Jeremy Zawodny leaving Yahoo: Just saw that my friend Jeremy Z is leaving Yahoo for a compelling opportunity with another company; I am excited for him, and wish him all the best.

San Jose Mercury News: Knight Foundation is awarding  aq set of organization in San Jose $1.5 million dollars to "help the community find its soul." ( Susan sez: I continued to be impressed--and thrilled--by Knight projects and investments (and am honored to be helping them with the Knight News Challenge.)

Amy Gahran: Is community news a nice-to-have? At The Future of News conference at MIT, Lisa Williams and other discuss whether local news is the holy grail local residents crave (verdict: Not.)

I'll be at the Editor & Publisher conference in Las Vegas for the next couple of days, in support of the Knight Foundation announcement of the 2008 Knight News Challenge winners.

If you're not aware of this Knight program, it's a multi-year grant program that supports innovative ideas that use digital media and technology (mobile, platforms, etc.) to transform local and regional community news and support discourse in the commons. Knight has funded both very location specific projects and much more platform-driven efforts and these efforts have jump-started platform and tool development around local, community, news and even some social justice and accessibility issues,because of how well-distributed the funding has been.

Last year's News Challenge (2007) winners iwent to 25 individuals, and to private and public entitiesthat ranged from individual developers to  MIT to MTV. This year's list of winner's is equally cool, and the announcement of the winners is tomorrow.

I'm still waking up, but this is a great post by one Hank Williams, whydoeseveryhingsuck?:

"It is entirely possible that before Twitter makes its first penny, it will become too important to exist in its current form, and the community will feel it has to be replaced by an open source distributed framework. This should strike fear into the hearts of anyone who decides open their API. While the Open API strategy has clearly worked in terms of adoption, it may have worked too well. In fact it may have worked so well that Twitter may be killed before it has even really made it out of the womb, by people that find it so important that they can't afford to really have it be a company."

I don't think this is going to happen to twitter, but like the concept of Open API perhaps not being enough as a big worrier for any developer.

Also think this is a good articulation of a higher-order problem.

So, I'm starting to engage in some very specific shifts in behavior, which I want to talk about, both as a means to better share my thoughts and output, and as a way to kick off some talk about how information sharing and discovery is shifting.  Here's the deal:

1) The best place to see what I am writing/talking/thinking about right now is friendfeed. You need to ask to follow me, but if you're not a bot, a link farmer or a spammer, I will approve you.

Why friendfeed? A couple of reasons:
a) FF is an aggregator. This means that since I am doing alot of clipping and commenting and throwing it into  delicious where I can save the info and get it again later, you can see all that there pretty easily. Since my delicious use means  I am not posting as many interesting links on my blog, if you care FF is the place to go.
b) You can comment on items there that you can't comment on on delicious as easily--in other works, the ff interface supports us having a conversation, which is one of the critical points, right?


2) Twitter is a way to escape the echo chamber and  sample voices/people.

I pruned my twitter stream a day ago. to make room for some new voices. I just went and got a bunch, mostly tied to an area I am going to spend time in over the summer. It was amazing how much I learned about the area--and about some interesting people to follow--by using the twitter location search- good way to suss out digerati in a new place.

3) Blogs are longer form and my  virtual ADD is getting worse (but I still love blogging).
I still love blogging, but so much of what I am doing right now is boiling down to snippets, and ff and twitter are good tools for that.

On the other hand, I could never write this post in either medium.

So, question for you all: How are social media tools shifting your discourse?

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.
  

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.

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.)