"will be headed to Boulder Colorado this summer save 2 weeks when I'll be back in NC for the beach and my wedding... I'm thinking this will be a pretty sweet summer if Tara and I can get into the long distance groove again. 3 months isn't bad right? Right? Right. :-)"

--Foodzie co-founder and fellow TechStars participant Nik Bauman, writing on his tumblr blog.

Susan sez: Puts my own 3 months away from the Bay area and my sweetie, family and friends into perspective, dunnit?

"The Tech Industry is what happens when really smart people get paid to have so much fun that they lose touch with reality."

-- Sarah Dopp, blogger, tweeting away.

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.

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.

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'm moderating a panel at BlogHer. in July on Who We Are: "Coming Out" via Blog
Here's the descriptor:

"No, this doesn't only apply to the most common meaning of "coming out", but rather to taking the brave step to reveal and address something highly personal to your blog community. The risks are real, but what about the rewards? Susan Mernit will moderate a discussion with some very brave bloggers. Stephanie Quilao blogs about health and a positive body image. Making the decision to blog a bulimia relapse risked losing a core audience who counted on her to be a voice of body image reason. How did they react? JenB has been up front about both mental and physical health issues on her blog. Does she feel supported...or judged? Finally, Sarah Dopp did launch a new project about being gender queer. At first she used a pseudonym, although she shared the site with people she knew. Eventually she came out and associated her real name with the site. Was there fallout? Or none at all. Find out how coming out via blog turned out for these women, and share your own story."

This is a chance to share stories about using blogs both to discover who you are and to share who you are with others--both through the blog and via the blog (as in real world sharing/owning/transparency).

BlogHer is one of my favorites conferences and I hope to see you there.It's July 19-21st, pretty much, in San Francisco.

PS, If female (and male)  CEOS of start-ups and founders of early stage companies would like to do a BOF at BlogHer--let me know; I would be up for that in a major way!

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?