"....you define yourself by who you follow. If you only follow your family, that defines you. If you follow a crowd, like I do, that defines you too. One is not necessarily better than the other, you just gotta decide for yourself what kind of inputs you want.

--Robert Scoble, commenting on Friendfeed in a discussion of  to what extent social media can scale, especially with filters like FF, and to what extent plain old pickiness or decisions about how to use these tools will inevitably kick in (ie you can't really get that much out of following, aka scanning, 10,000 people.)

Susan sez: Side point: Each tool has a different purpose and can have different rules and roles for how you use it. I'm still tight with the tweets, open with the blog and FF.

NYTimes columnist David Brooks keeps writing the coolest stuff. Here's some snippets from the latest, on the ascendency of geek culture:

"The jock can shine on the football field, but the geeks can display their supple sensibilities and well-modulated emotions on their Facebook pages, blogs, text messages and Twitter feeds. Now there are armies of designers, researchers, media mavens and other cultural producers with a talent for whimsical self-mockery, arcane social references and late-night analysis."

and

"Barack Obama has become the Prince Caspian of the iPhone hordes. They honor him with videos and posters that combine aesthetic mastery with unabashed hero-worship. People in the 1950s used to earnestly debate the role of the intellectual in modern politics. But the Lionel Trilling authority-figure has been displaced by the mass class of blog-writing culture producers."

Woke up this morning and read Duncan Riley's right on the money post Blogging 2.0: It's All About the User, and Louis Gray's related and more personal Blogging 2.0 causing friction with 1.0 bloggers.

Duncan talks about attention shift, as I and others have, and then Louis picks up the meme and says: " You can spot those living in Blogging 1.0 as they're the ones railing about keeping all their comments on their blog, and they're the ones saying that FriendFeed or Twitter have absolutely no value, and complaining about the noise."

I found this amusing, because even as it has some truth, it also has that kill your foreforefathers meme that seems both way too old skool and quintessentially male. (As in the young bull elephant fighting the old one for the herd, and so on...)

Seems to be the new--and better way--to go forward--is to educate--and collaborate. That seems to be what has happened as careers blogger Penelope Trunk's launched Brazen Careerist as a new network--she' s teamed up with some 20-something folk, more recent grads, to build a site with far more reach and relevancy than either might have achieved solo.

When Louis says "Those bloggers who accept the changes will have a natural advantage over those who do not. The additional time it takes to engage on FriendFeed, Twitter and other social media sites will absolutely pay off in the end, even if it's hard to understand for those who've always accepted things for what they are," I agree with him. 

And yet, positioning a face off between 1.0 and 2.0 seems so yellow-journalism, drive page views, WWE to me (And I'd like to be hitting 3.0, anyway, myself.)
 
I like Penelope's approach of inclusion, and appreciate how her network is based on bringing in the founders of Employee Evolution, a site dedicated to recent grads and their transition from school to work.
 
Seems to be that folks in our own little social software digital village could benefit from a similar approach, rather than emulate those elephants.

What do you think, folks?

I remember, even a year ago, I felt that I had it sweet with information management. My bloglines reader was full and well-organized, I had techmeme, blogher, and the NYTimes, and I pretty much cold check into flickr and upcoming whenever I felt the need. Plus I got lots o news in my email, and that crazy little thing called Facebook has these new status updates.

Yep, life was sweet.

Flash forward to today. May 2008. First of all, my attention has gotten completely fragmented. At any given moment I allow myself the luxury, I flit between twitter, Facebook, friendfeed, gmail, youtube, techmeme. and whatever else strikes my fancy. In truth, I feel like a high class street cleaner, someone who has to go back and start over the mind she's done cleaning  a particular expanse of road--in other words, scanning my feeds takes way too long, and once I've done it, I wonder if there's something that was added when I was somewhere else that I missed--and therefore, do I need to go back and start over?

Arrgh.

In other words, I'm halfway toward being a total flitterati.

What's a flitterati? It's when you have continuous partial attention for everything and nothing, when a steady diet of comments and 140 word tweets have dieted down your brain to where deep reflection seems impossible.It's when it's too much work to write something long, and when following along on other people's lifestreams takes the place of actually reflecting on what's going on.

Navel-gazing of the third kind, in other words. Only through a digital lens. Extremely fun, but truly broken, and scary if reflection is what you value.

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.

As I was working away yesterday, half ignoring the banter on twitter, someone breathlessly reported "Scoble is going to a meet with Arrington!" 

Not Robert is going to see Mike, not Mike and Scoble are getting together, but Scoble and Arrington were having a meet, sometime more in the tenor of the NJ Soprano crime family getting together with the guys from NY. 

Reading this breathless prose, not only did it strike me that this fella probably had only the most passing acquaintance with Robert and Mike, but that thrill of seeing these two larger than life personalities-- 21,955 people follow Scoble on Twitter, 22,935 follow Calcanis, and 15,646  follow Mike--was both hugely entertaining and made him feel in the know.

It was a short path from that observation to this one--that the Valley's most pugnacious, prolific and promoted entrepreneurs were all---to a man--in the business of driving page views.

 I mean, take a step back and think about it--what do Mike Arrington and Robert Scoble create? Uh, media. And Calcanis and Winer?

 Aren't those supremely well-handled personal brands? Ones that drive reputation AND traffic?

You see, on the Internet today, it's possible to play vicarious thrill reality TV to the max. 

You might be a little code mouse who'd choke if he had to say hi to Scoble (and be speechless with Mike), but the transparency of our social media tools allow you to get a fairly complete vicarious thrill.

Even if you're not at the TechCrunch IronMan afterparty, or the "meet" between Scoble and Mike, you can follow these well-documented activities, feel in the know, and imagine you're part of the in-crowd.
 
Only this is, that perspective is bullshit, as authentic as the hi-jinks of the WWE stars of the mid 90s--Hulk Hogan, Shawn Michaels and so on--only now the story is refitted for a more adult crowd (those same kids, all grown up).

On a certain level, in their Internet personas, Mike and Dave and Jason and a bunch of the fellas are expert at playing to the crowd, even more than any of the female wanna-bes in  their wake (yes, we have those, too.)

Yep, there's a section of Silicon Valley that's just one step to the left of reality TV, with personas as bright and shiny and one sided as those of any wrestlers of yore. That's where the media folk live, the bright shiny page-view drivers, along with the party people, the marketers and the babes (male and femail) inside the bubble.

But then, there's the rest of the Valley--less public, less pretty--where real stuff is getting made, people are too busy to be out every night, and innovation solves problems.

Are these two worlds incompatible? No.  But only one of them is a virtual reality show.
And while it's super-entertaining, if you're watching it, enjoy-- but just don't think that is all there is.

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?

"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

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.