In Oakland, we have an angry community member who is telling his peer group that Oakland Local is going to "gentrify the web"--i.e take traffic away from his site and the other grassroots sites that have existed for the past 4 years.  This person is an angry cyber-bully who talks about conspiracy theories, and Big Brother, but the question he raised--could you gentrify the local web?--was interesting enough that I went home and did a little research and want to share what I found.

Basically, gentrification means that local people who live in a area and have roots there are pushed out as outsiders come in and improve the buildings and raise the cost--and value--of housing. This is a classic pattern of displacement that happens all too often in cities, often with the new people as white gentrifiers and the displaced people as people of color. In Oakland, where neighborhood have been disrupted due to development, gentrification is a big issue--as it is in many cities.

So can this happen on the web? Understanding whether the local web could gentrify--or, to be specific with these accusations--was the existence of Oakland Local actually taking audience and attention away from pre-existing local sites, particularly those few run by people of color--seemed a worth exercise.

In Oakland, where Oakland Local launched in October 2009 and had an immediate, popular impact (we have over 3,000 Facebook fans), there were a large number of web sites and blogs already in existence--over, 1500, to be precise (see the Blog directory we built for more details),  Oakland Local's M.O. is to be a portal, or community hub, where we feature and send traffic back to content and community partners, as well as feature original writing and multimedia.

To test whether Oakland Local--and other new media sites in Oakland--were indeed gentrifying, or taking traffic away from older local sites, we did a little experiment with metrics--follow along and see what the results were.

First, we identified a set of local sites to test with:

• Block Report Radio--the web site of the person who was so angrily calling OL out
• The Black Hour at Laney College, a student web site
• Oakland Rising, web site for an East Oakland project to register voters, particularly in the Latino community

Next we set up a research methodology--look at the free, public Alexa data on each site and see how the traffic was being reported as increasing or decreasing over the past 3 months. Then, check Google search, using custom date ranges and the URL of each site, and see if the number of referring links--a way to measure influence--had increase or decreased over the past 11 months. To do that, we established two sets of date ranges--one from June 2009-October 2009, before Oakland Local launched, and the other from November 2009-May 2010, when Oakland Local was active.  We did not factor for issues of quality, frequency of updating, relevancy or any other issues that actually bring users to a web site--we just went for the basic comparison.

When we ran the data on these sites what did we find?

In every case, the discernable traffic for these sites--and the number of links they receive in Google--has gone up, typically by 30-60%.  These number show that The Block Report, rather than losing traffic since Oakland Local launched, has gained traffic, and that these other sites in Oakland have gained traffic as well.
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In other words, this suggests the local web is NOT like a city block, or a local neighborhood. The concept of displacement--of a web user abandoning one web site in favor of another--is not supported by this data. Instead, it suggests what common sense dictated all along--web sites compete for audience based on the quality and relevancy of what they offer, and most people spend their day visiting several--certainly, in Oakland, they have many to choose from.

Block Report Radio

Alexa.com statistics  for Block Report Radio report that the site grew 90% in traffic over the past 3 months, and 300% in the past month.

The Google links to the site between June and October 2009 were 155; the links between November 2009  and May 2010 were 252.

The Black Hour

We then looked at this college-run site, which offers terrific coverage for Black students at Laney College, one of the Peralta Community Colleges in Oakland, Their coverage is also of keen interest to the broader community in Oakland. (Note: The Black Hour has been an active partner with Oakland Local, and we have published and co-published a lot of work with its editor.)
Alexa data on The Black Hour showed that the site had taken a 40% dip in the past  month, but that the site has grown 20% overall in the past 3 months.

Google links show that from June-2009-Oct 1, 2009, the site had 4 links; from  Nov-May 1, 2010, there were 10 links

Oakland Rising

Oakland Rising is a slightly different kind of site than the previous two, because it belongs to a non-profit project, but since it is both local and community-action focused, it seemed like a good choice to research (note: they are also an OL partner)

According to Alexa, Oakland Rising took a dip in the past month of  50%, but in the past 3 month, their traffic rose 150%.

From October 2009-May 2010, OR received 13 Google links, from June to September, they received 14, so that's pretty much a wash..

Other data

Although it is outside of Oakland, and has a very different focus than Oakland Local, we also looked at stats for the SF Bayview, a historically Black web site in San Francisco, since our accuser said we were harming them.  Was that true?

According to Alexa, traffic for SF Bayview was down 20% in the past month, but up 30% over the past 3 months. Google links for SF Bayview were 607 for June-October 2009,  and for November 2009-May 2010, 11,600 (!!!) ) (Clearly, I am not the only person who thinks this site is providing great news and value).

Oakland Local's data
It doesn't seem right to go through this exercise without also sharing Oakland Local's stats, which I ran as a comparison (and to understand whether our critic might also be motivated by jealousy). Here's that data:

Alexa says that our traffic has gone up 40% in the past month, 22% overall,
Google links: Oakland Local was not alive before October 19, 2009, so we don't have site results to report. From October 2009-May 2010, we have 14,500 references in Google.

It's 6:22 am, and in a few minutes I am going to move into gear and start the day of travel leading to 2 weeks in Michigan, in s house on a lake that A's family built 90 years ago. This is my third visit, and it's amazing how this house and this town have become a home place for me; a place I think about when I am not there, and look forward to coming back to.

As a native New Yorker moved to the Bay area, I have no Michigan roots of my own, but I love it there...and look forward, every year, to learning more about the area.

This summer, I have big plans:

• swim, hike, bike, row, walk as much as possible
• read, nap, relax as much as possible
• write the product specs for Oakland Local and the related tools we want to build and get them back out the the team and contracted to build ASAP
• finish a tiny bit of client work I still need to complete
• write poetry
• read books
• blog and surf as much as I want to
• appreciate A, my wonderful partner
• miss my dog (but sleep later)
• I will be online, but further off the grid....can't wait,

This 52 hour stint in Atlanta, teaching social media and technology skills at a workshop for ethnic media leaders (mostly newspaper owners/publishers/top editors) has been transformative. What a great group!

The Knight Digital Media Center and the New American Media group convened this group of about 30 ethnic media executives--some from large and multi-publication companies, other small hyper-local news organizations-for a weekend of teaching around moving to digital. 
Arturo Duran, Michelle McClellan, Craig Matsuda, Dana Chinn and myself were the faculty; themes included the social media ecosystem, making money in the digital realm; managing change in your newsroom and organization, setting priorities for what to do online, and measurement and metrics (always critical).

As someone re-engaging with news folks  first via The Knight News Challenge and now both through teaching and workshops and starting Oakland Local, a hyperlocal news  community hub for Oakland, working with this group was fascinating. 

For one thing, many participants are small-business owners, for another, many have invested little to nothing in the web (at least 2 post PDFs of their print editions, no more). Additionally, while monetizing their efforts are critical (no surprise), jiust about everyone was eager to find the right strategies for their products--and so passionate about their media AND their communities. So, we had the feeling of really progress--I am sitting here listening to the teams present what they will do when they get home--what projects will they do to move their businesses online in a more meaningful way.

Some plans so far as these groups present plans based on what they learned:

• Add blogging and partner with a social media portal to serve the Korean community in their area
  
• Redesign their web site (ethnic site with only PDFs, very static) to reach Pinoys more effectively
  
• Add an online photo contest and build a presence on Facebook and Flickr to promote and engage community around a historic African-American hyperlocal news organization
  
• Start a social media presence to engage the community and grow audience/page views: YouTube Channel, Facebok and MySpace pages, Twitter stream--and build a feedback loop to be leaders in the Hispanic community in their state
  
• Training all staffers at Hispanic news site to do blogging and social media within their workflow and incentivizing them
• A community engagement project for a hyperlocal African-American community newspaper site  that will add an online community of citizen journalism through their web site (this is SO exciting). Planning to use NIng or KickApps.
  
• A Native American newspaper, hyperlocal, that will start creating original content online AND adding social networking on FB and Twitter.
• The midwestern African immigrant  focused-site is going to use mobile to target a broader base of African ethnic communities, and to recruit citizen journalists who will write for them.
• The hyperlocal Middle Eastern newspaper, with very little web presence, is jumping in to become THE online multimedia destination for Arab Americans in the US, with RS feeds, ads, and so on(moving from paper focus to the web!)
• The local historically Black paper that is going to do a jobs-focused site with user generated content and social media.
  

Susan sez: In such a brief time, I have come to feel so attached so some of these projects.These teams have the passion and the committment I so admire; by taking on web projects they're jumping into a new learning process that is going to change their businesses--and their lives. (yes, I am an idealist).

Deanna Zandt and I did a workshop at WAM! on using twitter and we shared a lot of tips that I realized were worth capturing both for this blog and as a handout for people who'd like one. So, here's a recount of what we covered, tools we talked about and links to note.

Twitter newbie set up tips
Why are you using twitter? And for what purpose? If you're tweeting to share knowledge, build community or have a virtual water cooler, set up an account for yourself. Use your real name, or a virtual name, whatever works.

Tips on setting up your profile
On your profile, make sure you add a web link. People are going to go there and check you out. I've seen people point to a LinkedIn profile or a Facebook page in lieu of anything else, but, clearly, pointing to a blog, a tumblr, or a web site is better--after all, the idea is to provide more data about yourself for people who might want to follow your twitter stream.

Also make good use of those 140 characters you get to put in your bio.  Because twitter is searchable, people will look for specific terms that match their interests. My current twitter bio says:" blogger, urban homesteader aspirant, product developer, consultant & geek."  
Deanna Zandt's bio says: "Je suis techgrrl extraordinaire, occasionally silly & surly, etc. I love pirates. And lamp."

Point here is to remember that people are going to search on terms that interest them on twitter search (search.twitter.com) and phrases in your bio are going to pop up. So add phrases to your bio that reflect your interests--and feel free to change them as often as you want.

Adding a picture
You MUST add a picture to your twitter profile. No picture=Dork=Not real--and not in a good way. Find a picture. And add it. Pronto.

Setting up a Twitter account for your organization or project
You can have multiple twitter accounts, for yourself, for different personas, or different projects. Each one can have a unique user name and/or a unique (or the same password). It's better to have a unique user name for an organization or project than to use your personal twitter account; that way your own digital identity stands independently--and persistently--from your current work and focus.

Protected and open updates
Everything you post to your twitter stream is public and index able unless you lock your tweets and make them private. This means that someone who is not following you (i.e. importing your tweets into the twitter stream of their twitter account for a specific user name where they appear as you post them) can still see your tweets by searching search.twitter.com on your user name, or typing your username into the twitter.com URL (ex:  twitter.com/susanmernit). In other words, twitter is not private unless you lock your updates--On the other hand, it's very hard to participate in the conversation if you lock your tweets.

Following people-and being followed back
The way you build community on twitter is to follow people and have them follow you, then have a conversation via the tool. Here are some ways to find people to follow:

The Find people tab
The Find People tab on twitter allows you to search for people you know, and to import your email contacts from many web based services and  see who you know and then follow them. However, you don't need to follow everyone you have ever exchanged email with; be more selective.

Searching on an interest or keyword
Another way to find people to follow is to search on keywords that interest you. Whether you are searching for "board member" or "reproductive justice" or "social media" or "micro-donations" you will get results, tweet by tweet. Check out the links to those posters; you will find people who share your interests and concerns; follow the ones that interest you.

Some, but not all, will then follow you back.
Search Google for the name of someone you're interested in and see if they have a twitter account.

If you search for "Susan Mernit" + twitter, my twitter account comes up. You can click to that link on twitter, get my user name, and follow me. Delightfully, this system works as well for people who have accounts using other names (like randomdeanna) as for "real" names. (Try searching for Deanna Zandt + twitter and see what comes up, just for proof it works.)

Click on a name in a tweet or retreet
Serendipity and exploration are tools to use. As you see references to other twitters in your stream that seem relevant, check them out. There is no stigma to following someone you do not know, quite the contrary.

Getting started and jumping in
Deanna has a great post about getting going with twitter right here.
Some of the highlights of her post about what to say (and do read the whole thing):

Here are some methodologies you can try out:

• Pure professional. You're an expert in your field and you want to share this with the world. Pick a couple of "beats" and focus your twittering on those beats. Find other folks tweeting about these topics and have conversations with them.
• Pure personal. Your cat is hilarious, you're thinking about moving to Wisconsin, you're on your way to Miami for a much needed vacation. You get the idea here, but do try to keep your audience in mind as you post some of your life's minutiae. I'm guilty of posting weird stuff, for sure.
• The blended model. This is the way to go, and what ultimately makes Twitter so interesting, in my opinion. If I wanted to know people's political analysis only, I'd go read their blogs. There's a humanizing effect of reading about a distant colleague's child's first words, or seeing that people you think are on top of the world have bad days, too. It creates empathy and insight. When I tweeted that I'd had a really rough, emotional weekend once, I was surprised to see which followers spoke up to say, "Hey, we're with you." And it helped further complete a picture of me for them, as well.

Also remember that Twitter is a conversation. One of the joys most everyone gets out of it is talking to one another. Reply often (remember your vocab? the @ symbol is your friend!) to your followers and people you follow. Use Twitter as a two way street, with many, many lanes going both directions.

The toolz
What tools do we like and use? In addition to Twitter (at twitter.com), which of course is your starting place, there are lots of other tools to enhance or modify your twitter experience. Some of the ones we currently favor include the following:

• Socialtoo:  Sign up for a free account that will report on twitter follow and unfollow stats via email updates, also use to create automatic follow-backs if you like.
• Twitpic: Great too to take photos with your cell phone camera or camera and then post to twitter, viewable web site.
• Qwitter: track who unfollows you and which tweet it happened after..
• Twitterfall: Twitterfall gives you a way to follow tweets on a specific topic in a constantly refreshed, almost real time basis. This is a great tool for tracking breaking new stories or conference updates. You can select both a term or a hashtag and a location and sort geographically as well.
• Tweetdeck: This downloadable client allows you to create and view multiple twitter streams at one time, by sorting them into groups. Great for high octane twitter scanning, overwhelming for many folks.
• Backtweets: Search for web links at twitter 
• WeFollow: twitter directory created by Digg founder Kevin Rose. Add yourself and your #hashtags to a category.

Download this post as a white paper right here:
Twitter tools that work for me--and tips for beginners.pdf

(Note: This post is based on a workshop on twitter presented at Women! Action! Media!, Boston 2009)

Back in 2003 when I started blogging, I took pride in posting the Sunday night meals I made for my family and friends. I shared them to make the point that although I was a tech blogger, I had another life, filled with dailiness, that I valued. (And I liked to cook for people I care for.)  I think I met Lisa Williams and Julie Leung because they picked up this meme and shared their own meals.

Fast foward 2009. Lisa is visiting for the weekend and my friend Amy is leaving after a long visit. Of course I'm cooking a meal for these two special friends--and some other people I care for.  Here's the menu:

• Caesar Salad
• Roasted dover sole with lemon and parsley
• Quiona
• Sauteed spinach with garlic
• Lemon Zucchini Marmalade loaf

And yeah, it's all home made, including the salad dressing and the marmalade in the cake.

Amy, it has been GREAT having you as a house mate! We'll see you on the flip-flop, friend.

When I started blogging back in 2003, blogging was an exotic activity practiced by a few.  There was this sense that being able to serve as a curator and link to others was extraordinary, and that those bloggers who had a coherent point of view were very special.

Fast forward to 2009, where everyone and their neighbor have a blog of some sort, over 4 million people use twitter, and we rely on crowd-sourcing to help us discover interested and relevant information.

Not only is there lots more noise, there are lots more interesting bloggers with something valuable to share. Instead of having three or fifteen blogs I might read about organic gardening or Web 2.0 or parenting, there are 3,500 or some equally stunning amount.

At the same time that the number of blogs has exploded, some bloggers have grown into mini-moguls.  Josh Marshall, Markos, Perez Hilton, Dooce, Maggie Mason, Mike Arrington come to mind, along with many others, as bloggers who've grabbed--and kept--a lion's share of the attention in their category, garnering enough traffic to expand their blogs into blog networks of one sort or another.  Not only is it hard for a new blogger to come along and break into those ranks (Pioneer Woman is the recent superstar that comes to mind), it's hard to even get close to them.

Knowing these home truths, I made the decision back in September/October to try to start blogging here more regularly, and to do what I could to build my traffic--damaged by a domain change and feed switch from susanmernit.blogspot.com to susanmernit.com), along with some spotty and less than inspired posting (or lack of)--back up.

Five months into the endeavor, let me tell you--it is damn hard.  Yeah, the traffic has gone up, but it's rough.

While I would not trade away the pleasure of sharing my views with people I care about, or exchanging ideas with others in the blogosphere--many of whom I don't personally know--I don't feel like I have actually succeeded in creating a blog people read and return to on an ongoing basis.  While I've written posts that have gotten significant attention and traffic, being a regular read of destination for a larger number of people just doesn't seem to be happening in the way I'd hoped.

Over the past few weeks, I've given some thought to why that might be, and I am pondering what changed I'd want to make to bring the traffic up (as well as making the decision to change nothing and continue just as I am)
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Factor 1: Tech blogging has become a breaking news experience for the most part
This isn't a new meme, but over the past four years, tech blogs have become ever more the trade journals of the industry, competing to break stories about new products, business deals and technologies.  As someone more interested in writing about the back story, user experience and tech in society, this is not a category I want to enter
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Factor 2: Lots of other tech blogs focus on round ups and how tos as ways to build their SEO traffic and deliver service value
Mashable is the epitome of the tech blog where one recurring feature is to cover the reader with data on a topic, and to list dozens of resources. ReadWrite Web does this as well. The 50 things about X is not my thing, but I do recognize that doing more lists, round-ups and service stories would be a way to increase traffic to this blog.

Factor 3: This blog lacks community
For whatever reason, mostly laziness and lack of time/making it a priority, I haven't worked hard to create community on this blog. Readers do comment, but I do a poor job of engaging with them. By not working hard on community, I've bypassed one of the main reasons users engage with a blog--because it's a flash point to have conversations with others that have value.  If I want to grow traffic here, building more community seems critical.
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Factor 4: Is the voice right?
There's no question that the distance between who I am and the way I write is very short; this voice is authentic and all that.  However, I'm not someone who uses her blog to share lots of personal stories, aspirations, debates and struggles.

As impassioned as I am about women and tech, feminism, creating positive social change and so on, I don't write about these things in a very personal diary-like way on this blog.  Should I? Am I missing a chance to engage more people by not writing about myself more specifically? Or is that just off topic from what most people find interesting? I have no idea.

Factor 5: You tell me--what would you like to see more of here that would make the blog more interesting to you on a daily basis?
 
Where should I be putting more effort that would improve the value?  I promise to listen to all suggestions and try those that make sense to me--and let you know what I think about all of them.

I've been a part of three principal communities in my life so far: the poetry world, the online news/media world, and the tech/social media world.  In each case I can point to a phase where I read and studied and met people and planned and experimented and got completely absorbed, and then my life started to shift. 

There was that moment I got out of college and started working for a poetry non-profit and teaching Poetry in the Schools, then the one where I went from a print journalist at Scholastic to creating one of the first education online communities and one of the first consumer web sites, then the move to Advance and New Jersey Online and then to Netscape and into the product development/tech world.

I feel like am heading to a new place again, but this time the obsessions are making our cities sustainable, food justice, urban homesteading, permaculture and a host of related things, including supporting access to Web 2.0 tools and making sure we have free media and multiple viewpoints online.

What I am doing about this interest right now is reading, thinking, learning, and, slowly, talking to people. Soon, I will also be taking action, as I'm going to do the following:

• Create a composting system in my backyard and build a worm bin to do vermiculture
• Plan a food-focused container garden
• Sheet mulch and remediation plant the dirt beds I do have
• Plant that garden, tend it, and have food to eat/share/put by
• Trade for eggs; try making my own bread, pickles, jam
• Follow more of the eating principles in Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon and Real Food by Nina Planck; i.e., less industrial protein and more pastured, free-range, grass-fed, all organic eggs, (raw) milk, dairy, no or little soy
• Create a space to grow food in front of my house and see what happens when I plant it
• Work with the Public Media Collaborative and interested people to teach every mission-driven organization in these categories of interest (and others) how to use social media tools to promote their events, campaigns, and programs.

The outcomes I want to have are to be less reliant on the current infrastructure and to get to know my neighbors and make deeper ties with people living around me.
 
So, I am starting a new blog to chronicle this journey.  Oakland Homesteaders starts as a place for me to map my experiences as I move from a newbie to, hopefully, a practitioner.

I may not post here more than once a week, and I have no idea how these plans will turn out, but I'd like to document my learning, my successes and my failures right here.

PS I am open to this being a group blog, both to share knowledge and to create community. If you are in Oakland or the East Bay and interested in posting on a somewhat regular basis on topics of urban homesteading, sustainability, alternative currencies, traditional foods, foraging, food justice, peak oil and so on, let me know.

Yep, home for 4 days, the back to Miami for a Knight meeting, Future of Web Apps (psyched about attending that!) and We Media, an annual conference about convergence that seems to have amazing programing this year (and alot more diversity than ever before).

Rebecca Weeks Watson from Real Girls Media and Divine Caroline and I are doing a session on social media at WeMedia, specifically what makes for effective use of social media to attract people to programs, organizations, brands and products. (There's also a white paper I've written that will be released there, with resources, best practices and a brief.)

Whew. Oh yeah, if you are going to FOWA or are local (or not) and would like a $150 discount code for We Media, I haz codes.

When I have a staff job, I feel much more mono-directional. When I was at Yahoo! running product, edit, program etc teams for Yahoo! Personals, I maintained my blog and made time for my personal life but 98% of my spare cycles went into thinking about things related to work at Yahoo, my side little Brickhouse project and YP.

For the first 10 months post Yahoo, my focus was running the amazing Knight News Challenge with the great Knight team and the super Heidi MIller, blogging, and getting my start up off the group. Lisa Williams, my People's Software co-founder describes the summer at TechStars as as intense as sticking your head in a washing machine, over and over, and that's not a bad description of the sheer brute force we felt we needed in trying to make the right things happen.

But by late September, even as we went into a beta, I decided to put the company on ice; the direction we'd gone in didn't engage me enough to spend two years living it full time, and there was no way to take money if I felt like that.  Lisa was great, we kept talking back and forth, and it was a mutual decision to take that step back.

So, what am I doing now?

Consulting & Advising
Well, for one thing, I am putting the word out that I am looking for consulting work, projects and writing gigs.

•  I think I'm going to be doing some business owner/product development lead work with an engineering team around a consumer-focused/nonprofit site, and I hope to also help a small but unique media property and research project take their products onto the web in a way that ultimately makes them money.
• I'm also taking the lessons learned from the Knight News Challenge's use of social media to get the work out, engage people and build community and both craft similar strategies for some non-profits, and train others in how to use these tools in relation to one another.
• Finally, it also looks like I am going to be doing some blogging on a new and developing passion of mine for oermaculture/urban homesteading and sustainability; it would be fun to supplement that with some tech coverage/column somewhere.
• And of course there is the amazing community of people crawling out of the wreckage of old-style online news--and the super talented younger people trying to figure out the business models--as a media person/product developer/entrepreneur, this whole category gets me going.
• And a couple of start ups I am helping a little bit.

But I am looking for additional work, especially into the spring, so if you have leads or needs, and want to talk about opportunities and projects, swell.

Another startup
Part of what eased the pain of deciding not to go forward with People's Software was coming up with another idea that seems like an even better fit for my skills and passions. I've been working on this idea with a small team and hope to launch in March/April. My goal this time, though, is to boot strap it (see consulting, above); I am willing to trade speed for independence this time around.

Blogging & writing

• My identity as a writer somehow came back with a vengance when I more from Silicon Valley to the much more urban Oakland.I've been blogging more, writing for BlogHer, and will start doing occasional pieces for another blog (agreements almost done.)
• I'm also more interested i'm doing white papers and documenting what I know/have learned/observed
• And trying to figure out the best ways to write about my rampant interest in urban homesteading/permaculture/sustainability....where I have a lot to learn (which makes it fascinating)

Participating in community

• Equality Camp Oakland: who wants to help? After Equality Camp in January, I agreed to help put on one in the East Bay--it's just about time to have the first organizing meeting--if you are interested in helping to plan, let me know. Thinking February planning meeting, April event.
• Public Media Collaborative: A new group to bring together community organizers and activists, social media experts, videographers, journalists, technologists and others to talk about how technology can be used to create positive social change online and in the real world, and to create projects and opportunities to work together on local trainings and events. Next meeting, early March, East Bay this time.
  
• Gardening, worm bins, composting and so on: My new newsreader folder is all about worm bins, composting, grey water and so on (No, I am not getting chickens, though I would like to barter jam for eggs).
• Women in tech things: WAM, WWTTelesummit, Shes Geeky, mentoring...
• A spiritual community where I am giving some service
• Family & friends

What are you focusing on right now?

I'd love to see other people pick up this meme and share, since with full time jobs disappearing, so many of us are reformatting ourselves.


 

LIve now at BlogHer: "Thorina Rose's book about her divorce, The Heart Break Diet, is part of a rich and glorious tradition of late 20th century and early 21st century memoirs told as illustrated graphic novels.Very much in the spirit of Allison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Tragicomic Family Story, Danny Gregory's Everyday Matters, and Moira Kalman's Principles of Uncertainty, The Heart Break diet shows how Rose used her art and her creativity to survive a traumatic loss and come back stronger.

More here.

Have you seen the twits asking if you're going to Blissdom? Or whether you're saving it for BlogHer, instead?

 Curious as to what this Blissdom was, I poked around and discovered that Blissdom is a blogging conference for women, to be held this February for the second time in Nashville, Tennessee.

Looking at the web page, Blissdom takes more than a little inspiration from BlogHer's conference energy--only with two significant differences--Blissdom has a strong Christian faith-based subtheme--and has Walmart as a sponsor.

Sponsored by some Nashville bloggers (would they call themselves girls? I'm not sure), February's Blissdom '09 is a repeat of  October's Blissdom '08.  This conference started life as a plans for a local party after the BlogHer business tour stop in Nashville, but turned into a day-long event after BlogHer cut back the tour, eliminating the Nashville meet-up.

Now, Allison Worthington, aka Mrs. Fussypants, and her partner Barbara Jones, aka one2onenetwork are calling in the tribe to Nashville for a lingerie and Cosmo-tinged party that Carrie Bradshaw and her gang of pals would surely enjoy (if they were moms of 5 with their own businesses, a relationship with their lord Jesus Christ, and blogs and blog-based businesses of their own, that is.)

The conference pitch is to come to Nashville for fun and fellowship  and "learn from other women about building your blog, your brand, and your business while achieving bliss in those other areas that are so important too: being a mom, a wife, and being true to yourself."

So here's the thing:

• Would I, an irreverent New York Jew transplanted to the Bay area, feel comfortable at Blissdom?
  
• Could I too be a Belle of Blissdom?
  
• Or would my life as a Bella strike me from the lists?
  
• Would the fact I don't have small kids, or a husband annoyingly but charmingly underfoot a home, deter me from feeling welcomed at this conference? 
  

And how about that Jesus thing? If God's grace comes with a cross on it, would I feel welcomed?

While it's clear the conference wants to bring into people by the boatload who aspire to Allison Worthington's ability to balance  "her magazine, her mommy blog, her photo jewelry business, five young sons and a wonderful husband with lots of coffee and God's grace,"  it might also be true that this conference isn't interested in attracting people who doesn't fit that model, including childless and single people, LGBT ers and people of color who don't fit the demo.

On the other hand, this might be the just the women's blogging audience that  Walmart is looking for. Maybe Walmart has funded Momtourage (iVillage) and Blissdom( this event) because these are their people.

(Of course if that means the more  diverse group at BlogHer just isn't, it will make me want to scream loudly for at least an hour.)

Short version: Am I the only one who gets the vibe that Blissdom is ground zero for the post-sorority, married with children version of SATC with blogging?

Or am I just being Mrs. Crankpants this morning?

(Update: I'm not angry about this at all. I think it's fine for everyone to organize into whatever affinity groups ring true for them, and I respect all beliefs and religions, At the same time, this is the first women's blogging group I've run into where many of the organizers list both having kids, being a good wife, and their Christian faith as key to their lives--and while it makes perfectly good sense--it's also, uh, surprising, especially with Walmart forking out $$ so fast and all.)

Update 2: Mom 2.0 Summit, another niche conference in a rapidly crowding category.

So, the year our economy tanked is ending today and a new year, complete with a smarter president and a sobered American populace, is about to start. Not soon enough, folks.
 I'm all about looking ahead, but what would I call out as memorable happenings for 2008 from my little vantage point?

1. BlogHer went large
Not only did feel good and have good values women's network site BlogHer raise enough $$ in a B round to suggest a $38MM valuation might be possible, it got an investment(aka strategic partnership) from Web 1.0 women's network NCBi/iVillage, which must have made everyone on the team in general and former women.com exec editor and BlogHer co-founder Lisa Stone in particular feel like a baton had been passed. Even more, BlogHer birthed a book, became THE destination for Mommybloggers, and hired slews of people, proving the scrappy underdog was now the Man (okay, I mean, the Wo-man).

2. Sex sites flopped, but new ones showed up.
Losses: Famous divorced sex blogger Jefferson of One Life, Take Two, basically took his blog offline after some heavy-duty personal issues blew up .
 
Brilliant writer/sexworker/feminist troublemaker Melissa Grant Gira went from the joy of a highly visible job sexing the Silicon Valley economy at Valleywag to freelancer and start-up queen (boffery.com)
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Gains: Amelia McDonell-Parry and Catherine Strawn and a gang of others started the oh so appealing The Frisky, a sex & relationships site that not only features Susannah Breslin of The Reverse Cowgirl Fame, but actually has hawt and funny articles (often, both at once.)

Sarah Dopp came out from behind another name and owned up to building genderfork, a celebration of androgyny and rolling your own, and Sinclair Sexsmith, a hot boi blogger, returned the favor with Queer Eye Candy, for those of every sexual persuasion who like to look.

3. Tech incubators, bar camps, and start-up weekends became cool. As did giving the lucky start-ups large sums of cash to fund nice offices and new iPhones (but not Aeron chairs)
. Maybe it was the vantage point of a summer in Boulder at incubator ground zero (TechStars), and the fact that 60% of the folks laid off from Yahoo! with me started their own companies (or went to start-ups), but there were moments when getting funding seemed like the 00s answer to the depression's stay awake and dance contests, or more complicated versions of the 50s Queen for a Day (most for guys, and with spreadsheets, this time.)

4. Crowd-sourcing became the new quality, aka if it's high up on DIGG, it's gotta be good.
Even as Mike Arrington's TechCrunch gripped the Web 2.0 news space even more tightly than in 2007 (and with so many more sites, events, and writers), squirming digerati developed new interest in the wisdom of crowds, with Seesmic founder and LeWeb organizer Loic LeMeur proclaiming that the biggest need for twitter was to match a poster's identity and their authority so we could appraise their idea BEFORE we read it (he may live in Palo Alto, but that sounds so French!)

5. Giving is good, and social media helps you self-organize for change.
Pistachio and Beth Kanter used twitter, and facebook, to raise funds for good causes.  The Knight Foundation and The McArthur Foundation(Note: I have connections to Knight) employed transparent tools to help give $$ away. Of course, the ultimate was the Obama campaign, whose gift that keeps on giving was to never stop  selling, leading to amazing house parties AFTER the election.

6. Yahoo tanked--and we all watched--and commented, in real time.
Were you wondering if I'd get to this one? Who could omit mentioning the bipolar relationship between Yahoo, Microsoft and all the press people everyone kept leaking to as layoffs led to offers led to rejected led to layoffs, all accompanied by the steady downward creep of the stock price. Even better, Kara Swisher's commentary proved that bull(shit)-baiting was still a worthy sport.

7. The new tech kids kicked the old kids-and the old kids kicked back
This was the year some fresh new voices came into the Web 2.0 bell jar, in some cases fitting right in, in others, blowing it open.  Steve Hodson, Sarah Perez and Corvida all had smart things to say and parlayed their smarts into paying blogging gigs with bigger sites; Louis Gray emerged from the suburbs with a passion and verve that made others compare his blog to Robert Scoble's.  Mike Arrington picked up Steve Gillmor and made him an honest man (and IT blogger); Anne Zelenka moved on to teach math (sigh). New (to me) voices that made me keep reading included Oril Yakuel, Dave "digidave" Cohn, and my friend Patricia Handschiegel.

8. Macs Attacked.
Between February and September 2008, I bought 2 Apple computers and 3 iPods.  In 2007, I bought one meensy little shuffle. Multiply me by 44 million people and you can understand how Apple blew up into one of the consumer brand companies that no one could get enough of.

9. Lifestreaming became real.
First of all, the tools to put it all out there matured. Suddenly it became possible to put yourself out there on Facebook, friendfeed, seesmic, viddler, vimeo, 12 seconds, and www.ustream.tv and build a picture of your life that could turn you into a mega brand.  For some folks, this worked out really well (viz Chris Brogan, 26,639 twitter followers); for others, it led to (much) ridicule (viz Julia Allison, nonsociety).

10. A million flowers bloomed-social media, publishing, SaS tools transformed small businesses.
Blogging, lifestreaming, ecommerce and community are a trifecta plus one that is powering all sorts of successful, moderately successful and ultimately unsuccessful enterprises. From Mommybloggers selling ads, to crafters blogging about their etsy shops to would-be prophets of cool hawking the latest organic local jam to urban homesteaders selling worm-bin designs and red worms by the pound to their neighbors, there has been a rise in individual entrepreneurship the web continues to power.

What's ahead in 2009?  Lots more small businesses and entrepreneurs, increased emphasis on community and surprising new investments.

If I spent a week combing through the 1,000-odd lookback, look foward and round up lists, this might be more comprehensive--but you wouldn't be reading it on New Year's Day. So, fast, cheap, and good, here's a few lists that are on my must-read.

Rex Sorgatz: 30 most notable blogs of 2008
Nothing like a fresh and authoritative point of view to help enliven the blogroll!

TechMeme, Megan McCarthy: Top Ten Tech Stories of 2008
Don't love the list items (because I am not a fan of how TechMeme turned into CNET as the breaking news home for consumer electronics product stories, ugh), but love that Miz Megan is there to write the list(and more lists to come.)

Orli Yakuel:The Web in 2008
Israeli blogger Orli has her own take on things, one that always enhances my perspective--and this video piece is no exception.

Louis Gray,10 Things I Wish I Would Do Better On the Web Come 2009
A new king of I-centered blogging has great notes to share.

Everyday Journalism: Resolutions for journalism students: become invaluable
Isn't it true that all of us need to become invaluable and network like crazy in 2009?
Kudos to recent grad Suzannah Yada  for articulating that. (Via Ryan Sholin)

So I headed to NYC for meetings (trashed by the storm) and a family visit(that worked) and then came to Ohio to hang with the BF's family and dear friends. It's been an interesting week, calm and freezing, with enough online access to keep me from going nuts (and to remind me what a workaholic I am).

Here's some of what I learned and reflected on this week:
1) Winter is worse in NYC, especially Manhattan, than other places.  The extreme snow I plodded through most of the week was easy to handle when I wasn't navigating Manhattan streets, subways and public transport. Not really going anywhere made the snow a nice scenic benefit; even when I did travel, using a car made it easier.  Lesson 1: If I ever consider moving back east, locate work and home really close together so travelling is lessened--that's where the curses are, not the snow itself.

2) Social media--say what?  My NYC family has graduated to Linked-In, but for those over 15, Facebook is uncharted territory and twitter is who knows what. friend feed? nuthin'.  Here is in the Midwest, among people who don't associate computers with either their personal identity or a means of being cool, everyone knows what Facebook is (and most use it), but LinkedIn seems kinda new-fangled, and twitter is a ghost. Lesson: For many people, computers are still something you use to get work done more efficiently.

3) Despite #2, social media provides insight and knowledge into people that can float all boats.  My old friend Phil Boiarski and his wife Kay and I met up and we had a great time and lots to talk about! Why? We follow one another on twitter and via blogs, flickr, friendfeed, etc. Man, did that narrow the gap! Lesson: Having rapport counts for a lot, but social media can feed it.

4) E-commerce is essential for anyone not living near a big city.  We're spending the last couple of days with some friends in a college town hours from both Columbus and Cleveland--and the amount of mail order goods that flows through here is impressive. Not that there isn't a good market, and a Whole Foods 90 minutes away, but the more specific alternative for lots of things is ordering online. Books, organic ingredients, special break flours, you name it...the postman delivers.

5) There's no place like home.  Getting away is swell, but I can't wait to get back to California. Not only do I have tons of work to do, but I just want to dig in in my own space, And reconnect with the people I haven't seen since I was out here. And....

Six Apart announced Motion, a new tool for MT Pro that the company says supports Pownce-like microblogging, friendfeed style activityustreams and open id sign in for commentators. Engineer/product guy David Recordon says this is an open web app and a way to maintain real community.(And of course the whole presentation of the new product is elegant and clear; Anil is both through and eloquent.)

But here's my question: Were the Pownce team moonlighting on this app before their acquisition? And was their acquisition a means to accelerate delivery?  It's a well-known but little discussed way of life in the Bay area for talented founders to moonlight when they get short of cash and can't go back to the Board for more; was this was Leah Culver  and Mike Malone were up to keep Pownce, uh, going?

Side note: Whomever is making Leah keep a blog should stop, this vox thing is frighteningly inane. Kittens & turtles? Scary. On the other hand, Mike's blog hasn't been updated for two weeks (Guess: which is more authentic?)

2008 has had more change for me than any recent year since 2005.

 In the past year, I left a executive job at a large company, worked as an advisor running an amazing non-profit social venture competition, went to Israel on a blogging trip, started a company and went to Boulder, CO to do TechStars, a venture incubator, stalled that company and then started another company which we are working hard to launch in Q1 2009.

On a personal level, I moved around more than I have since my 20's--giving up the post-divorce apartment in Palo Alto for sublets in Boulder and Berkley---and, classically, used these transitions to re-think my life.

Most importantly, 2008 was the year I fell deeply in love, enough to want to live together, something I didn't expect would ever happen. Because of that love, I now live in a house in Oakland and it is great.  2008 is also the year I connected--in a more adult and playful way--with my son, who has always been amazing, but who is becoming one of my best friends as well as a great family member.

For me, the big lessons of this year were that meaningful work matters incredibly and that I want roots in a place, want to live sustainably and want to feel connected to creating positive social change. If that can include doing product development, helping others with new business opportunities and solving problems and doing a kick ass start-up, great!

This was also the year I reconnected with myself as not only a blogger, but as a writer--both a poet and an essayist/article writer--skills that were part of me for a long time, but have recently come back to the fore.

Like Blanche DuBois, we all depend on the kindness of strangers(and friends)--this was especially true in my case, this year. 

There are so many people who were so kind at different points during this year, I don't think I can call them all out, but I would like to single out some of the people, who for me, help make this year of transformation very special indeed.

The (former)  and present Yahoos!: Ryan Kuder, Barbara O'Conner, Gail Schumpert, Elizabeth Churchill, Salim Ismail, and others.

Boulderites: David Cohen, Andrew Hyde, Brad Feld, Ingrid Alongi and the most amazing Amy Gahran, along with techstars mentors Susan Kunz and Lisa Rutherford, and fellow teams at TechStars, with special call outs to Samantha, Brian & Emily. And my wonderful friend Jem. And Joe Juhasz & Tom Vilot & Dan P & Dr. Hellspawn. You all rock!

The Florida crew: Gary Kebbel & Alberto Ibarguen for giving me a chance to work with them. Jose Zamora, Kristen Taylor, Marc Fest, Jessica Goldfin, Robbie Adams, Jenne Hebert & Heidi Miller for working together on the Knight News Challenge.

The home team, East Bay & Valley divisions: Keith Teare, Mary Hodder (who went over and above in helping me out), Ed Falk, Jared Brandt, George Kelly, Patty Mitchell, David & Jennie Coleman, Robert and Maryam Scoble, Jory des Jardin, Lisa Stone, Elisa Camahort Page, Renee Blodgett, Craig Newmark, Sarah Lacy, Lori & Seth Neumann, Raines Cohen & Betsy Morris, Sylvia Paull, JD Lasica,and Carrie Sealine.

The SF team: Marnie Webb, David Cohn,Cathy Brooks, Sarah Dopp, Christine Herron.

Northland: Ponzi Pirillo, Roland & Barb Tanglao, Boris Mann.

My posse (East coast): Co-founders Lisa Williams & Nancy Soriano, problem-solvers Chad & Erin Sullivan Capellman, Deanna Zandt,  The amazing Viviane.

Thank you for being in my life, for what you give and teach me (and how you make me laugh, sometimes).


 

I've been an avid blogger for the past five years, but it's never been something I made money with directly. The blog was great to bring me into a larger community, help me get consulting gigs, and speak truth to power, in a small way, to my bosses at Yahoo!. But now that I am almost a year out in self-employment land, with one start-up sprint under my belt and a big push happening on the second incarnation, I'm well aware that I've got to think about what I do to cover my expenses starting in March (when a current project winds down).

That train of thought led to me wanting to understand whether my blog, which I've always written for fun, could actually make me any money. It also led me to think about how un-oriented toward increasing my traffic, growing followers or building a brand I've been in the past few years.  Sure, I'm out there,  but I don't try to build traffic the way some folks do so well--and, on reflection, I felt that made me a little too, uh, old school?

So, what did I do?
A)    Reviewed colleagues in my niche: Went back over some newer bloggers I liked and reviewed how they positioned themselves: louis gray & corvida, in particular.

Also took a more critical look at techcrunch, readwriteweb, and gigaom. Informative, but didn't see a lot I would change on my blog. Just motivated me to post more often.

B)    Revisited the twitterverse. I also took a long, hard look at how I used twitter--and how other people--with far larger followings--used it.

 Bingo! Light bulb went off in head!

After reviewing the twitter style of folks like chris brogan(21,000 + followers), Scott Beale (21,000 following) and Pistachio (11,000+), the realization suddenly hit--these folks are doing great micro-blogging, delivering ideas and links in their tweets (Uh, duh, what was it about twitter I was somehow missing?)

I then decided where to put my chips: twitter--and increased, more topical blogging.

So, first I started consciously shifting my twitter style and topics; as a long time blogger,I didn't find that too difficult.
Then I started posting blog entries(once again), 3-4X a day.
I pushed myself to do that last post at night about something relevant, and to add my two cents if I had relevant thoughts or a back story.
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In that spirit, I wrote a post that commented on the pending Yahoo layoffs; part of that post was then picked up as John Paczkowski's Quote of the Day, which got my post out there.

At the same time, Fast Company put an article that quoted me as a Web 2.0 expert on their home page; I added my twitter links and a welcome to my site when that went live. And that put my blog out there, along with my lifestream feeds.

Results? On Nov 24, I had 949 twitter followers; today, Dec 8 , I have 1,025--the biggest jump in my history.
 
How does this fit with following social capital?

Creating information with value leads to people following you, and/or clicking on links, which in turn increases followers, unique visitors and page views. Which, for some people, leads to enough ad revenue to pay for a couple of lattes every week (right now, that would be me) and a sense that it is possible to learn something new, every day.

I am going to keep playing with making the blog and my twitter stream as useful as possible to people who read them, will continue sharing the backstory on these experiments as well.

1 million plus layoffs happened in the US in 2008. There were 181,671 corporate layoffs announced in November, and there will be at least 20,000+ in media and technology in December. In other words, if you're not the person contemplating filing for unemployment benefits, how it sucks to look for a job right now, and will I end up on the bread line?, you're living with, related to, or close to someone in this situation.

There is nothing like a holiday where covering costs in the year ahead is an open question to kill off holiday cheer. Being one of the rats on the sinking ship may be an evil joke when you work at Yahoo, but it's terrifying when it's your own little ship that may be sinking.

According to Chicago outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, November 2008 was the worst month for layoffs since January 2002, when large employers cut nearly 250,000 jobs as the nation tried to shake off the prior-year recession and the Sept. 11 attacks. For all we know, December may surpass November in job loss, and for those without steady gigs, the sheer magnitude of the numbers seems daunting.

Welcome to the patchwork economy of 2009. Given the severe nature of this recession and the sheer redundancy of so many laid-off product managers, writers, editors, marketing folks, sales people, administrative coordinators and so on, it looks like we're headed into a time when far too many of us are going to be doing a little of this and a little of that to get by.

Blogger, writer, editor, barista, cleaning lady?

So many of my friends are reeling, well aware that the bottom in their industries--and in the economy as a whole--just hasn't been hit. I'm not going to be surprised, after the holidays, when I hear about friends doing small projects together, or taking service-y part-time jobs (if there are any to be had) or, like in the last recession, packing up and heading for somewhere cheaper, or with more family to lean on.

On one hand, I find this situation incredibly depressing--we're plummeting from over-expanded go-go years into enforced austerity with almost no transitions. On the other hand, I wonder what new things will come out of it---will Americans reinvent their priorities now that we are out of cash(and credit)?

Will neighbors use social media tools like twitter to create planned--or on the fly--dinner clubs? Or swap and share tools, maybe creating a community list, rather than buying unto themselves? Will we dial Christmas down to a low murmur where we can actually consider what we are truly thankful for--rather than focus on what someone else could purchase, but we couldn't?

The good news about a patchwork economy is that is has the potential to bring people closer together, out of their President-Bush-sized palatial homes in the burbs and their apartments in the cities, to consider how they can help each other get through the downturn. The good news is that the patchwork economy can take some of the air out of America's adrenalin-driven, reality-TV show hyper-consumerism, where the important what you drive, how you look and what you buy are the values imparted.

The bad news though, is that the patch-work economy is hard. Hard-headed, hard-nosed, fragmentary, scarce. Patchwork means patching or piercing together, often the scraps and the bits left over. And as anyone who's every sewn any stray bit of doll clothes for a child quickly learns, it's tedious work.

In the patchwork economy, we'll be trading off time-that precious commodity we used to have too little of--for dollars, or for services that will keep us from having to spend the now scarcer dollars we do have. Perhaps the patchwork economy will be the impetus for more of us to grow food--crops and urban chickens and herbs--in our backyards--I know I am thinking about it (though I will probably skip the chickens).

Perhaps more people will be moved to reduce their impact on the environment as much as they can by buying recycled items, bicycling and walking, taking public transport and moving away from those insidiously evil (and enduring) plastic bags.

It would be optimistic to imagine that adversity is going to bring everyone together; my fear is that the marginal will become even more marginalized, and as the numbers of homeless and dispossessed persons rise, so do the numbers of those we see as "other."

For myself, in the midst of launching an exciting new startup and at the relative beginning of a new relationship, there is the challenge of understanding how, over the next 12 months, I am going to cover my expenses. A year ago, I might have said "Find a new job." Six months ago I would have said "Raise some angel money." But today, I'm telling myself to tighten my belt, conserve costs, and look for consulting gigs and project work, joining the patchwork economy where it lives.

(Cross posted to Huffington Post)

If you worked for a big company you hopefully have a severance package; if you worked for a start-up, or a small company, you hopefully had some stock worth something.  Either way, if you're unemployed and looking for a job, or going out on your own, managing your spending is going to matter. 

For one thing, those corporate expense accounts and tech support calls are gone; for another, you don't know when the money will start to flow again, so you want to manage what you have.  Assuming you are not anticipating dire straits, but want to be conscious as you cut back, here are some suggestions on ways to manage spending.

1. Downscale where you eat lunch out
Forget expensive sushi and Foreign Cinema unless a friend with a job is paying. Have more of your lunch dates at the cheap and cheerful ethnic restaurants and casual cafes most cities have. If you're someplace with nice weather and a local park (like South Park in SF), suggest grabbing a sandwich and a drink and finding a park bench (I had a great meeting like that last month). No one cares about fancy lunches anyway, so this is an easy place to manage cost with little impact.

2. Let go of impulse buys--online and in real time.
For my friend A, it's the books at Amazon.com; they're irresistible. For another friend, it's Target--she just keeps finding things she has to have.  And for a third friend, it's the bargain stores like Marshall's and Ross-she's saving money, so why not pick up some stuff?  Cute, but here's the deal--in a recession, smart people cut  spending.  And smart people without regular paychecks slow down on buying things. So, put your spending on a diet. 

Some strategies for spending less on nice to have items include: only pay in cash (and put that specific bit of money in your pocket for use in that store, no other money to be pulled out), defer a purchase by using the "if I really need this, I can come back later" trick to slow your impulse spending down (and then don't go back and buy it later), and playing the game of seeing how little you can buy, not how much
.
3. Make a budget (and manage your spend)
In other words, understand what your fixed costs are (housing, transportation, insurance, entertainment, food & sundried, etc.) and what's discretionary.  I cut a chunk of cost from my life when I downgraded my cable (I'd pretty much stopped watching) and downgraded my landline phone. I cut another chunk when I stopped buying take-out sushi for dinner every time I walked through a decent market and started going home and making fish or chicken, instead.  In this same vein, review your gym, any personal training programs, therapists, etc and decide it it's worth it to maintain, or if you want to stop going, switch to another provider, or cut back,.  Ditto for expensive haircuts and coloring; do you want to continue to maintain your light blonde, or is the moment to go darker with blonde streaks? And so on
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4. Make your own ketchup. And brew better coffee.
Okay, it's not making your own ketchup exactly(that would probably cost more), but it's re-evaluating what you pay for convenience now that you have more time. Spending time in a café when you're working from home is one of these expenses that quickly becomes essential, but the $4.00 lattes and the $18.00 quick meals on the way home add up and don't contribute much to your bottom line or your well-being.  If you give up some of the things you got in the habit of spending money on when you were employed, you'll save money and get to use if for something more central.

5. Redefine fun
One of my friends has a monthly open house where she hosts a bevy of people for drinks and dinner. It's one of the great good times of the planet, IMHO.  You could do the same, but a lower-cost way to approximate this good time is a cooking club or a monthly potluck where you and your friends get together with good drink, good food and good company at someone's house, not a restaurant.

In a similar note, go out for drinks instead of for dinner, or go have dinner at home and then go see a movie. Spend more time on the weekends hiking and biking, and less time shopping(why good look at stuff you are NOT going to buy?). If you have a garden, work in it; and if you don't and you can, go get some plastic tubs and plant a bunch of herbs to enliven that home cooking(or Trader Joes prefab) you are going to eat more of.

6. Chill down on the travel, weekends away, presents, and big ticket items
Steady jobs mean money for occasional weekends away, more trips to see friends and family, and less angst over a new dishwasher, refrigerator or car.  This may be stating the obvious, but deferring airplane tickets, spa junkets and car purchases is exactly what you want to be doing if you just got laid off and want to manage costs.

In this economy, no one is going to think less of you if you tell them you'll visit a few months from now, or that your concerns around money make that Napa weekend a bad idea. Similarly, you can dial down on the gift-giving and people will get it--we're in a recession, folks.

7. Make sure you like your sweater (aka, manage heating costs)
You want to conserve money at home, as well as out. That means understanding that keeping it warm and cozy inside this winter is going to cost a whole lot more--which you may not want to spend. So, getting acclimated to that warm sweater, that dog on the bed, that insulation around the windows makes good sense. And if your friend comes over and wants to turn the heat up, make her a cup of cocoa.

8. Swap, don't shop
One of the best shopping excursions I've made in recent years was to a friends' birthday party that included a clothing swap as part of the festivities. One woman and I basically swapped wardrobes, as I seized her (now too-small) more formal office clothes, and she grabbed my (now too-big) free agent, kinda hippie clothes.  Not only was trying clothes on and sharing fun, but I got some great items...and at a wonderful price called free.

9. Eat what's in your house--or cut down on the stockpiling
Maybe it's my Great Society 60's/70'ss upbringing, or maybe it's my shopping patterns, but my freezer is packed with food, and so is the cupboard. Last night, instead of going out, we had dinner made with things that actually were in the freezer, cupboard and the fridge. Novel concept, eh? If you're a food accumulator--just eat what you're captured and brought home--and slow down on the stocking up till you do.

10. Grow your own food, compost,  and be more sustainable
Okay, to be truthful, I don't think doing this will save anyone who throws some tomatoes and herbs into containers much money; you might spend more, But, you'll be eating healthy food you grew yourself, and recycling your food waste into compost for those plants(my friend in Denver has a organic and a non-organic compost pile; I wouldn't go that far).  Urban gardening is something we're all going to do more of in the years to come, consider getting started now.

11. Be a more conscious spender
Are you spending impulsively, or out of habit or emotion? Do you end up passing free time in stores, buying stuff? Becoming a conscious spender is the best way to manager your spending because it means you spend money when you meant to, on what you intended. And that's the best way to save of all.

12. Read How to Cook a Wolf.
The marvelous food writer MFK Fisher wrote a book during WW2 on how to feed yourself well during food rationing and through poor student days; it's still a great read...and as tough as things seems, they were worse back then.

Last May, I packed up in Palo Alto and took off for Boulder, CO. It was a great summer, and then I drove back to California. For the past couple of week's I have been staying with a friend in the North Bay, and now I am on an East Coast trip for the Knight News Challenge to NY and DC (and ONA).

Here's the drum roll--when I get back, I move into a friend's sublet in Berkeley for a couple months..and look for a more permanent place of my own. I've thought about moving to the East Bay since 2004, but circumstances (job at Yahoo!, divorce) made me want to hold off and stay in the Valley.  Now is a great time to move, and I am psyched to head to a part of the Bay area that, frankly, reminds me of Brooklyn, where I spent so many years back East.

I'm hungry to put down some roots, and while that won't happen for a few months, I'm excited about finding a place that can feel like my block, my home.

So my Peoples Software co-founder Lisa Williams drove back from Boulder to Boston. It took 4 days and it was l--o-o-o-n-n -n-gggg. Lisa's home now, tho, and she did a post about Family Dinner, a weekly supper she used to make back in the day (when I also posted my family dinners).
Couple of things:
a) Lisa, glad you made it home
b) Loved seeing Family dinner again
c) You cooked!! Back in Boulder, we rarely cooked after week 2, just like we rarely hiked, biked, or went to the movies after a while (start-up mania, folks).

I of course am crashing at my friend's house, and since she is a chef, I get to eat what she cooks, which tonight was leftover rare roastbeef with aoli mayo and watercress on pugliese bread (these leftovers are not hard to take.)

So, let's see. Woke up at 4:45 today, birds singing, dog snoring, temptation to head out into the cool Boulder dawn on  the walk path. Then I remembered all the things I was supposed to do tonight, and turned over and went back to bed.

6:30 awake. Reading email, drinking coffee. 7 am, finishing specs. 8-9 walk dog and hang out outside. 9-11, conference calls (very productive ones).  11:30, head down to TechStars, aka The Bunker.

1 PM Meeting with Mile Culver, Amazon Web Services preso. 4 PM call with prospective tech lead. 5PM Lost on UC campus, heading for Shelfari talk with Josh Hug.  Late. Call from prospective tech lead; uh, maybe not, not sure yet.

Okay. Back to the Bunker, 6:15 PM. Work some more.
9:30, head for home.
9:40, cleaning the kitchen and moving the owner's schmutz into a closet (yea!), smacking the moths in the cereal in the closet.

10 pm, Diana Krall, wine, blogging before the last cool walk in the night with the dog
.
Need to remember that if the moths are in the kitchen, I can smack them. If they are in my head, need to coax them out.

If Ayelet Noff were to be played by a Hollywood star in the movie version of the Israeli web scene, the actress would have to be either Scarlett Johansson or Uma Thurman.  Ayelet's blend of authentic charm, warmth, web savviness and marketing smarts is so high-wattage only an Oscar winner could do her justice.

A former New Yorker, Ayelet is one of those bi-cultural Israelis who grew up in the US and then moved back.  Fluent in English and seemingly effortlessly bi-cultural, Ayelet offers a much need broad perspective to the high-tech start-ups that seek her counsel--she offers advice on product development, marketing, partnerships and brand positioning; my sense is she often provides a valuable and more savvy focus to Israeli teams wanting to reach a global market.  In addition, Ayelet is a born connector; she truly knows everybody and relishes introducing people to one another; the dinners, meet-ups, coffees and conversations she helped created for the Travelling Geeks crowd on this last Israel trip were wonderful.
During The Marker's COM. Vention; Israel's equivalent of Web 2.0 Expo, I sat down with Ayelet and asked lots of questions. Here, some of the answers:

When did you start your blog, Blonde 2.0?  What made you dive in with it?
"My background is in marketing. I worked for TBWA Chiat/Day in New York for a while, then came home to Israel and worked at ICQ and with some start-ups. 18 months ago I started Blonde 2.0--there was a need for a marketing business that could explain Web  2.0 tools and help them use and integrate them in the Israeli market; the name was just a way to brand myself.

Are there many women who do what you do?
No, not really.  For one thing, in Israel, many people marry and have babies by the time they are 25 or 26, so not everyone wants to be as entrepreneurial as me. Also, not everyone has the perspective I have; I'm Israeli, but I've lived around the world and am able to see different cultural and international points of view, particularly the American market; that and my fluency in English set me somewhat apart.

How do you get business?
Well, I'm pretty visible, between my work and my blog/brand. Clients often come to me, either through word of mouth, or via my social networks.  Often, they're at an early stage where they need a web site and lots of positioning, or they're farther along and they need to really focus on the marketing.

What are the rules you try to run your business by?

• Always remember people who have helped you; be helpful in return. Build a good support network
• Do a good job -there is no replacement for that!
• Work with really smart people; use the best
• Don't use your personal social network to promote stuff; you'll burn people out.
• Never speak badly of anyone.
• Work with companies whose products you'd use yourself and that you believe it.
• Write about clients  in your blog, but discreetly--don't over promote

For me, meeting Ayelet was great because she's someone, perhaps like Deb Schultz in the Bay area, who can bridge Israeli tech culture and the US Web 2.0 scene. Smart and motivated, Ayelet is both a pivotal part of the Israeli scene and an interesting contributor.

Excerpt from blonde 2.0:
"...bloggers today have a dramatic effect on the outcome of startups. Bloggers are the opinion leaders of today. I would be more inclined to try a service or product if a specific blogger that I admire recommended it as opposed to a journalist. But we're not only talking quality. We're also talking quantity. 120,000 blogs are opened each day and startups can receive a great deal more coverage through blogs than through traditional media. In addition, there are niche bloggers that write about specific topics and turning to those bloggers will of course get you much more targeted exposure for your service/product."

Links:
Blonde 2.0 blog
FaceBook
twitter

On April 23, the MacArthur Foundation and Common Sense Media are hosting a free public forum at Stanford University on "how digital technologies and new media are changing the way that young people learn, play, socialize and participate in civic life."  Julia Stasch, the Vice President of the foundation, will talk about  MacArthur's $50 million digital media and learning initiative; danah boyd and Mimi Ito are among the funding recipients who will present research.

Teen Socialization Practices in Networked Publics
danah boyd, University of California Berkeley
Drawing from interviews of teens across the U.S., boyd will explain how social network sites such as MySpace and Facebook have become an integral part of how youth relate to one another and develop their social identities.

Understanding New Media in the Home
Heather Horst, University of California Berkeley
Looking across a range of case studies, Horst will examine how families of varying backgrounds negotiate the changes and challenges of incorporating new media into everyday family life.

Hip Hop Music and Meaning in the Digital Age
Dilan Mahendran, University of California Berkeley
Based on his study of youth hip hop production in the Bay Area, Mahendran will describe how young people learn, mobilize, and develop meaning through collaborative digital media production.

New Media from a Youth Perspective
Mimi Ito, University of Southern California and Principle Investigator of the Kids' Informal Learning with Digital Media project
Ito will conclude the research presentations with an overview of project cases studies, ending with a discussion of what parents, educators, and technology developers can learn from youth engagement with new media.

I am super excited about this...and have one extra ticket...email if you want to go--and if I know you, please.

I'm back home; it's a nice day in the Bay area, and my body thinks it's evening tho my brain says midday. This of course will lead to the inevitable crashing out that jet lag often delivers.
Meanwhile, fellow Merry Travelling Geeks Crankster JD Lasica has published the very cool survey of the even cooler tools that the Bay area blogging crew on the israeli-based travelling geeks bus (and it was a very intimate bus) would confess to using.

People, that means you are about to hear what useful toys and shiny web implements Robert Scoble, Sarah Lacy, Craig Newmark and the rest of us fire up every day. Here are some highlights from the list.

• All 8 use Firefox, Facebook and Twitter.
• 5 use Friedfeed daily, 6 use flickr daily, and half said they used Gmail daily.
• Blogging software has the greatest fragmentation: some folks use multiple platforms, principally Typepad(5), Moveable Type (3), Word press (1, with one planning to switch.)

Most obscure (and retro) tools? SSH (secure shell)  & Pine (email client). Who? Uh, Craig.

Talking with the spokesperson for Rambam, the big medical center for northern Israel; learning that there's a diversity here in staff--Druse, Moslem, Jewish, Christian--more pronounced than in some other areas; there are more Russians here than Arabs, the spokesperson says; you can see the northern border/frontier(Lebanon). The city is more secular than Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, there's lots of high tech and everyone goes to the beach (this is the hospital spokesman snapshot of the city.)

Like Palo Alto, the city has a high tech center, a big hospital and a technical university; there's a 2004 Nobel Prize winner in biochemistry--Faculty is also doing interesting work in regenerative medicine (like growing bones back...), as well as in treatment of stress and trauma (understandably, this is the border center...)

Listening to this preso, I understand how irrevocably I am a geek; prototyping medical instruments, treatments and protocols grabs my attention, even when the data is way outside my field; the whole process of exploration, analysis, testing, and development is always compeling.

We're also hearing their preso on "Medicine Under Attack" --there's a short film (and lots on the web)--The hospital was treating patients and under threat of missle attacks--this is a huge part of the historical memory of the place, and a history of which they are very proud in terms of the service they delivered.

(Susan sez: I'm a newbie visitor here, and yet I'm noticing that no one in the film is visibly Arab....am I being a total nickpicker to notice this? he staff is clear everyone participated in delivering care and was brave and comitted, serving the Gaza  and other areas as well as the city. Is it a valid observation? I have no idea--the dedication of the medical staff in the film, despite the terrible dangers, is amazing.)

(Added note: There's the wish to stay here and learn more, talk more, understand the moving stories, the great science, the lessons of war I know I don't understand at all, but there's no time for that today; this is a footnote in a lesson I have barely started to learn and may never full experience.)

And another note: This hospital keep giving service to the community and the soldiers 24/7 during the war--that is an amazing thing.)

1. TechCrunch: Mike Arrington going to sue Facebook over use of his image
2. jwz: 10th year anniversary--Mozilla first home now back online.
3. Problogger--Get paid per tweet
4. CNET: TechCrunch acquires TigerBeat, will rename it CrunchKids
5. GMail: Be on Time, Custom Time
6. Google & Virgin airways: Human settlement on Mars (Susan sez: Google is so big it now gets more than one April 1st joke, eh?)

What else has caught your fancy?

Yahoo's Shine, helmed by former print editor Brandon Holley, just launched this am, after weeks of beta testing. The goal here, if it isn't obvious, is to create the most compelling start page on the web for women, all ages;to that end it's a riotous tumult of soft lifestyle features with fashion, parenting, home, dating, relationships and just about any other *female* topic you'd see on a magazine news stand laid out prettily on the home page. In other words, there's no finance, instead it's Work + Money; there's no news, there's a cheat sheet on top news items.

It's going to be interesting to see how this site does. On one hand, it's nice to see the multi-year discussions of women and their value to Yahoo (4o million of their users are female)turn into something; on the other hand, I wonder how useful it is to create a site is that specifically is for women, rather than women friendly--and which such broad scale(pun intended).

You see, Shine feels so fluffy that for me, I can't see it becoming my daily start page--in truth, it's so niche, or so mega-aggregator niche--that it feels not that smart, or not smart enough for me, my friends, or any of the women I know to use as the destination site. I think The Huffington Post would be a great site for Yahoo's team to take lessons from--that site is clearly women friendly, carries great news of interest to women and yet isn't a pink ghetto for the home maker (which Shine kinda feels like on Day 1.)

More compellingly, Shine is encouraging female bloggers like Back in Skinny Jeans Stephanie Quilao, to contribute content; in return the site will send traffic back, a powerful reward from the Yahoo Network people powerhose(or is that firehose)? There's also going to be third party content--more girly, girly stuff, of course--from lots of magazine publishers, including Glamour, Epicurious.com, Style.com, InStyle, Cosmopolitan, Harper's Bazaar, Women's Health, and Good Housekeeping.

So the question is-who is going to use this thing? Or who will it take traffic away from (besides Yahoo's old school front page?) Will the women who use PopSugar come over here ? (Nah.)

The HuffPost ladies? (Nah). Blogher women? (Surely not.)

Conclusion: Yahoo needs to cannibalize its own traffic to retain audience it is losing. Will that strategy work to make Shine a success? Only if canned-magazine style content is what women actually want, vs. the true user generated content and authentic voices Shine's audience can find elsewhere on the web.

Susan sez: Get those advertisers in there quick, before the audience dwindles.

"Anyone who has been following my work for a while knows that I heart LiveJournal with a passion. I've been on LJ in one form or another since 1999/2000 and it's still the only community that I check in with daily for personal purposes. While I love LJ personally, I also deeply respect its history professionally. From its earliest years, LJ was home to many thriving subcultures: geeks, playa obsessed freaks, queers, goths, fans, camgirls, and even post-structural feminist cultural studies scholars. Because I've identified with or dated members of each of these subcultures, I've ended up back at LJ time and time again. Of course, LJ is much more than its subcultures. LJ is also home to teenagers, Russian activists, literary aficionados, knitters, and many many more. Like the community systems of the early web, LJ brings together communities around shared passions. Like contemporary social network sites, LJ serves as a hangout space for friends. Combined, LJ is one of the most powerful tools for people to gather, share, communicate, connect, and chill."

--danah boyd, speaking out on the news she's joined the new advisory board for LiveJournal

More at danah's new LJ blog, and at the LJ staff site.

Susan sez: I'm not an LJ blogger, but I have many friends there and a log in; there is amazing community.

I was laid off from Yahoo! 4 days ago. Since then, it feels like things have happened at warp speed: new phone, computer, home office set up, tons of transition planning, lots of thinking about not only what I have to accomplish right now, but what do I want to do next.

With the power of social media, so much of this process is happening transparently, and in what feels like almost real time. Social media tools make sharing information, connecting around situations, and communicating with large and diverse groups of people--both one to one and more broadly--happen amazingly fast.

Here are some of the observations of what's different about how we can use social media to communicate today.

1. Broadcast capabilities have multiplied and improved
2. Tribal affiliations mean people who have never met in person feel connected
3. Information transfers far more quickly and efficiently
4. Your personal brand is out there and quickly read

Here's the detailed view:

Broadcast capabilities have multiplied and improved.
Back in 2003, when I was laid off from AOL, I didn't yet have a blog. Most people didn't (I started one that March). Letting people know what had happened to me was a slow, laborious process based on sending lots of emails. The way I looked for work was to talk and email with people and to subscribe to lots of email lists like the KTlist and to check job post, job sites, etc (I ended up deciding to start my own consulting firm, which I did, successfully.)

Today, blogging, FB, twitter helped me notify people simultaneously that I had lost my job. The news rippled so quickly that far more people learned this fact far more quickly than in 2003, and with a lot less time spent on communicating it on my part.

Tribal affiliations mean people who have never met in person feel connected.
Mimi Ito started writing about Digital Nomads and high tech tribalism a few years ago, and her work becomes increasingly more relevant as social media moves these concepts to the center.
In other words, people who have never met share identity in community because of shared interests, values, friends or lifestyle. Sometimes, this is people wanting to friend someone they perceive as famous or prominent; other times it is friending a perceived(yet unknown) peer.

In the case of my news, tribal affiliations meant that people who I did not directly know, but who read my blog or followed my tstream had feelings--and responses--around the news. Similarly, my extended network for friends on FB responded quickly.

In 2003, these tools just didn't exist, showing that social networking supports affinity in a broader and yet more focused way than I'd thought.

Information transfers far more quickly and efficiently
Back in 2003, the press looked to companies for news.

This week, journalists watched the blogosphere, the twitter stream and even flickr for news related to the Yahoo! layoffs. They found lots of fodder, first from Ryan's posts, then mine, and later Chip & Randy's (among others). The interplay between press and bloggers--a new form of symbiosis-- intensified the ripple effect, so much so that this post is currently #4 under my name at Google search.

Your personal brand is out there and quickly read
There is no question that the reason my news had impact was because I am a blogger and active in the tech/media/geek communities, as well as someone who's been in the industry for 13+ years. My *presence* aka my personal brand was based on things I have done, said and written over time, many of which are available online, or have been chronicled as part of other records (talks, conference appearances and attendances, etc.).

In 2003, people had personal web sites, but there was no way to so quickly form the many-sided view of a person you can get fairly quickly today, if you have some context. What this means is not only can a broader mass of people feel like they *know* me (or anyone embedded in social media), but that employers and colleagues can form quick opinions as well.

Conclusion:
The tools are working. Hurricane Katrina, an Obama video, or some other piece of news can get quick play, but so can something as small as someone's job loss--and that is pretty amazing.

Yesterday, I lost my job--and, somewhat to my surprise, the whole blogosphere heard about it.

The Personals product team has been working on upgrading our Personals site and user experience for a while now, but this latest release transforms one of the most visited parts of the service--the Signed In Home page, the log in page for both searchers and posters.

The team's worked hard to re-think this page to offer more efficiency, speed, and value--the new design offers a hierarchy of critical activities (checking messages and who's viewed you, searching for matches, editing your profile) in a way that makes them more accessible and info rich right on this one page; there's also a new search feature we call the Carousel which allows a searcher to look at relevant search results right from the signed in home page, rather than having to go to search results.

We've just released, so we're still watching stats and user feedback, but it's looking good.
I'm also pleased about the development path the Front End engineers followed to build this--we have a new modular development framework that adds speed and flexibility to the work flow--and a much richer look and feel.

In NYC, and reflecting on what it feels like to be back here after almost 10 months away, longest time ever.

On one hand, the city feels amazingly familiar, as it always does; in fact, I am surprised at how comfortable I feel. On the other hand, I see how much more of a Californian I've become; the subway is far more *urban* in feeling, people on the street look different than they do on the West Coast. Instead of blue(sky) and green (trees) the predominant colors seem to be black(clothing) and grey (sidewalk, buildings, streets, sky).

All that side, it's great to be here, great to know I will be here for another week and exciting to experience New York through somewhat fresher eyes than in the past. I also have a great sense of how I've changed by seeing myself back here, the old homestead, and noticing how my own focus has shifted (more techie, more feminist, more relaxed).

And yes, the dogs really are smaller, so they can fit in all those compact apartments more easily.

1 am this morning and I was back online, checking techmeme and facebook and blogher and yahoo personals and all my email accounts.

7 am and I am writing my first blog post in 10 days.

This was the longest time I was truly off the net in years--I could check email on my treo, so I monitored my life from the cottage in the woods, but no surfing, no browsing, no posting, no reading big files, no attachments, etc.

What did I learn?
A) Going away and going truly off line in Michigan was more relaxing than hiking in Peru and checking internet cafes..it felt much farther from my usual life and concerns, even if it was geographically closer.

B) Part of me is and always will be a writer, no matter how much of a tech geek I am. I used the time I normally use for blogging to write poems and short essays and was totally absorbed.

c) When I'm not always surfing blogs, I read books more: two old sci-fi novels by Lois McMasters Bujold, the first volume of Dorothy Drunnett's Lymond Chronicles, a marvelous book of poems by Claudia Emerson called late wife, which won a Pulitzer Prize, and various magazines, poems by Neruda and so on.

d) It's hard to think about tech, social media and Silicon Valley when you're swimming, hunting for petosky stones, hiking, canoeing, rowing and eating black cherry ice cream in a little town in the Midwest.

e) It's energizing to think about tech, social media, and the Valley when you get home, refreshed, which is how I feel right about now.

"There's nothing new to that fact that people play a direct role in how we discover what may interest us on the Web. It goes back to Yahoo!'s earliest days. Back to links.net, back to the NCSA What's New page. It goes to the heart of what blogging is all about.

People have been way too hung up on Digg's voting algorithms and forget that what makes Digg, Digg is its community of participants. "

--Karl Martino, paradox 1X, writing about human editors, search, and the social web.

Elizabeth Edwards is one of the most authentic people I have ever met. The way she interacted with the audience at the keynote and her subsequent interactions and presence at the cocktail party and right down to how she spoke with people outside the event on her way out demonstrated a depth of sincerity, an authenticity and an ability to be present in her life that I just don't see to that degree in many people. Regardless of the political beliefs, it was VERY powerful and inspiring.

Susie Bright is also an amazing person I got to meet and interact with at BlogHer. The founder of Off Her Backs and an early feminist and subversive, Susie is a vibrant, interesting person who has much to teach and clearly enjoys learning from others. Susie, I hope we connect more back home in CA.

I was also really proud of my friends Lisa, Jory and Elisa. They've created Blogher as a platform that clearly is taking on a life of its own under their able stewardship. The fact that Jory's business skills can lead to so many sponsorships, Elisa's organizational skills can produce such a large conference (and make it all go so smoothly) and Lisa's presence and political chops can bring in an Elizabeth Edwards are all cool, but what gets me is how the vision and message (yes, this is a cause-related business) they support are something so many women are tapping into--I am watching with interest to see where this all goes.

BlogHer also had a diversity I don't usually see. Not only was it woman-focused, though with some very cool men attending, but there was a racial mix and an age mix that many conferences don't have--and this time, I think the very engaged Mommybloggers were balanced with lots of other types of bloggers--including, I was happy to see, a larger number of women over 55.

I met so many interesting people and have a huge number of follow-ups for next week--and feel refreshed and energized--just what I hope a conference would help me achieve.

(On another note, it is interesting to contrast this post with the ones about the techcrunch party-which seems like a must-attend for status event more than it was fun for everyone there. Don't know if that is true, but am getting that vibe.)

(And on yet another note, I hope Scott Beale's party was a blast. I *heart* Scott and would have loved to be there. The pictures here and here look great.)

Labels: blogher07

Okay, so for the digerati, Facebook, pownce, twitter and many more are the flavors of the moment. Fads, as Rubel says (and he's partially right.) .

But what does our interest in these particular services tell us about ourselves, right now?

Some thoughts:

1. We want to be local, not global. Small is beautiful, and a digital backfence like Facebook's status updates or twitter, has irresistible appeal.

2. Local is a state of mind. My new best friend, who I met in December, lives in New York; most of our friendship is bites and bytes, but she's my can I borrow a cup of sugar/do I look fat in the dress pal. (In other words, tech powers connections--powerfully.)

3. Reality TV is us. Who needs Survivor? The relationship status changes on FB have their own small drama--and are the equivalent of telling the town crier you're now married/separated or whatever.--And this is true for many social nets.

4. EM Foster wasn't the only one who yearned to "Only connect." Everyone with 530 friends on any social network is demonstrating both a yearning for community and their talent for getting a sash full of Boy Scout (or Girl Scout) merit badges.

5. It's all about the people, still, not about the brands. The fickleness and the endurance of switching costs suggest, that no matter what guys who like to gather for dinner chat and then name names and blog about it afterward say a universal ID isn't yet mandatory--too many people are still discovering the thrill of digital identity sharing via FB, twitter, flickr and so on.

6. People are learning their own power. PopSugar, FM, and other ad networks were first, but niche and community ad networks will abound--and the bloggers and creators will drive the terms once the first wave passes...communities (and content) that can't be commoditized have high value--and people are seeing that.

7. Forget Starbucks, the third place is digital. Got 5 minutes? Need a break? That place you like to go is probably right on your screen.

8. Passive versus active still matters--but you can drive behavior. Remember those rules about people who watched TV rather than posted in online forums? It's still that case that most people are reluctant to write, slow to put themselves out there, and cautious about privacy and sharing. BUT--smart networks like FB model behavior and get that lagging 80% to do more that they ever did before, raising the bar on all network/community activity.

9. Stories rule. Aren't celebrities royalty? And don't we all love their fairy tales? And aren't we all busy creating a few of our own? No, more than a few....with magic tools.

10. Technology teaches possibility. It's true that Facebook is a fad, as are the other hot sites of the moment--but it's also true that the big rush onto Facebook tells us more about what users want--and about how particular behaviors, once established, seek to find a home. Create that home, power that home, and babe, you win.

Bonus point: Having fun now? Wait till it all truly moves to your phone aka hand-held device.

Is it unusual to try to live blog the session before yours as a way to manage being a little nervous?

Monday am: There are over 300 people at the idate conference, and everyone is avidly taking notes as Mark Brooks ( Online Personals Watch) gives a state of the state of the online dating industry from his perspective.
Some up and comers aka growing businesses Mark notes from the stats:
° Zencon?s blackpeoplemeet.com

° Manhunt.net
° glesnet

Mark also recommends Quantcast for another stats view, along with Hitwise, Comscore, Alexa and Compete.com, a service that says they show registered user log ins as well as page view traffic (this interests me, because as we go more Web 2.0, with more AJAX and JSON pages, we'll be reloading less pages-and yet all our ComScore engagement metrics are going waaay up--another reason to look carefully at multiple measurement sets.)

Mark also takes a look at social network and online dating time spent metrics via Nielsen NetRatings and proclaims the winners:
° YouTube-30 min
° Beebo 1 hour and 3 min
° My Space -2 hours

(It occurs to me, as Mark talks, that Plenty of Fish is the golden child of his discussion, mentioned repeatedly, not only because it has tremendous growth metrics, but because Marcus' success is the Horatio Alger story of this vertical, the smaller guy making good in the big leagues.)

Mark's take on top news (online dating) stories for the year:
° Dr Phil joins with Match.com and drives credibility and success
° Putting real people on the home page (Match and Yahoo! Personals both do that)
° Y!P and Starbucks team-up--wonderful branding affinity
° NYTimes piece on social (read anonymous calling) phone numbers: vumber, jangl, talkplus and others
° The Helio/MySpace deal

MB Predictions for 2007:
° Online personals will subdivide into categories
° Social networks will niche out
° Social networks are taking traffic away from online dating sites ('the top of the sales funnel')
° Next generation services will crop up, like high-end matching making services (Love Access, Vintacom)
° Free eHarmony will emerge (he means an EH-like service)
° Mobile dating fueled by Nokia N95 and other integrated phone devices
° Facebook gets swacked by a new player
° Background checks will be added by other big dating services
° Voice 2.0 integrates
° Plenty of Fish gets bigger--top 5 (does that mean someone will buy it?)

MB Issues:
° How about that date bait? Mark has ideas about affiliates.
° Make it easier to cancel a subscription (good point)
° Scamming: Don?t kick'em out, kick'em to some annoying diversionary SWAT team (it's called payback)
° Consider support and extension services, like photo cropping

Cute cartoon: "Let?s go back to meeting online, you're much better looking there."

Welcome to the suburbs, where the digital home is getting real, like you didn't already know that. I'm in the 'burbs, day off, helping some family members settle into new digs and the amount of activity around wiring the house and getting all the tech online and working together is just a total trip.
Here's what is being installed:

• Home wireless network
• Cable modem/ethernet network
• DVR
• Cable television
• New computer set up and install (spiffy new Mac)
• Three new TVs with wiring in the walls
• 3 DVD players (techology stowed in cabinets)
• Security for the network

What did cherished family members' last place have? Nada.

This means that these folks will now regularly do the following activities:

• Manage photos from camera to desktop to ipod to web
• Download missed TV episodes and movies and watch on computer and on TV
• Manage music from computer to ipod
• Do video recording via the Mac

I predict that the new set up will also lead to blogging, vlogging, and lots of DVR...I'll report back in a few months on what all this spiffy new tech is making possible--but geeze, for my cherished family members, this is a freakin' revolution!

Rich Skrenta blog-tagged me, so here are five things you may not know about me:

1. I edited a small-press magazine for three years just at the end of college. Hand Book got all sorts of grants that allowed myself and my co-editor, Rochelle Ratner, to publish 3 issues before we realized that distributing the thing was going to swamp us. However, I developed a passion for 'zines that played right into the obsession with the Net I'd develop 12 years later.

2. Doing laundry is one of my small pleasures. The idea that in a couple of hours I can take a wrinkled, smelly heap of cloth and turn it into warm, neatly folded clothes and sheets thrills me every time. And no, don't ask me to do yours.

3. I have a 100-lb. American bulldog named Winston and a black cat named Panther. Winston follows me from room to room when he's not asleep. Until a few weeks ago--although he's lived with me for 10 years--Panther didn't really like me. Now he's following me from room to room as well.

4. I love trashy sci-fi, fantasy and horror movies. When it comes to flicks like Vlad the Impaler and An American Haunting, Netflix is my connection. I also love jazz, opera, fado and flamenco--and Tiimbaland ( Sexyback).

5. I started working when I was 17. My jobs included camp counselor, artist's model, babysitter, book binder, waitress, writing teacher, and library clerk. My favorite college job was writing teacher--I taught poetry and journalism to high school students at Buck's Rock Camp.

Bonus: Check out the Blog Tag Tree

I tag Maryamie, Elisa, Rebecca, Mark and Salim

Deep inside Silicon Valley, working at a high tech company, it's easy to think everyone is constantly online, reading blogs, podcasting, bookmarking and what have you. After 5 days in New York, with people who are as information hungry and of the moment as everyone I know back home, I've formed some observations on the educated general populace at large:

Everyone does online dating, and if they haven't they're thinking about it because it worked well for people they know. Over the holiday, at least 5 people either told me about their online dating experiences, asked me for tips on making online dating work better for them, and/or told me about how their good friend had met someone online and --surprise!--gotten married. Yep, it's here to stay.

Many people over 40 don't really pay attention to social networks, unless their kids have a MySpace page, they're in the music business or they're interested in (viral) marketing. The low resonance of social networks for the friends and family I interacted with other the holiday was fascinating. While in Silicon Valley my friends debate the relative value--and feature sets--of one SN compared to another--just about no one I encountered over my NYC holiday had much to say about connecting virtually, using online to help plan offline events, or even using LinkedIn for job hunting.

Everyone gets blogs--they are the new magazine article/press release and promotional footage, all rolled into one. Everyone I met knew all about blogging, read blogs, and had considered starting one(even if no one did.) One friend--who's the boss of a media company-- said "I am going to ask everyone at work who wants to have a blog--I'm already planning mine for Jan. 1."

YouTube is the new Candid Camera meet the digital public library for everyone under 18, and the buzz is loud enough that the grown-ups are listening. When I asked my nephews (8-13) where they went to find music videos, TV shows like South Park and movie clips, they all said YouTube. As I helped them search for legal clips to watch, they had no problem downloading files and clicking so the videos went full screen. We got together with a bunch of 9 year olds and they were all experienced watching video and film clips on their machines!

I pay alot more attention to bloggers' voices than do my friends and family in New York. I was going nuts for those few days I had trouble going online and it wasn't because I wanted to read my email, it's because I've grown addicted(this week proved that) to the conversations on the blogs. Techmeme, tailrank, digg and bloglines are my information crack and while bloggers' voices might be just alot of extra data to my NYTimes reading family and friends, you know what? I gotta have'em.

Busy human beings, are, by definition, fast followers. For many adults, the biggest problem they have is lack of time. This means that every new technology innovation, every new social media tool, is tried at the expense of something else. For many people this means experimentation has few rewards--even if they like the cool new tools--they probably won't have time to use them anyway. So why not wait until the value of the coolest, most useful new things is dramatically clear and let the rest dwindle away?

It's Turkey Day and I am in New York visiting family. It's cold and rainy outside, but warm and steamy in here, where there's a marathon cooking session underway--roasted brussel sprouts and chestnuts, free-range turkey, pumpkins/squash/pear pudding, cranberry biscuits--my sister doesn't hold back, and I am the kitchen assistant.
Back home in California, it's warm and sunny(I hear) and people I love are at their own holidays with friends and family, cooking/eating/talking and, hopefully, feeling the joy this season is supposed to bring.
For some of us, the happiness of the holiday always has a bit of sadness too--for people who are gone, relationships or friendships ended, dreams lost. And for everyone who's about to be dumped into the holiday shopping frenzy (that would be everyone not living off the grid), major issues about money spent, time off, and all sorts of truly silly stuff are no doubt about to set in.
I wish everyone this holiday season the joy of appreciating themselves, their friends and family, and the good fortune they have--I feel very grateful for my own life--the family, friends, and interesting ideas--and for the chance to be here in New York with family and friends whom I love.

Happy holiday, everyone!

My friend Lisa Williams is about to launch Placeblogger, an OPML-based aggregator that will be a directory of local blogs--blogs focused on a place, not neccessarily news blogs--around the country.
Now Steve Berlin Johnson, one of the more reflective writers I read, announces that's he's got a stealth local start-up called outside.in--a service that aggregates local news, blogs and other feeds into one handy-dandy destination page (a fulsome example is at 11217--Park Slope, Brooklyn, where Johnson lives)--Palo Alto seems a little, uh bare right now).
Like Backfence, the too-early Bayosphere, and dozens of local news-focused sites like BaristaNet (Montclair, NJ), outside.in will try to generate value for a local community and serve as the starting point and destination.

The difference between outside.in and some of these earlier sites, however, is that rather than serve as a place to create and post content (think stable of writers model) these new sites use feeds, tagging and GEO-URL to create a service that can aggregate and therefore serve as the epicenter of local user generated content--in other words, something more similar to what Topix has been tryng to do with its local local content (see Palo Alto in their planet here and Park Slope here).

Susan sez: It energizes me to see efforts to get local *right* come round and round again as the tools and users evolve. Back in the early mid to late 90s, we did New Jersey Online, a local site with news, forums, and personality, then truly local sites like BaristaNet popped up in the 00s and newspapers improved their skin in the game, and then we got into the citizen journalism thing big time and lots of efforts faltered a bit as others worked--and now here's the latest placeblogging incarnation starting to develop and it is going to be very interesting.

Susan sez 2: The ever-more techy site of me has to point out the intense value of companies like Yahoo supporting their efforts through a rich series of APIs. One obvious implication of these aggregator sites is that the do ride on tools--and APIs- developed by others, so the importance of haing local APIs and making them available to people working at this level is critical. (Imagine if say a big web FooBar business decided to have a rich API and offer it to placebloggers and the placebloggers all created local APIs driving back to that business and just think how much that business might gain in distribution and referral if all these emerging hyperlocal bloggers picked the feed up...and...you get the drill.)

And then of course there is the business woman part of me which is constantly interested in how to support local, targeted advertising--the sweet spot of all this growth.

So, the ever-shifting continuance of local and the rise of placeblogging are great--and may a thousand flowers--and many more placeblogs--flourish.

BONUS: Steve has some points about placeblogs worth repeating:
1. It's all about hyperlocal.
2. A post can be local, even if the blogger isn't (and therefore worth aggregating)
3. Neighborhoods are more important that maps.
4. Geo-tags and location-aware tags are good, but it's also important to have other filters-- date, for example.
5. Local news often has a long-shelf life.

Ad Age: ReadyMade magazine/web site/crafting empire is bought by Meredith Publishing, publisher of Better Homes & Gardens. (Susan sez: Good move--now Meredith can target crafty 20-somethings--and their grandmothers.)

Online News Association conference: Staci Kramer reports on how talking heads slog it out. Mike Arrington was there and feels he was attacked.(Note to Mike: I was there last year and not only does the talk seem much the same, it seems not so different than the talk five years ago. And yes, you sound like the sacrifice...)

CityVoter's got an online platform for local business display and classified advertising that turns into a nifty directory filled with user generated ratings--and it just got $1MM from Tudor Ventures (via Paid Content.)

TVGuide.com relaunches, all new, shiny and loaded with social media. tv.com,watch out.
Howard Rheingold announces the DIY Media Weblog, a blog about participatory media sponsored by Annenberg.
Backfence.com rolls out a local site in Sunnyvale, CA. rolling in behind Palo Alto and San Mateo,
Danah Boyd: Facebook's "Privacy Trainwreck": Exposure, Invasion, and Drama

And how about that lonelygirl15?

So I've been in the Hamptons with the family for 5 days now, going to the beach, walking, eating, talking, seeing friends, etc.
I was a tad ambivalent about this trip before I came out, because last year I had three instances of tourist rage aka bad visitor attitude in four days--a woman threatened me in the checkout line in Old Navy, for example--but this time, everything has been amazingly mellow and calm.

The basic routine is get up, walk, have breakfast, read the paper, check email, go to the beach or some other activity, eat a late lunch, more beach, shower, casual dinner, walk or hang out a bit before going up to the room, read blogs, check email, go to sleep.

In other words, mellow and relaxing.
Still have a couple days to go, but definitely starting to think about heading back home--and anticipating getting back to work.

Jay Rosen's got a new idea--an open source pool of bloggers/journalists who get modest funding to do investigative reporting stories that can be filed and distributed around the net. Called NewAssignment.Net, Rosen's virtual bureau takes the concepts of the wire service of the past 100+ years (started back in the day of the Pony Express) and gives it a citizen journalism twist (or would that be shove?)
Jay writes: "The site uses open source methods to develop good assignments and help bring them to completion; it employs professional journalists to carry the project home and set high standards so the work holds up. There are accountability and reputation systems built in that should make the system reliable. The betting is that (some) people will donate to works they can see are going to be great because the open source methods allow for that glimpse ahead."
In other words, this is funding for both independent journalism and the long tail of Evelyn Rodriquez, Chris Albritton, and others.
Jay adds:
"Each assignment would have a price tag, which is simply a realistic budget?- the amount that has to be raised to get the right people and do a very good job. NewAssignment.Net is a non-profit because it?s just about the journalism. Delivering audiences to advertisers isn?t the mission. The budget reflects the actual cost of doing the work, plus overhead for sustaining the site, plus whatever tax we decide to impose to carry New Assignment ahead."

Extra bits: Craig Newmark's donating $$, Dan Gillmor is advising, Jeff Jarvis's start up will provide tools--and who knows who else will get involved?

Susan says: This is potentially a very good idea, especially if Jay & co is shrewd enough (and I think he is) to make sure it's clear this project is for everyone--from 17 year olds urban kids to rural moms who want to research the power plant, to activists looking to do reporting abroad.

Came back from 4 1/2 days in Seattle last night--what a great time! Gnomedex felt totally worthwhile--had very interesting conversations with a bunch of folks I know, including Hslley Suitt, Julie Leung, Scott Rafer and John Furrier, had more conversations with folks I am getting to know, like Shannon Clark and Chris Heur, and met some interesting people I hadn't known--Phillip Kaplan, Ethan Kaplan, Elizabeth Lewin and Darren Barefoot definitely being on that list (along with many others).
After the conference and the (very convival) Scoble BBQ (thanks. guys!), my old friends picked me up and carried me off. After a great dinner at the Hilltop AleHouse in Queen Anne , they proceeded to take me on a tour of local parks where one could view the sunset--from Kerry Park (virtual tour here) to more rustic--and charming-- Carkeek Park. Then it was back to their house, where the newly installed deck looked out over the bay, the trees were old and tall, and the sun was (still bright). Is there anything as sweet as reconnecting with old friends and seeing where life has taken then when you looked sideways?

Conclusion: I had a great weekend and Seattle is amazing--this has to become the next place I explore in detail--the mix of city on the edge of the woods and mountains and access to lots of water seems irrestible.

And one more thing--This is a good moment to say how great it is--and how much I learn--from being a part of the social media/emerging technology/ user-focused kieretsu. So many good people, so much passion and ideas.

L isa Williams has been here for the weekend, and our friendship is a great example of how technology tools (from the telephone to blogging) just help reinforce--and support-- a friendship with someone who lives 3,000 miles away.

Lisa is a rockstar, and it's been great to spend more time with her (once more).At dinner last night, Lisa & I got to hang with a super-smart crew of disruptive folks (you know who you are), tell way back stories, and think about how to change the world with cool tools while eating pretty decent Chinese food--then go home and talk for hours.After too many years of crossing the country for one dotbomb or another, my sense of place--and affinity with some alternative Bay area creative geekery--is coming on strong, and it feels damn good.

Update: Blogger chewed up this post, ugh!

Fred Stutzman: 5 social networking sites NOT to miss-- Cyworld, Bebo, Hi5. Faceparty, XuQa.
Valleywag: Netscape relaunches yet again; this time it's a Diggler.

SiliconBeat: Photo site Riya's vision grows to encompass visual search
Backfence: Palo Alto local site launches.

"...I?m very proud that the new Yahoo! home page uses the open-source Yahoo! User Interface Library extensively. "
-- Nate Koechley, Yahoo Interface User Blog

Susan sez: Open Source..way to go!

So, Ms. Trying to Be Balanced here went walking in the Astradero Open Space Preserve yesterday morning, a good 5 miles or so on a couple of trail loops. The wildflowers were lovely, the hills were green and the high grass on the last 2 mile loop was pretty--and loaded with ticks.

There is no feeling in the world like getting off the trail and back to the car and having your companion urgently say "There are six ticks on the back of your shirt!" Forget high-tech when you're trying to tug your t-shirt over your head on the roadside without flipping the little buggers into your skin--anyone who's had to deal with a tick bite or an embedded tick KNOWS this is not what you want to let happen so it was home for a shower, tick inspection, and isolating and washing my walking clothes. Later that night, I got a call from my walking partner, who had four to six ticks who'd dug right in and had to be picked off with tweezers (ugh).

Lesson of the story: Walking, good. High grasses, very, very bad. Sitting at computer safer, but much less fun.

• Google Reader module plugs into Google personalized home page--including video!
• NYTimes: AOL does more with voice over IP and the magical AIM platform.
• John Battelle's FederatedMedia's ad tool kit is live-John is one of the only people talking about creating a new ad network for bloggers back in Winter 2005 that has actually launched a real company--way cool.
• PR Newswire: Abazab's widget puts video and more on any customizable page--via mobile phone, PC or PDA. Beta account, please?
• FresnoFamous spawns Modesto Famous--shoutout Jarah (why Modesto?)
• DoneWaiting launches WeColumbus.com--way to go Rob Duffy!
• Yahoo Tech users microformats..is that cool or what? (thx, Alex and JZ)

Executive Director of Harvard's B erkman Center for Internet and Society John Palfrey has a post today about whether the way his independent venture, Ten Top Sources, sources and then publishes content from blogger's RSS feeds is a) legal and b) appropriate.

Palfrey describes the selection process: " As the editor compiles the site, the editor sends out an e-mail to the person who appears to be responsible for the site, or, sometimes, posts a comment to say that the site has been chosen. The site renders a list of those sites offering the feeds as direct links to the page. The site also subscribes to those feeds and renders them all together on a single page. It is this latter activity that I take to be the concern."

He goes on to say " The issue raised here is whether it is a copyright violation to render these syndicated feeds in this way. As a matter of copyright law, I contend that it is not. The strong form of the pro-copyright argument runs like this: the creator of the RSS feed retains, automatically, all copyrights in the content in the feed and retains all rights in its republication, use as a derivative work, and so forth."

And "If you want people to run your feed in private aggregators, but not in public aggregators that are for-profit, to re-offer your content just as you've offered it, and to attribute authorship to you, why not add to your feed a BY-NC-SA license? "

Om Malik's said TTS is almost splog, republishing content w/o permission, and Mike Rundle's written that the site steals content--and traffic--viz "Top Ten Sources takes all your information from your RSS feed, republishes it on their site, and then uses it to build traffic."

What's interesting here, what I want to talk about, is how this desire to bundle and aggregate feeds into a new product is not unique to TTS. The blogosphere is full of companies that want to find ways to package feeds and either distribute them more efficiently to publishers, or companies that want to package feeds and distribute them to consumers. Either way, the revenue potential of attaching targeted ads to readers of themed content is another way to make the CPMs jump, we all get that.

But it seems to be what Palfrey has not yet addressed--which makes sense considering this company is so new--is that many of the players entering into the bundled space recognize they have to give more back to their creative sources than just a little traffic or a thank you.

Without some share in the revenue, it's not right to make $$ from anything more than a headline and a digest, unless the blogger has specifically given permission for a great depth to be published off site.

This is no different, in truth, than the third-party distribution deals we used to do with the portals when I worked in magazineland--we'd give AOL, or whomever, a limited set of digital assets to run on their site in exchange for links back; if they wanted more content to run on their site, the deal changed.

Why would committed bloggers want anything different?

IMHO, Palfrey and company will come to recognize that truth and find ways to accommodate it as they work to maintain the good will of the community; other entrepreneurs are exploring ways to back in rewards, incentives and revenue based on performance of the blogs they gain permission to bundle and redistribute.

A fascinating excerpt from the leaked memos--this from Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie:
"Today there are three key tenets that are driving fundamental shifts in the landscape all of which are related in some way to services. It's key to embrace these tenets within the context of our products and services.

The power of the advertising-supported economic model. Online advertising has emerged as a significant new means by which to directly and indirectly fund the creation and delivery of software and services. In some cases, it may be possible for one to obtain more revenue through the advertising model than through a traditional licensing model. Only in its earliest stages, no one yet knows the limits of what categories of hardware, software and services, in what markets, will ultimately be funded through this model. And no one yet knows how much of the world's online advertising revenues should or will flow to large software and service providers, medium sized or tail providers, or even users themselves.

The effectiveness of a new delivery and adoption model.

A grassroots technology adoption pattern has emerged on the internet largely in parallel to the classic methods of selling software to the enterprise. Products are now discovered through a combination of blogs, search keyword-based advertising, online product marketing and word-of-mouth. It's now expected that anything discovered can be sampled and experienced through self-service exploration and download. This is true not just for consumer products: even enterprise products now more often than not enter an organization through the internet-based research and trial of a business unit that understands a product's value.

Limited trial use, ad-monetized or free reduced-function use, subscription-based use, on-line activation, digital license management, automatic update, and other such concepts are now entering the vocabulary of any developer building products that wish to successfully utilize the web as a channel. Products must now embrace a 'discover, learn, try, buy, recommend' cycle, sometimes with one of those phases being free, another ad-supported, and yet another being subscription-based. Grassroots adoption requires an end-to-end perspective related to product design. Products must be easily understood by the user upon trial, and useful out-of-the-box with little or no configuration or administrative intervention.

But enabling grassroots adoption is not just a product design issue. Today's web is fundamentally a self-service environment, and it is critical to design websites and product 'landing pages' with sophisticated closed-loop measurement and feedback systems. Even startups use such techniques in conjunction with pay-per-click advertisements. This ensures that the most effective website designs will be selected to attract discovery of products and services, help in research and learning, facilitate download, trial and purchase, and to enable individuals, self-help and making recommendations to others. Such systems can recognize and take advantage of opportunities to up-sell and cross-sell products to individuals, workgroups and businesses, and also act as a lead generation front-end for our sales force and for our partners.

The demand for compelling, integrated user experiences that 'just work'..

The PC has morphed into new form factors and new roles, and we increasingly have more than one in our lives , at work, at home, laptops, tablets, even in the living room. Cell phones have become ubiquitous. There are a myriad of handheld devices. Set-top boxes, PVRs and game consoles are changing what and how we watch television. Photos, music and voice communications are all rapidly going digital and being driven by software. Automobiles are on a path to become smart and connected. The emergence of the digital lifestyle that utilizes all these technologies is changing how we learn, play games, watch TV, communicate with friends and family, listen to music and share memories.

But the power of technology also brings with it a cost. For all the success of individual technologies, the array of technology in a person's life can be daunting. Increasingly, individuals choose products and services that are highly-personalized, focused on the end-to-end experience delivered by that technology. Products must deliver a seamless experience, one in which all the technology in your life 'just works' and can work together, on your behalf, under your control. This means designs centered on an intentional fusion of internet-based services with software, and sometimes even hardware, to deliver meaningful experiences and solutions with a level of seamless design and use that couldn?t be achieved without such a holistic approach."