I seem destined to have back and forth discussions with Steve Hodson, who picked up something I wrote yesterday about becoming more engaged with twitter and friendfeed than I have been. Steve's a really eloquent, persuasive writer, and I was engaged in reading the piece when I got to this statement that just stopped me:
"While blogging has been heralded as the new news medium there are those of the early adopter crowd who have used blogging as a way for them to have conversations but blogging was never meant to be the end point where they would stay. In the meantime though they attracted the most attention and as a result those of us that wanted to make blogging a career had to work even harder to get noticed."

So, did Steve just say the following:

• People who started blogging a few years ago (2003 for me) are making it hard for people like Steve to get noticed?
• Non-professional bloggers (like me) should get out of the way of people who want to be professional bloggers (like Steve?)
• and, finally
• Those old folks in the early adopter crowd didn't really have the committment to keep blogging, unlike Steve who is called to the vocation so deeply he wants to make his living from it?

Say it ain't so, you of short vision and big hubris, who make lots of silly and incorrect assertions here.

• First of all dude, what is a "professional" blogger? Someone who wants to live on the AdSense pennies they collect? Someone who starts a blog publishing network?
• Second, you're bitching because there are people who started blogging before you who get in the way of your getting noticed? Bah!  Blogging is a  cream rises to the top process, not a who's the best looking dude of the three left on the desert island. Scarcity does not relate to quality, face life and take a deep breath. (Your friend Corvida is a great example of that--she's super talented and now widely read--and when did she start, six months ago?)
• You imply that the writing that non "professional" bloggers do just makes noise, and you say tha FF and twitter make it  easier for "professional" bloggers to rise above the noise because those loud fools just go over there. Steve, this sounds alot like the "I belong to a special priesthood and you stay away from my clubhouse" that old time journalists did  and as such it is utter bullshit.

Summary of what Susan thinks:

• Steve is a smart guy with good ideas whose blog I enjoy.
• This particular post is full of bull hooey and mistaken assertions.

So, this is the last night in Michigan, heading back to Boulder tomorrow.  It's been a interesting two  weeks--I spent more than hald of it working, mostly from a little cafe and on stolen, faint wi-fi on the porch of the cottage, the rest of the time trying to have the vacation we had so long planned.

Thanks go to the team at PSCO for their support through all this--and the work they've done so well--as well as to A, who was supportive of turning time off into remote work. In many ways, choosing to work remotely during a summer program this intense seemed like madness. On the other hand, as someone whose been around dot com frenzy a number of times, I knew this stint of time would not be a make or break for our success if we all agreed to it and handled it well.

Or, to be more blunt, what I really mean is:

• In some ways it was audacious to leave the team at this moment.
• But not going away would have meant canceling the whole trip.
•  I've made those kinds of personal sacrifices before and they helped scuttle an important relationship..and turned out not to be as make or break as I'd thought.
• So this time I wanted to balance the work commitment and the family commitment
• And I think I did.

So now I've had this great trip, I've observed a few things:

• I am both compulsively connected to the net and an obsessive worker
• I have to have vacations where I balance work and fun or there are no vacations (this may be sad but true right now)
• Technology makes it easy to be this way now, hallelujah!

Lots more posting to come as I get back to a decent net connection.

Take a look at my new essay, The End of Innocence and Making It Big: The NYTimes spins yet another lost girl tale of innocence, regret and discreetly hot sex, at BlogHer.
A snippet:
"Is there truly any less foolproof way to sell the Sunday issue that to get huge viral buzz from a damsel in distress story played out in that most modern of locales, the blogsphere?

Call it cynical on my part, but I can just see current NYTMag editor Adam Moss looking back over the upper-middle class waif stories (and media sensations) of Joyce Maynard and later Elizabeth Wurtzel and wondering if Emily Gould's sob story of error and reform would generate the same page views and buzz those two highly manufactured heroines achieved.

While much of the media criticism and the consumer comments have focused on Gould's narcissism and opportunistic use of her beauty, sexuality and position, and the aggressive marketing of her subsequent prettily teared up regret, no one has talked much about the cold-blooded cynicism of the Times in assigning and publishing what is just the latest incarnation in an ongoing series of sensational stories by attractive young women who struggle."

"The problem we would soon find out was that having hundreds of active users in Chicago didn't mean that you would have even two active users in Milwaukee, less than a hundred miles away, not to mention any in New York or San Francisco. The software and concept simply didn't scale beyond its physical borders."

--Meetro founder Paul Bragiel, writing about his crashed and burned start up and the lessons learned in a wise and useful post on TechCrunch

Authoritative newspaper article in the Boston Globe that says "...two new studies by economists and social scientists have reached a perhaps startling conclusion: An important part of the explanation for the gender gap, they are finding, are the preferences of women themselves. When it comes to certain math- and science-related jobs, substantial numbers of women - highly qualified for the work - stay out of those careers because they would simply rather do something else."

Additional data points on this one are that "A certain amount of gender gap might be a natural artifact of a free society, where men and women finally can forge their own vocational paths."
Furthermore, this article says "It may seem like a cliche - or rank sexism - to say women like to work with people, and men prefer to work with things."

Seems reasonable to me. After all,  if we stay with this argu=ment, then we also know that African Americans would prefer not to become CEOS or C-level executives; they stay out of those careers because they would simply prefer to do something else--NOT!!!!.

In other words, this is the most stupid, specious and circular arguement I have heard in a while, and I am embarassed a priestess of the journalism tribe would digest this booha whole and spit it back up for us,

Come on, woman, empirical reasoning does not rule!

Seems to me that when we make workplaces equal access and age/race/ and gender neutral, then we can ask these questions for real...otherwise, it's a question of  whether you're willing to be the exception--or not.

This is a picture of the most recent ycombinator Start Up School at Stanford. Take a good look. Seems like it was a great program.  Anyone able to tell me what is wrong with this picture? Post in comments, please.