Did I mention how much I enjoy Weezers Pork and Beans video?  The meta-approach of making a video that includes bits of popular vids from YouTube--notably Tay Zonday of Chocolate Rain Blendtec's "Will it Blend" blender, Miss Teen South Carolina, the  Numa Numa video, All Your Base are Belong to Us, Peanut Butter Jelly Time, the "stupid" ninja guy, and a nerd who made  the Guinness Book of World Records for wearing the most t-shirts at any time.
just makes me smile.
Loving the wit of it every time I watch.

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. "

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.

Is this a reality show in the making or what? 

Robert Scoble, Craig Newmark, JD Lasica, Cathy Brooks, Deborah Schultz, Jeff Saperstein, Brad Reddersen, Renee Blodgett, BizWeek columnist Sarah Lacy and myself are about to spend a week in Israel touring around the country as the Consulate General of Israel to the Pacific Northwest's  experiment in inviting Bay area tech bloggers and digerati to get a look at Israeli innovation? The deal, we can write whatever we want; share impressions freely, but the trip's a junket (they're covering airfare and most expenses).

Travelling Geeks in Israel, we're calling it, and we've even got an aggregate blog, courtsey of JD Lasica, with much valued assist to my webmaster Chad Capellman (no, he didn't get to go).

Would you be surprised if I told you I said yes as much because I thought spending a week on a very small bus with this crew would be at least as interesting as touring the country?

We're going to have total media junkie access to all sort of people, from tech's best and brightest to peace leaders. Because of security, I can't share the schedule, but there's going to be alot to read, listen to and watch--and what I can't imagine will be anything but joyous tumult Real-World style when this many bloggers, many addicted to their digital cameras, video set-ups and 5,000 words per day are all crowded together with lots of stimulation and lots of ideas and opinions to share

In other words, brilliant mayhem (I hope), or what a slice of the blogging community might look like if you flew some of the brightest and most obsessive bloggers I know into a country smaller than New York, bound them together with computer cables and wifi, and then set them free to explore everything, all at once.

So, the party's starting, the geeks are getting together, and, whether I love every minute or not, I am so ready for this wonderful, long, strange trip..

As someone obsessed with data, meeting John Kelly from the new stats and mapping enterprise Morningside Analytics was one of the high points of Re:Public last month. Now The Berkman Center for Internet & Society's Internet & Democracy project has just released a major study on "Mapping Iran's Online Public: Politics and Culture in the Persian Blogosphere" that is based on Morningside's data and created with them,

One sound bite: "In contrast to the conventional wisdom that Iranian bloggers are mainly young democrats critical of the regime, we found a wide range of opinions representing religious conservative points of view as well as secular and reform-minded ones, and topics ranging from politics and human rights to poetry, religion and pop culture."

Quick stats:

• The Persian blogosphere has  approximately 60,000 routinely updated blogs.
• The Iranian blogosphere is dominated by four major network formations with identifiable sub-clusters: 1) Secular/Reformist, 2) Conservative/Religious, 3) Persian Poetry and Literature, and 4) Mixed Networks.
• Anonymous blogging is more common in the Conservative/Religious network formation than in the Secular/Reformist one.
• State blocking of blogs is less pervasive than expected, though clearly more common in the Secular/Reformist network formation.
• 40% of the blogs are by women; a huge number are about poetry (!)

Going to dig in and learn more, can't wait to see the stats on Russia, Europe, the US.