Get more content from Yahoo to get more ad inventory and high value content--think Oscars packages and Personal Finance stories on video
• Manage ad rates and splits on special packages for big CPG advertisers (this is 2003 AOL all over again)
• Evaluate whether there is some new Yahoo! technology or acquisition that has to get popped onto Newspaper sites right now (!) (Clearly, newspapers are going to miss FireEagle unless Yahoo! builds them something specific.)
• Oversee the legal agreements (I'd translate this to mean addressing newspapers that want to make other alliances).

The press release reminds us of the following useful faces

• There are 30 companies in the Newspaper Consortium that represent 779 local newspapers
• That equals 32 percent of all U.S. dailies and 41 percent of all U.S. Sunday circulation.
• Hot Jobs is the crown jewel on both sides(and it's a great model)
• Yahoo's partners are--A.H. Belo Corporation, Bakersfield Californian, Black Press, Buffalo News, Calkins Media, Inc., Columbus Dispatch, The Columbian Publishing Company, Cox Newspapers, The Day Publishing Company, The E.W. Scripps Company, GateHouse Media, Inc., Hearst Newspapers, Herald Media, Inc., Journal Register Company, Journal Sentinel, Lee Enterprises, McClatchy Company, Media General, Inc., MediaNews Group, Inc., Morris Communications Company LLC, New York Daily News, New York Times Regional Group, Paddock Publications Inc, Paxton Media Group, Philadelphia Media Holdings LLC, Shaw Newspapers, Sun Times News Group, Times-Shamrock Communications, The Times Publishing Company,  the Tribune Review Publishing Company.

So I just tuned into the website for the very ambitious and totally overwhelming Slow Food Nation coming to San Francisco August 29-Sept 1st.
Wow.
I definitely want to participate in this--but in what parts?  The whole thing seems miraculous, but overwhelming.
Anyone have any suggestions or strategies on what looks more interesting?  (I guess participating in any part of this means steeling myself for crowds of thousands and lines everywhere...any great talks happening as opposed to tastings?)

Thanks in advance if you can help me make sense of this.

So, I'll be heading back to California  from Boulder, CO later in August once TechStars is done.  I've got the dog, and I'm expecting to drive solo. So, questions for everyone who is so inclined: A logical trip West is to go Route 80 and stop in Salt Lake City, Reno and then roll into Norther California.

Does anyone have suggestions for the following:

• Dog friendly places along the way?
• People to meet or places to visit not insanely off course?
• Places or people insanely off course that you think are totally worth the distraction? (Note I am ruling out driving through Burning Man because my dog would not survive the heat.)

Have fun posting here or email me and thank you.

Allyson Kapin of Women Who Tech and Rad Campaign's pulled together a proposed SXSW panel that brings myself, Connie Reece, Lynne Johnson and Charlene Li to talk about Breaking through the Glass Ceiling.

Since this is SXSW, everyone gets to vote (and you have to sign up to do this, see the comments etc,)  I've never gone to SXSW, think it would be fun and want the panel to be both interesting and instructive.

Here's the precis:

"Are you a woman (or a man) who loves to tech out but is tired of sexism, ageism, and the lack of diversity? Women in tech and social media experts identify strategies for breaking through the digital ceiling. The panel will discuss topics such as getting heard by upper management, how to effectively advocate for your work and expertise, what men can do to help promote women in technology as well as how to break through the barriers of being too young or too old in the tech sector."

So, again, if you feel impelled to sign in and vote, we will not be sorry.

"But we are shifting, too, from a culture of scarcity to one of abundance. That is the essence of the Google worldview: managing abundance. So let's assume that instead of a scarcity there is an abundance of talent and a limitless will to create but it has been tamped down by an educational system that insists on sameness; starved by a mass economic system that rewarded only a few giants; and discouraged by a critical system that anointed a closed, small creative class. Now talent of many descriptions and levels can express itself and grow. We want to create and we want to be generous with our creations. And we will get the attention we deserve. That means that crap will be ignored. It just depends on your definition of crap."


--Jeff Jarvis, Buzz Machine, writing most eloquently about how the world is shifting and we are getting back our ability to be active creators.

I've been working with the wonderful Knight News Challenge team--Kristen Taylor, Jose Zamora, Heidi Miller, Robertson Adams, Marc Fest and others (under the apt leadership of the innovative Gary Kebbel) to help improve the range, quality and diversity of this year's applicants for the 2008-09 News Challenge (which will give away roughly $5MM to support open source projects that move forward local discourse and sharing/discussion around news, community, social media, visualization.)

Inspired by TechStars and YCombinator, the Garage creates a (drupal platform) community where current and potential applications for funding can enter their ideas, share comments and peer review, and request mentor support to improve their application before they submit it.

The Garage is open as of today; the KNC08 will start taking applications as of September 2nd; close is November 1st

If you are a newsie, a social media person, a social justice person using online tools to improve the world, a hyperlocal fan, or any sort of interested party (or a previous applicant) come and check it out and look around.

Kristen Taylor video on Garage here; blog post here.

Phillip Lenssen has outdone himself with this adorable little tale of the mom and pop shop whose golden goose is an SEO consultant.
The opener...
"There was once a mom and pop kind of web shop selling auction products, making money through the affiliate commissions. She (the wife) would do the design and customer contacts, and he (the husband) would do the programming of the site. Mind you, they had no products of their own. The only thing they could do to sell more was thus not to improve the products, but simply improve their site to bring in more people and do more sales...."

(Read it all here.)

Rachel Kramer Bussel has an excellent piece live in the Huffington Post about Carla Bruni, her reported number of sexual partners and whether counting out loud makes you a big slut (she says in our culture, it does). Worth a read and thought provoking.

There are also a number of posts about my old East Coast friend Jefferson who gto divorced around the same time I did and blogged his post-life wildness with a vengance, to the point he got Internet famous with some of the Post-College set. Jefferson is now getting sued for custody of his kids by his ex, and the sex and erotica blogosphere, East Coast division, is divided about whether he deserves their support.

Viviane's helped organize a legal defense fund for him; Fleshbot's taken up the call, and British writer Suzanne Portnoy's written at length about his problems,

However (why is there always an however?) Others in his circle have not been so kind; old friend (of his) Dacia Ray's come out with a critique of this always asking for something and using bad judgement fella;  a recent lover's posted a critique, and friends are critical (ouch).

Do you have to approve of someone's actions to fund their legal defense? In this crowd, the answer is clearly yes, potential loss of kids or not.

On a different note, BitchBuzz is clearly going to have some lovely sex-related writing, like Maria Diaz' review of Bedpost, a column by Esmeralda Smith on love and sex in the cyber age, and tips on buying private toys online.

"...Don't get me wrong, the gender ratio is a hell of a lot better now than it was when I took my first tech-related job back in the early 90s, but to say that things are balanced ... well ... it's just not true.  My dear friend Christine Herron, an accomplished business woman turned VC, has for some years now made it a practice to count the number of women in the room at any given event or conference. Based on her relatively strong statistical analysis for an array of major technology industry confabs, it would seem that we women have hovered at about an 11 percent participation at such gatherings for several years now.

I've heard word that investors are specifically seeking female entrepreneurs yet of the hundreds they meet in any given year, only about 2 percent are women.

Why?"

--Cathy Brooks, writing in the new feminist blog, BitchBuzz.

BitchBuzz, Cate's super cool new web mag is live, filled with smart talk from edgy women. My contribution is a piece about feminism and Valley culture and some of the disconnects I'd like to see people find ways to bridge, More here,

And a little snippet, below:
"I mean, on a certain level, WTF? Okay, so taking your shirt off at a conference falls into the category of extreme marketing (even if Pete Cashmore does it), but how does that fit with wearing stilettos and a slinky top to a business event? Or getting your picture taken?"

• News21: Jody Brannon, former MSN exec and wonderful teacher, named head of the ambitious and hope it goes far enough next century news program.
• Chris Brogan: What happens when Google owns you (and locks you out of your data?)..Great post with useful comments,
• Inside Facebook: which apps are most engaging? (Hint:Justin says check the MAU/MAD ration: Which applications tend to engage different users on a day to day basis (high MAU/DAU Ratio), vs. the same users on a day to day basis (low MAU/DAU Ratio)?
• Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup: Community, pix and comments from last nights' meeting

"...But startups, like the rest of life, are a test of constant failures.  What is the thing that refreshes and renews you and gets you back to the textmate file?  Fame, greed, insecurity, opportunism.  They go only so far.  The greatest of these is love."

--Brian Oberkirch, in love with your anvil, at like it matters.

So, about a week ago, I unlocked my twitter and friendfeed accounts; made the public; ie anyone chould choose to follow me.

In the week, I've gone from 517 twitter followers to 552 (not an explosion); my friendfeed followers have gone from 1463 to 1514; which, interestingly, continues the 2:1 ratio that many users of both services have seen in terms of number of followers.

Nothing else has changed, seems no reason not to keep open till other makes sense.

"This was a very difficult decision to make. We have never sold a newspaper, from my father's time to my time."

--Donald Newhouse, president of Advance Publications and son of S.I.Newhouse, who founded the media empire, commenting on the Newhouse family decision to sell their two largest New Jersey newspapers unless the unions accept significant cuts and cost-reductions. (The Newark Star Ledger is expected to lose between $30 and $40 MM this year, according to todays WSJ article.)

(Via Peter Levitan)

I'm enjoying both getting quoted by Sarah Lacy in  the Businessweek women in tech column she posted this week and reading the piece itself.

Also digging Sarah's post on her blog, which quotes a dude telling Julia Allison to lose weight (ROFL) and gets into some of the girl power vibe of younger women in tech.

I'm also working on a column for the upcoming new web mag BitchBuzz, edited by Miz Cate Sevilla, that gets into some of the disconnects around what is pro-woman behavior in the Valley(yes, talking with Sarah helped prompt that).

So here's the question:

• What can women in the Valley do to help one another further?
• How do we smooth out some of the disconnects about what feels appropriate in style and presentation (or agree to give one another more supportive space)?
•  If you're a women working in tech, how do you want other women to help you?

To put it another way, I'm a big supporter of both BlogHer and She's Geeky, and a big fan of Women Who Tech and Women 2.0/Bay area Girl Geeks dinner--but how do we bring all these things together? What's the opportunity to further given one another collegiality, mentoring, suppport?

If we had a new girls network, what would you want it to look like?