"I'm a bad gay myself. I keep sleeping with boys. I'm a bad straight. I keep on fucking, and not getting married. I don't think I'll ever get married, even though I almost did when I was 23. I don't think I'll ever be gay or straight. Bisexual is a term that barely even fits. I gave up on this notion that I'd only ever want to sleep with or love someone of "my gender" or its "opposite" a long time ago. I don't even know what the "opposite" of my sex is anymore. I forgot before I even moved to San Francisco."

--Melissa Gira, writing in a marvelous hope it lives forever post about being geeky, queer and a troublemaker, or what she describes as "queerdo" as a lead in to a call to action to come to Equality Camp, a Bar Camp for supporting/building a movement to support marriage equality.

(Details for Equality Camp, and yes I will be there: Saturday, January 3, 2009
9:00 a.m. - 6:00 p.m.
Citizen Space, #300, 425 - 2nd Street, San Francisco, CA  94107 (unless it gets bigger than 50-70 ppl. Link to sign up here.)

When you are addicted to the Internet, like me, and when you go offline for three days during a holiday with family, like I just did, you notice things.  My loss was not the net (heaven forbid, I have a browser on my phone), but my social media tools and community (twitter stopped working on my phone and so on...)
Now that I am (joyously) reconnected, so observations:

• When you are offline, you miss news delivered to you personally in the bulletin-like format of personal emails (truth is, I did get email on my phone, just not the net)
• Without twitter, there is no extended community to monitor and feel connected to (true continuous partial attention)
• Without friendfeed, there are no news links & commentary to enhance and expand news. And there is no meme of the day; the "best of" post everyone piles onto with comments.
• And web surfing on a little browser isn't the same...most sites are not optimized (I know, I bought a Blackberry instead of an Apple and this is what I get...)

Anyway, there are some new tools I am playing with that I didn't miss, but now that I am re-wired, seem hella fun:

• Plinky. Jason said don't say anything, so no info yet, more to come on this one
• Zentact: Tag your friends and contacts and then better manage relationships; I'm intrigued, but I imported too many people so the product loads way too slow to really test.
• Mr tweet: Is this a one trick pony? Had a great time when I got my first report of twitter people to follow...will there be more? (hint, hint, fellas).

Thanksgiving started early this year when family arrived from three different states, converging on the East Bay. Since we have lots o' foodies in the group, we made our way from fried chicken sandwiches and scones from BakeSale Betty's to a tour of the Ferry Building and The Slanted Door, to a drop in at Expresso Roma Cafe, Monterey Market and Mangiani's. All for research purposes, of course.

Naturally, all this was prep for the main event(s) tomorrow, when we produce multiple home made pies and head for turkey and yet more food.

This piece is a great complement to my BlogHer piece on friednships that fail.
(thanks, Viv!)

When I signed up for Mr. Tweet, the new app that helps you discover who you should be following among your network of followers and twittering influencers, it was with the same due diligence that has made me sign up for so many social medial apps that the abandoned detrius of those trials feels akin to asteroids floating around the moon.

But Mr. Tweet is great.  Not only did I learn that I had some highly interesting followers I needed to follow back, I got an analysis and report of the influencers Mr. Tweet recommended I follow--not only their names, web sites and locations, but info on their average daily tweets, if they responded to people they did not follow, and so on.(I am now going to try using MrTweet with my dog's twitter account and see how the algo holds up.)

Checking out the team behind Mr. Tweet led me to Yu-Shan Fung, fomer Amazon engineer,  and Steve Ming Yeow Ng, with my friend Andreas Weigend, former Chief Scientist at Amazon who is credited as their advisor. These folks say they are passionate about people discovery, self-organizing tools, and cutting through the mess of data claoming our attention...I'm eager to learn more about what they're up to.

"t's all part of a big boom that has been growing across the country: The new modern women's entrepreneur. Women who aren't just interested in taking a slice of the corporate pie, but owning the pie, the bakery and the manufacturing company that supplies it -- and are making it happen. Fueled in part by strong mothers from the Working Girl era of the 80s and power women role models like Oprah Winfrey, and Hilary Clinton, women today are more driven than ever.

Only this time around, we don't just want to work at a company. We want mogul status, and we're working for it."

--the marvelous and talented and so dead on right Patricia Handschliegel, putting her own lavish LA spin on something I am seeing all across the country--women wanting to run their own business and now doing it for themselves.

People I know are organizing two upcoming conferences focused on women in tech. Fem 2.0 is on February 2nd, at George Washington University. They say their mission is  "to bring together "the leadership of major women's advocacy organizations and online women's communities to further the connection between today's issues and women's voices."

AAUW, BlogHer, feminist majority, moms rising, feminist.com, care2, The National Conference of Negro Women, the National Council of Women's Organizations, NOW, VivirLatino, The Women's Media Center and WIMN are among the conveners for Fem2.0; one of the organizers s an old friend who has worked with ifocos for many years. It's not clear what the agenda will be, some some GREAT people are involved.

There's also an East Coast She's Geeky that Kaliya, who worked on the first She's Geeky in October 07 with Mary Hodder, Laurie Rae, and myself, is running in New York. She says there will be a West Coast She's Geeky in late January and stay tuned.

What could happen over at twitter when you add Rael Dornfest--someone who's created and edited a superb book series (O'Reilly Hacks), built one of the first RSS readers (Meerkat), working on the RSS spec standards and then went on to found a cool little company values of n that built Stikkit: Little yellow notes that *think*. 

Now the man's going to join forces with Ev Williams, Biz Stone and other smart people at twitter; my product development head is bursting with speculation about the cool direction twitter could go in (and thinking multiple products people, one at a time...). And of course the dude's an engineer....

TechCrunch broke the story and the twitterverse is humming with the news.

New post up at BlogHer that isn't about sex or dating but about friendship.
The lede:
"Is there anything worse than the unvoiced but clearly visible tension between two people who are supposedly friends--but for some reason aren't really, not anymore? Maybe the experience of feeling angry and resentful toward a so-called friend, but not feeling comfortable expressing how hurt you feel? Or the worry that a slight or oversight someone made was actually deliberate, malicious, clearly intended?"

The rest, here,

Layoffs are happening because our economy is big time tanking. That would be true no matter what season we were in. But combining our recession and the havoc is it wreaking with the traditional big company reductions on force in Q4 gives an undertone to the holidays that just makes me go ugh (not that I work for a bigco anymore). There's nothing more evil that the combination of holiday festivities, with their slam dunks on your wallet, and knowing your regularly paycheck has just gone--or is going--away.

With that lovely thought on your Monday, news that Google is laying off, palm chopped their staff, and techcrunch is tracking every single programmer, marketeer and product stunt double laid off in the Valley should either make you feel great that things can't get any worse for you (you have a job or already lost it),or once again emphasize the fact that in your about to be axed pain you are not alone.

And oh yeah, the NYTimes wrote a story about SixAparts' plan to rehab--I mean give free accounts and support to--laid off journalists, a high tech version of selling pencils I hope is much more successful--and that certainly has resulted in great PR for SixApart (congrats, Anil,it is a lovely idea).

So I just updated the writing tab on this site.  I've always been a writer--professionally, in the early days--and then as an avocation, on the side, but my desire to do more writing--alot more writing--is increasing(more on that in next post)

. Currently I blog regularly at Susan Mernit's Blog and am a contributing editing with weekly posts for BlogHer on Sex and Relationships. Decided to do a recap/cheat sheet of favorite and popular pieces I've written including the following:

• Huffington Post: Social Media Must Haves for the Recently Laid Off

• SMB: Losing Jerry Yang: Why CEO's departure reflects how Yahoo! has been broken
• SMB: What I want from Friend Feed
• SMB: 5 months on Facebook: Observations of Value
• SMB: The Battle over Bundling: Ten Top Sources and more (aka RSS & copyright)

 BlogHer favorites

• Joined, not merged: Keeping a room of one's own
• How can I ditch thee? Let me count the ways
• The Cheap Date & 15 ways to have fun ones..without feeling like a cheapskate
• I don't want to get married. Been there. Done that. Got the t-shirt(and the kid)
• The end of innocence & making it big: The NYTimes spins yet another lost girl tale of innocence, regret and discreetly hot sex
• Sex for fun: do you play that or not?
• Love Happens, Or from Casual to Comitted, Trying it All Again
• My love for Patty Smith: Or, sex, gender, androgyny and freedom
• On dating younger men
• (more people have read this than anything else on blogher that I have written. Why? It is the number 2 link on google for dating younger men (LOL)
•  Not choosing monogamy, why exclusivity doesn't matter

I am also proud of this talk on blogging, sexual identity and privacy Viviane and I did at Arse Electronika: Avoiding the Emily Gould Effect: Blogging, transparency & oversharing and of this essay on what it feels like to write poetry again after a long absence.

Patricia Handschiegel wrote a great post today about the emotional states entrepreneurs cycle through. Reading it, I saw myself working on People's Software, and feel some of the same feelings working on the new thing we're readying for 2009.

Patricia's identifies the following problem feelings as cycles entrepreneurs go through:

1. Feeling overwhelmed--that's obvious, right?
2. Shockeds & surprised--who knew X ?
3. The big decision--once you make it, that's it, whatever it is.
4. Mourning: Sad when startup takes over most of your life.
5. Tired: Anyone not get this one?
6. Hatching--launch or sale, it's the rocket ship ride.

Patricia's list is much more detailed, and both useful AND funny--check it out here.
(And did I mention how kick ass Patricia is? A real inspiration.)

Via the yummy and hilarious Cake Wrecks)

"Can you imagine the impact of Yahoo Personals on the dating scene between the Taliban and the Pashtun? It's like Romeo and Juliet with a happy ending."

--a playful Sylvia Paull, writing on her blog

A friend just sent me this:

Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things

Moved in 12 days ago and discovered the house had no phone or cable jacks (so much for renovation). That meant almost 2 weeks of cafes, working in borrowed office space (thanks, techsoup!) and typing on the little tiny keyboard on my phone/PDA.

How do you think it feels now that ATT has come and gone and I haz net access and working wireless? Pretty damn good! 

The idea I can work from home without stress is thrilling, and the new, locked gateway--in use for the past 5 minutes--seems fast (hope that continues).

Geeze, feels like I live here(not just inside my computer, but in this new house.)

Are you a corporate entity looking for a "trusted media advisor"? Do you feel the need to go to a consultant company to plan your event panels? Are you someone who wants to supplement your firm's damage control of an event with good advice from a blogger or member of the press?

If the answer is yes, you may be the target prospect for the brand spanking new Abrams Research, a new consultancy formed by Dan Abrams, a lawyer, legal reporter and anchor who clearly took one look at the Huffington Post's wisdom of crowds blogging approach and decided to apply it to media strategy, aka spin.

One of the people who helped put together his first crack at an experts' list(which is not made public on the web site) is Rachel Sklar, recently departed from Huffington Post; three others also participated.  (Full disclosure: I helped Rachel by suggesting some names for this list.)

What strikes me is that Abrams has done a masterful job of Web 2.0'ing his new consulting business. 

Without very much expenditure, he's created a site, sent out a notice and gotten enough media buzz from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal to fill up those contact forms he's got at the site--and all without having to hire any fulltime staff except himself. If anyone is wondering whether Dan Abrams knows media strategy, this move alone should prove it.

Bonus point: Also dug this list of old media and new media people--too bad there's no one from the Bay area, where we mash up media and tools:
"The Abrams Research Board of Advisors includes top leaders from almost every area of media:

• Former NBC Universal Chairman Bob Wright 
• Fox Entertainment President Kevin Reilly
• HBO's Bryant Gumbel
• Court TV founder Steven Brill
• Former American Media Editorial Director Bonnie Fuller
• Men's and Women's Health editor David Zinczenko
• Curbed Network Founder Lockhart Steele
• Former New York Times Sunday Business editor Judith Dobrzynski
• NBC Travel editor Peter Greenberg"

(Going to hold the bad jokes about over-40 former corporate execs on the list, since they could apply to me as well.)

This just in from the Women's Media Center in NYC--the WMC's 2009 Progressive Women's Voices program is accepting applications with a December 15th deadline.

Here's what the call to action says:

The Progressive Women's Voices program has become a cornerstone of The Women's Media Center. We are "changing the conversation" by making sure that there are plenty of qualified, authoritative, progressive women experts available to editors, reporters, producers, and bookers.

In our first year of the program, we intensively media trained 33 women who have gone on to earn over 1000 media hits year to date. Our inaugural class was a stellar group, with experts in foreign policy, reproductive rights, environmental issues, racial justice, voting rights, the history of feminism, immigrant communities, outsider cultures, national security, and many more areas of expertise.

With our training and help, in 2008, our PWV women wrote Op Eds in the Washington Post and The New York Times, features for Elle and New York magazine, were quoted in USA Today, Forbes, Variety, Mother Jones, the Wall Street Journal, Slate, Salon, The New Republic, the Los Angeles Times, on the Associated Press and Reuters wires, appeared on Good Morning America, CNN, MSNBC, CBS Nightly News, Fox News, ABC News, CNBC, The Tyra Banks Show, PBS's "To The Contrary," Bill Moyers, on numerous NPR shows, and in hundreds of other significant media outlets.

We are now accepting applications for our 2009 Progressive Women's Voices classes. We have three classes scheduled for the year. The first class will be training in New York Feb 6-7, March 6-7, and April 3-4, with all travel expenses paid for by the WMC. Applications for the first class will be open from now until December 15th.

If you know of a woman whose voice should be heard in the media, please forward this email to her and encourage her to apply. If the first class does not work for her, we have two more planned later in the year, so please encourage her to check our website for complete program details

Susan sez: Who needs this that you know? Pass it on..

Jay Rosen and Ariana Huffington have a great post up, congratulating the 12, 000+ people who worked on Off the Bus, the HuffPo/NewAssignment.net participatory journalism elections project.

 Big news: it worked. Next news: HuffPo is inviting all the participants who want to continue to write for HuffPo to post their data here (at survey monkey)


Jay's money quote: "The same wave of low-cost, newly practical participation that led record numbers of Americans to give money, and join networks for the candidates, also led 12,000 people to sign up for OffTheBus and participate in politics by covering the campaign."

"despite the external environment we face, the fact remains that yahoo! is now a significantly different company that is stronger in many ways than it was just 18 months ago. this only makes it all the more essential that we manage this opportunity to leverage the progress up to this point as effectively as possible. i strongly believe that having transformed our platform and better aligned costs and revenues, we have a unique window for the right ceo to take ownership over the next wave of mission-critical decisions facing the company."

--Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang, explaining how his work in moving the stock price from $31 to $10 has set the company up for success.

The news that Jerry Yang was stepping down as CEO of Yahoo! filled me with a mixture of delight and sadness.  Delight, because anyone who drove their company's value into the ground like Yang did deserves to be removed (and, in truth, should quickly remove themselves); sadness because I remember how high my hopes were when I joined Yahoo! In 2006--and how frustrating it was to have everyone there care so much and work so hard--only to have top management unable to be effective and make the right calls.

My two years at Yahoo! were a window into multiple changes of direction, resets and re-focusings unmatched by any other company I have worked at (including AOL).  When I came in, Dan Rosensweig was saying connecting people was the key and everyone was scrambling to integrate profiles they didn't have. Midway, it was advertising tools and self-serve that was going to be the core value, and then, later, it turned into being the front door and portal for the world. In between, each of these morphed 47 times, leading to divisions and business lines being shuttled between executives, people being laid off and then offered new positions, and a drift, that once I left the company, 10 months ago, seemed chronic and persistent.

To my mind, both Yang and the culture he created are responsible for this. All along, as bright people left or were failed to be given useful new jobs and were moved out, the senior execs kept saying everything was fine. But in truth, employees were being given new managers who--inevitably--left, and then reassigned to more new managers, many of whom, in most divisions (Tapan Bhat's excepted), left again. The disconnect between the happy face of the Yahoo! senior team and the major wandering in the desert of the lacking a strategy troups comes from the same lack of grounding in reality that Yang demonstrated in hiring Sue Decker as his Number 2 (no operations background? Puh-leeze!)

So, now Yang's departure offers some interesting scenarios:

• Does the board demonstrate their complacency and hire someone from his executive circle at Yahoo!
• Or do they hire someone who can ready Big Purple for sale (and cut and cut as they do so)?
• Or do they hire someone with the guts to manage the long, slow work of rebuilding what was once a set of premium assets?

In my opinion, if they are smart, they will go for #2--but that will be Yahoo's loss--and something that happened entirely on Jerry Yang's watch.

So, over the summer at TechStars, my Diet Coke addiction grew. My 1 can a day went to 3 or more, and since I've been back, I've definitely been swilling 2+ cans a day. And I don't need anyone else to tell me this is bad.

It is bad.

So, as of right now, I quit.  I quit sugar for six weeks this summer and came back to eating MANY FEWER sweets; I am going to quit diet coke right now for 3 weeks and see how I am doing.

So, if you were coming to Silicon Valley and you could meet any luminary (Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Gina Bianchi, Eric Schmidt, Meg Whitman, and so on...) and hear them speak/give a talk-- who would you like to meet?

Working on project and would love to get crowd's view...post in comments, please

Is it totally old school to watch when two media pundits turned new media pundits get into a blogosphere cat fight?  How do we evaluate the winners--by their stance on the side of right, their chest-thumping, their clearly superior logic, or what?

In the case of this week's Ron Rosenbaum/Jeff Jarvis smack down, I propose we use their rhetoric as the battleswords--let him with the best insults, put-downs and sound bites win.  After all, isn't that what punditry really is? Twitter meets The Quotation Dictionary?

Rosenbaum, Slate:

• "Dedicated guys who did great work at the dying dailies are being made to feel by Jarvis that they deserve to be downsized. Yet who has the most honor, the men and women who did the work or the media consultants who mock them?"
• "Firing people on the writing side because of the incompetence of the business side is a long tradition in the media business, and Jarvis gives management a New Age fig leaf with which to shift the blame from their own incompetence."

Jarvis, BuzzMachine:

• "He's mad because I'm not acting sufficiently mournful and respectful at the demise of his friends' journalistic careers (and perhaps his own). I'm "increasingly heartless" about these "beautiful losers".

• "Rosenbaum accuses me of "living the good life" as a consultant, professor, blogger, blatherer. I wish. When I worked for Advance and Conde Nast, I made many times what I do now. So why the hell did I leave? Because I wanted to be more a part of the future and believed I could best do that by working with students who will be that future, by helping companies from the outside with one other perspective, and by joining in and sometimes prodding the urgent discussion about new and sustainable models for news."

Susan sez: Is Rosenbaum hitting out in the wrong direction attacking Jeff?  Does trying to take Jeff down a peg do anything to affect positive change?

Blog by blog, quote by quote, I say Jeff wins this one--what do the rest of you think?

Update: A no name poster on Jeff's blog sex Rosenbaum is irked by Jeff's ego--and that it gets in the way--but hey, do you know many successful execs w/o big egos?
 
Jeff's deeds matter more than his desire to be recognized; without the work, there would be no chances to get flown to Dubai.

John McQauid sez:"Radical innovation is the only way forward for journalism, and is incredibly promising. Whining about the bygone days (five years ago!) of newspapers and magazines may provide a necessary emotional outlet, but it's a huge waste of energy and a distraction from the challenges at hand."

The Observer's Gillan Regan jumps in to cover the story--but adds nothing.

Rosenbaum, 1, Jarvis 10,
:

"From conglomerates to internet ventures, executives should be planning now on a decline of up to 40% in advertising spending during this cycle. Instead they're sleepwalking into economic extinction--even those lean online ventures which were supposed to take up the mantle and preserve New York's position as a media capital."

--The ever-direct Nick Denton of Gawker Media in an extended post about the economic downturn (when do we start calling it a depression?), onlne media and ad revenue. Nick's cautious here in his projections--but his calling out the moanin' is right on.

New post at BlogHer: "After all those statements about never living with someone, after wanting to make sure my independence was something I wouldn't (once again) mistakenly give away, A & I are moving in together. (You know it's real when you mix your books, and your pots and pans, and actually have discussions about which artwork to hang, as opposed to hanging whatever you want.) But that's where the room of my own comes in. In this cozy little house, already filled with books, I not only have a (shared) office, I have my own space."

--Read the whole thing here.

I am thrilled by saabira chaudhuri who's written a superb piece about the assholes whose take on her piece on the influential Women of Web.20 showed their brains live below the waist.

She writes: " What is it about the online space that brings out not only the best, but the absolute worst in people? Where are all these people in real life? Do they just never leave their holes, I mean homes? Or are they people I run into all the time -- at work, on the subway, at a bar downtown or at Starbucks?

The first thought that comes to mind whenever I run into ugliness like this is the New Yorker cartoon: "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." The comfortable anonymity offered by the Web allows people, in this case men, to say whatever it is they actually think deep down. And their feelings are incontrovertibly sexist. These are the same people we all run into in real life. But in the offline world, like the Ku Klux Klan when their masks are put away, it's hard to tell who's who. Men offline would never dare claim ownership to the ludicrous statements they so freely spout on the Web."

There's more, all well worth a read, and with a level of compassion I relate to--after all, these dickheads are spoiling it for the good guys, the ones we work with, love with, are friends with--or are these those guys in a different mode?

Hope not. Think not. But jeeze, are these men the people who elected Bush twice--or a different set of fools?

"...now we have the delicious irony that a white president from a patrician family, whose administration was so negligent about America's poor and black citizens, was so incompetent that he helped elect the first black president."

--NYTimes op-ed columnist (and personal favorite) Maureen Dowd, writing about Obama's election and racial identity,

David Cohn's Knight News  Challenge-funded project, Spot.us, which I have been a bit of an advisot to launches today--and is the subject of a NYTimes story.

Spot Us,  is the Craigs' List/marketplace approach to bews, allowed reports to propose coverage and seek funding, and funders to advertise journalistic topics or stories they want to fund. The focus is  reporting in the San Francisco Bay Area--the public puts up the money for the work.

Dave is one of the most energetic and bright people I know, with wonderful energy AND approachability--this is exciting to see move ahead.

Great quote from Dave: " "Spot Us would give a new sense of editorial power to the public,"I'm not Bill and Melinda Gates, but I can give $10. This is the Obama model. This is the Howard Dean model."

Sitting in Oakland on Sunday later afternoon, the Web 2.0 conference already seems far away, but some of the connections and conversations are still resonating.  Web 2.0, this year, was one of those conferences that proved that travelling long distances (which I didn't have to do) is worth it when it bringing people of compatible interests together.  For me, there were the old friends from AOL, the former Yahoos, the current friends and business partners, and new people to meet and talk with; an ideal mix, right?

Some highlights in my world:

• Learning Isaac Mao is going to be spending time in the US as a Berkman fellow; I met him in Shanghai in 2005, think he is great and would like to help him do things in this new role.
• Reconnecting with Rebecca McKinnon. Another person from the early blogosphere I know and admire it was a pleasure to see.
• Steve Marder: My former Eurekester client is such a smart guy, I want to talk more with him.
• Joking about Obama's My Man, Sam Perry, with scores of people
• Catching up with fellow travelling geeks JD Lasica and Renee Blodgett
• Realizing that assholes are always assholes. Saw a couple of people who are just jerks, and they were consistent. My favorite was the guy who when I said hello, skipped the script that involves saying "And how are you?" and went straight to bragging about all the people who want to hire him. Was a great demonstration of insecurity. My response was generous-"Oh, I am so happy for you, must feel great..." and I walked away laughing.

Isaac Mao is one of my heroes and it is thrilling to see him speaking at this conference. Isaac wrote  a letter to Google about their censorship practices in China and has been a major force in Chinese blogging and social media (and he is brilliant). He is co-founder of CNBlog.org and a researcher in social learning. In 2005, he started the movement for adopting Chinese bloggers on overseas servers and has been a force for positive social change within the framework of what the Chinese government will tolerate.

Isaac's point is that a new creative voice is emerging in China, but that repression continues--and he's right.

Listening to the brilliant Rebecca McKinnon talking about whether the spread of capitalism--like Murdoch--actually supports the growth of freedom and democracy in China?
Rebecca: Pre-founding Global Voices, American bloggers were pointing to and linking to non-US bloggers even less than the mainstream media.  And we had to go the non-profit route to make this happen.

People who are trying to create citizen media are often being stymied by governments who don't want them to; censorship around the world is a growing problem.  In China, you can't access Human Rights Watch, for example...in about 25 countries, you can find censorship and filters--and many of those filtering tools are from US, Silicon Valley companies.
Rebecca is showing slides the reveal how both US and Chinese companies use filters that support government agendas--for example, while Google.com has photos of the Tienman Square Massacre, google.cn has no such photos available. In other words, there are companies--like Google, and Yahoo! and BlogChina that allow them to be squeezed by government agendas and that are contradictory to users' needs
.
McKinnon is involved now with the Global Network Initiative which recommends that companies sign up to agree to support certain basic standards for users, while still working in country with the rulez.

She also quotes Danny O'Brien of the EFF, who suggests that perhaps using too many of the same tools globally--lke gmail or skype--is asking too much of private companies--aren't we over relying on them? What is we built more grassroots alternatives?

Lunch: Ever notice how at conferences, you end up meeting exactly the right people you didn't know, often by complete accident?  That truth led me to a table at Web 2.0 Friday lunch where I connected with no one. Might as well have been invisible. The man on my right, who was from Florida, had no interest in chatting; the fellow on my left was busy pitching a younger, very pretty woman on his consulting skills, and she couldn't even get a word in edge-wise.  Two folks across the circle, including the person whose intelligent face drew me there, didn't cast even a nod or a glance my way; for whatever reason, they had eyes only for one another.

Final outcome? Drank my (decaf) coffee, grabbed my bag and headed out...only to see a table of friends and to go hang with them.

Audience: Last night at the House of Shields post-conference drink-up, a twitter friend I was boozing with said the Web 2.0 conference crowd was a lot more privileged white guys than she was used to seeing. Words that made it through the din sounded like "No people of color," "everyone from the same social class," "doesn't feel like the variety's there." Her conclusion: This is a nice conference, but feels like many people are kinda the same.

Susan sez: Do I agree with that? No, not completely, there is diversity here, but I think this particularly conference is very much about the economics of technology innovation--with a healthy dose of companies--and  CEOs--to admire.

Connections: The time I've spent here, seems well worth it. The talks are okay, but the hallway encounters with fellow conference-goers are priceless (as Lookery CEO and MyBloglog flipper Scott Rafer demoed yesterday, when he spent the day lounging in the hall, holding meetings for free.) What this conference doesn't seem to have, which is less true at BlogHer, WeMedia and other smaller conferences, is a good way for attendees to connect. Although I have made plans to meet up with a number of people, I've also eyeballed a number of people--including some clearly entrepreneurial woman--and haven't found a natural way to talk to them; outside of the breaks and meals the formula here is not too interactive.

Almost liveblogging (wifi crapped out) A Conversation with Mark Zuckerberg
with John Battelle (Federated Media Publishing), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)

Facebook founder Mark Zuckberg's talking about the partnership and investment with Microsoft, and John B asks "Do you need money?"

Mark says no, and the audience giggles nervously.

The body stance of Mar Z is "bring it on, I can tackle you;" the John B stance is "I want this to be good, um, it better be."

Mark says "We have 125 million users, we're growing internationally and we've made all the 300,000 words on the site can be ported into native languages and it's worked extremely well; we have more than 20 languages available--and this is a very important strategic thing."

More Zuckerberg: Big focus in opening new offices in International locations: Paris, London, Dublin. Plus we have a big surge in self-serve advertising
.
Battelle pushes on ad revenue percentages and Zuckerberg agrees there are hundreds of millions of revenue from Microsoft, sponsors and advertising.

Battelle: Do you think Steve Ballmer is happy with the price he paid?
Zuckerberg: It's been about more than the dollars..they really want to try new things and take an innovative approach
.
(Susan sez: Watch out when someone keeps saying "It's just..." Why does that always strike a false note for me?)
More sound bites:
 
We don't feel any pressure to live up to $15 million dollars
.
On a day to day basis, there is no thought Now we have to do X to justify a $15B investment.
Battelle: How many people work at FB?

Zuckerberg: About 700

Battelle: Do you have a hiring freeze?

Zuckerberg: No.. We want to hire really great technical people who will build things and help us continue to grow. We are also working at adding sales where we have real activity..7% of the population of France is on FB, for example...we need to grow that and start an office...

Susan sez: Am I right in thinking that Marc Zuckerberg wears the same look for every public appearance? White cotton T, black North Face pullover, jeans, tennis shoes? (Oksy, back to the talk...)

Zuckerberg: The challenge is to make people feel comfortable putting information about themselves online.
 
Battelle asks about Connect and what it offers users. Zuckerberg say applications are feedbased and drives engagement with users, which in turn makes them grow at a faster rate.

Susan sez: Zuckerberg is impressive in how his surface openness is a defense. He's good at picking the 5 points he wants to make and sticking to them in a low-key, but firm way. And there's the sense of the passionate, driven entrepreneur which is every 45 year old man's idea of what a young start up founder should be.

*Running upstairs to post.

The Media Business--liveblogging--

Packed ballroom for Ev, Joel Hyatt and the most wise Ken Auletta, expert media critic and observer. Discussion of CurrentTV working with twitter and Digg around election night data and user participation that, says Hyatt "Enabled people to participate in the experience and interpret it for their peers."

(Shows reel..uh, not working...they need to keep taking..)

Auletta: So how you gonna make money?

Ev: UH....it's not as big a dilemma as people think it will be for us. We haven't focused on it yet. Twitter is valuable for people and for companies and organizations (Susan sez: This means he doesn't have a clue--yet--but we're all going to pay, he hopes, when it gets to be a metered service down the road...)

Ev: The experiments around the election can be done for anything that comes up, like a new camera launch...

Auletta: You mean you have faith?

Ev(laughs): Uh, yes, but twitter has both commercial and personal value; we can deliver on commercial value and we can monetize that.

Hyatt(CurrentTV): We are doing really well. We are sitting on top of cable set top model carried to 58MM international subscribers for licensing, AND we get revenue from our sponsors...we got profitable by 07 and we use the $$ to do new media development.

(Video of 25 year old flacking the great backchannel around the debates via twitter, and the digs on the stories....ad the virtual party watching the exit polls etc turned into...(Susan sez...great video!!)

Auletta to Ev: So what excites you about this election stuff?
Ev: Democratization of media is a passion..worked on blogging ten years ago...one of the most profound promises of the Internet is giving everyone on the Internet the ability to have a voice..What current is doing that is new is democratizing TV.

Auletta: How about some new ad models?

Ev: We plan to...(he looks nervous)...twitter's model is commercial activity on an opt in basis. If they don't want it, they don't get it. (Susan sez..Metered service!!!)

Hyatt: Subscription and license fees and ecommerce will add revenue (Susan sez: I have heard this before, but it needs to be done...)

Auletta: What is your impact on traditional media?
Haytt: We have provided thought leadership to the industry...we predate YouTube...TV was a closed system.
Ev: We have gotten uptake from many media outlets recently...CNN, Newsweek, TV shows...reporters are using twitter to surf trends, it's very immediate.

Hyat: We are doing viewer-created ads; user generated advertising...and we now do that for our advertisers (Susan sez..this is neat!)

(Shows video of young guy who is in love with and dating his Prius...)

Hyatt says the media industry is now owned by comglomerates and that it's not positive for a vibrant, strong democracy...we're opening up for people's voices.. citzen journalism has already proven to be enormously useful and valuable.

(Commercial ends)
Auletta: So how do you monetize that?

Hyatt explains that the guy's commercial was free to the advertiser to use on current as part of a sponsorship package, they can pay the creator to use the ads elsewhere--think about how much cheaper this is than agency commercials!)

Auletta: Ev, what wakes you up in the middle of the night?

Ev: It's still early for twitter...we have yet to realize our potential..it is all about execution now No one big worry.

Hyatt: Our competitivr advantage is to stay at the leading edge of innovation. How do we attract the best talent to do that?.We need to give users continued control of the power. In 09 we will have new channels(sponsored) with partners, and we will drive lots of promotion, engagement and participation.

 (Susan says I just heard MTV meet Digg!)
..

Liveblogging:
The ballroom at the Palace is filled with dark suits, big screens, flickering laptops. Mike Arrington is on stage interviewing ATT head Ralph de La Verga about his products.  This is the big wet kiss kick off for Thursday;

Mike may squewer people on TechCrunch, but at Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle (and TechWeb's) show, he's a pussycat, as genial and mild as Lou Dobbs.  Ralph, of course, is the consummate pitchman; he's invoked the JD Power awards 3 times in the last 5 minutes, and said "great" about 1,000 times.

Is it bad form to wonder what ATT paid to be get this slot? What sort of sponsorship or influence exchange led to this sweet high school prom of a fireside chat on this sunny morning in San Francisco, 2 days after the US elected Baraka Obama our next President, and right in the middle of our economy going splat?

The iPhone: Mike wants to talk about that. Ralph uses the iPhone and another that Mike won't let him talk about...no, it's the Blackberry Bold, which went on sale election day (and Ralph says the BB just about sold out in the first 2 days...does this mean this talk is really about AT&Ts value as a stock buy as everything else tanks?)

Is there a slowdown in selling the iPhone this quarter? Mike asks.

Why no, Ralph responds, why no..despite the bad economy, we're selling like crazy--and we have this little texting device, under $100(commercial plug)
.
(Susan sez" If you did the ROI on this talk, would it be reasonable to assume that the cost of securing it has a far better ROI--given how targeted and blogger-friendly the conference is--than just about any form of advertising?

Ralph says his phone is a key part of his ritual--everything from using it as an alarm, to reading email, etc. And now Mike wants to see what the audience uses--iPhones and Blackberrie lead, of course.
 
Side note-- (Susan sez: Every single person sitting in front of me is wearing a black or navy or brown sweater or suit coat; in the cluster of 30 people in the audience around me, 4 are women.)

Okay, Mike woke up