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 can't think of a company that I am more impressed with than Google, but they are coming to grips with the fact that "startup energy" can't be faked. There's nothing quite like going from five people to fifty or a hundred."

_VC Fred Wilson, issuing an open recruitment call to Google employees who want "something more entreprenurial."

Susan sez: I like this because a) it's probably a true observation, b) it is so amusing to see someone use the start-up story on their blog as a way to woo staffers away (who want to go, natch), c) I feel a small bubble of jealousy for the now well-fund companies Fred is doing this for--we're way more early stage and I don't have substantial real money yet to woo away Googlers, so I am both admiring and a little envious.

(And having said that, if you are kick ass FE and want to work with a very cool start up this summer, I am the woman to contact..we are early stage enough you can have a BIG impact.)

"I can't think of a company that I am more impressed with than Google, but they are coming to grips with the fact that "startup energy" can't be faked. There's nothing quite like going from five people to fifty or a hundred."

--VC Fred Wilson, issuing an open recruitment call to Google employees who want "something more entreprenurial."

Susan sez: I like this because a) it's probably a true observation, b) it is so amusing to see someone use the start-up story on their blog as a way to woo staffers away (who want to go, natch), c) I feel a small bubble of jealousy for the now well-fund companies Fred is doing this for--we're way more early stage and I don't have substantial real money yet to woo away Googlers, so I am both admiring and a little envious.

(And having said that, if you are kick ass FE and want to work with a very cool start up this summer, I am the woman to contact..we are early stage enough you can have a BIG impact.)

According to the Daily Mail, a Facebook flashmob stunt went awry when hundreds of very pleased with themselves people had a tremendous entertaining waterfight in the middle of Leeds, a UK city. Only thing was, they apparently trashed a prize-winning garden during the rout. Oops!

"I know you don't believe me, just like you don't believe Mom when she tells you that you are beautiful. But I'll say it anyway: One day you will lead a very fancy life. Yes! A girl like you whose parents work multiple jobs and barely make ends meet can grow up to live in a beautiful corner apartment in Manhattan overlooking the water, have weekend houses in the Hamptons and Miami, attend fashion shows in Europe and be photographed for magazines."

--Former Seventeen Magazine editor Atoosa Rubenstein, writing in a new book of letters from women to their younger selves, but demonstrating a degree of non-relevancy to most women I know--of all ages--that just seems amazingly clueless.  I mean, come on. At least aspire to fame on YouTube or something.

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.