• The Virtual Campfire:  Jenny Ryan
• Research done on  MySpace, Facebook, and Tribe led to the exploration of the softening boundaries between human and machine, public and private, voyeurism and exhibitionism, the history of media and our digitized future. Plus: great stories of digital natives, net nomads and so on. Exciting work!
• TechCrunch: Joshua Schachter joins Google: (Susan sez: Yahoo imposes, Google disposes?)
• Paidcontent: NewsGator gets $10MM in new funds. Susan sez: This rocks! The talented team at NG gets cash to build out their business even further.
• Infoworld: How to kill those robocalls.
  

• Crunchberry: What Northwestern J School students learned from creating newsmixer.
• Publish 2.0: Win a job contest (aka the future of journalism competition)
• Ellen Hume: Coach potatoes and journalism culture
• Ashoka & We Media competition: The Power of Us
• Mobilizing Youth: The new volunteer workforce, reading notes
• Robert Reich: Should we call it a depression yet?

• Sabrina Dent, UK: FOWA: The future looks mighty male
• Stephanie Booth: 5 lessons in promoting events using social media
• Stowe Boyd: Grounding myself (why Stowe does to remain sane..he says...)
• Kara Swisher: HuffPo naps $25MM in funding (wow!!!)

• Elisa C: Which panels @SXSW to vote for (yeah, mine is there, but so are many other good ones--thanks, Elisa/LazyWeb)
• Svetlana/Profy: Her list of tips on pitching coverage of your start up to tech bloggers
• Jeremiah O:  4 tenents of the community manager
• The Truth Seeker: Are blue jeans a feminist, lesbian uniform?  Via Tess(NSFW), a viewpoint from another part of the blogosphere, suggesting to me that so many of my guy friends are truly lesbians trapped in a man's body and that their jeans prove this.

• News21: Jody Brannon, former MSN exec and wonderful teacher, named head of the ambitious and hope it goes far enough next century news program.
• Chris Brogan: What happens when Google owns you (and locks you out of your data?)..Great post with useful comments,
• Inside Facebook: which apps are most engaging? (Hint:Justin says check the MAU/MAD ration: Which applications tend to engage different users on a day to day basis (high MAU/DAU Ratio), vs. the same users on a day to day basis (low MAU/DAU Ratio)?
• Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup: Community, pix and comments from last nights' meeting

• TechCrunch: The super-talented Tish Whitcraft will head customer service at MySpace. Tish was our senior customer care exec at Yahoo! Personals, and she ran a great team. Smart hire.
• The Atlantic: The coming death shortage--"f an increasingly influential group of researchers is correct, the lurid spectacle of intergenerational warfare will become a typical social malady."
• RWW: Rapleaf study says women outnumber men on social networks."The only social networks studied that didn't have more women than men in the 18-24 year old group were venerable old LinkedIn (where incidentally the 25-34 age group was tops) and a site called Perfspot."
• Steve Hodson: Watch where you are pointing that camera, bub! Or, it's not only subjects who feel harassed.
  

• Miss Aniela: Am I the only digital nomad on the planet who hasn't really focused on this amazing phtographer? Natalie Dybisz's  self-portraits and sense of mood are fascinating, and, of course, she blogs.
• Joe Lazarus: "Here's a free business idea for a budding iPhone entrepreneur.  Develop a graphical iPhone App Builder that lets non-technical people like me make simple iPhone apps through a drag & drop interface."
• PB Wiki TwitPacks: Need more people to follow? Check out--and add yourself--to the self-organizing lists here.
• Blogcosm: Who spoke at BlogHer 08?
• Brad Feld: The power--and value--of social gaming (and Zynga's $$ round)
  

• The Neural Buddhists - New York Times: David Brooks is a genius; great piece on science and sprituality.

• BREAKING: CBS Acquiring CNET For $1.8 Billion; 44.6 Percent Premium | paidContent.org: Roll up! "Among the sites in the CNET family that will be part of CBS Interactive pending approval: CNET, ZDNet, GameSpot.com, TV.com, mp3.com, CNET news.com, UrbanBaby, CHOW, Search.com, BNET, MySimon and TechRepublic."

• Demand Satisfaction! » The Get Satisfaction API is here!: Great announcement--what a way to go! "We've fully embraced OAuth as our third party identification protocol of choice, to ensure seamless, user-friendly, and secure account integration."
  

  
  

• BizWire: Radio One acquires Community Connect for $38MM, 12 years after founding the business(and in a reported effort to shift more revenues to the net).
• Marc's Voice: Marc explains how his company helped drive toward this success with a new online community to support revenue plans.
• Engage.com: There's a spiffy new product release, carefully thought out user interactions, and a new blog! Prediction: Subs and PVs go up.
• Ted Rheingold: How twitter and blogging differ (via Vander Wal)
• Fred Wilson: We Need a new path to liqudity is great, but the comments are even more fascinating--and they just keep coming.
  

Paid Content: Congrats to Rafat and Stacy on hitting this latest stage of staffing and growth.(Looks like the server might be down.)
Om Malik: What I learned since my heart attack. ("I was reading a review of the Macbook Air over on Macworld when I realized that the machine and post-recovery me have a lot in common.")
Wired: Detailed and absorbing piece on futurist Ray Kurzweil and the singularity (and his medical regime). "Kurzweil predicts that by the early 2030s, most of our fallible internal organs will have been replaced by tiny robots."
Doublebassist Jason Heath has a cool post about using friend feed and twitter. (Via someone whose link I lost, sorry)

David Cohn: On Ryan Kuder's Ning network for Willow Glen.

So I've been using Facebook for 10 months. I have over 1,000 contacts and I get about 10 emails a day there, half from people I know, the rest from groups and events and from people I do not know. 6 months ago, I logged into Facebook 4-5 times a day; it was my take a break at work for a few secs guilty pleasure. My particular delight were the status updates.

In the 1o months, I have also added and actively use twitter, del.icio.us, and the new FriendFeed.

Of course, that means I use FB less. It also means that what I said earlier, that FB was going to train millions of users to use social networking tools--and then watch them leave for more disaggregated services--just like users left AOL for the web--is proving true.

What's interesting to me, here, is that the biggest behavior-changer is FriendFeed. Because I have made my del.icio.us posts, my blog posts, my flickr stream, my tweets and so on visible on FF, anyone who is really interested in watching my information flow can see it all rolled up there. This means that my interest in and perceived need to do link roundups on my blog (Noted), and to post flickr updates dials down to, well, almost zero. Suddenly, there is a tool that is aggregating my social graph data for me, in a way I can control(you have to ask to get my feed).

This makes Facebook much less compelling (though I still value the Notes, Events, and access to email and birthdays). My biggest use of FB these days is on my mobile phone; I browse as entertainment while in line, or at the airport, once I've read through all my emails.

It also seems like others' updates to FB are much less frequent; the bright, shiny new toy aspect is gone and friends are rushing off to other tools, other experiences. At the same time, people who are not as embedded in the bleeding edge are coming on; two of my relatives joined recently, and the SO's siblings are also there (good validation of the mainstream value).

What's next? FB will continue to be on my active list, but it's moved from 1st position to 4th, with FF, twitter, techmeme still ahead of it as critical information sources.

And my newsreader? If it was a toaster, it would be unplugged and getting dusty.

Mercury News: "How Yahoo! lost its way"--A look back at Yahoo! through the years, with a focus on mistakes, missteps and weaknesses. "Upper management was plagued by cronyism. Even when new ideas got a green light, the projects were starved of resources. There were too many people with inflated titles, too many business units and too little cooperation among them."

Read/Write Web: Richard likes Yahoo Buzz. Alot. "While digg has been desperately trying to make itself into a mainstream social news site - and it has succeeded to a degree, as its frontpage now includes politics, entertainment and other non-tech stories - it hasn't got anywhere near the punch that Yahoo.com still packs."

Search Engine Land: Quotes the P ortfolio interview where Google's Eric Schmidt says a Yahoo-Microsoft merger is "bad for the net:" wonders if there is any way to avoid merger, concludes: not.

Kara Swisher: "I am not clear what the benefit of uniting two troubled Internet companies is, but I am sure AOL and Yahoo investment bankers can explain it all away (taking tips, presumably, from the advisers who cooked up the first disastrous AOL merger with Time Warner)."

Henry Blodgett: "Will Yahoo blow Q1? Certainly possible. The economy is tanking. AOL is sucking wind. Even Google appears to be having a rough go of it. And unlike Google, Yahoo has a lot on its mind other than the crappy economic environment."

HipMojo: Why I Sold 87.5% of My Yahoo! Shares

Susan sez: This coverage is scary.

Fred Wilson: Esty sellers using twitter to promote new merchandise (this makes perfect sense).

Zawodny: Herding Cats, YouTube video that is "the funniest thing ever." (It is funny.)
Lee LeFever: Another great Common Craft video: twitter in plain English.
Technium: Kevin Kelly on how one thousand true fans is the key to (music) success. (Susan says: Maybe not just in the music biz?)

Paid Content: Interview: Beth Comstock, SVP-CMO, GE: NBCU's Digital Mindset Has Been Changed(about NBCU reorg this week--she is getting kicked upstairs to GE)
Kara Swisher: Sheryl Sandberg leaving Google to be COO, Facebook. "Sandberg, who is married to former Yahoo music head David Goldberg and has two small children, also becomes Facebook's first major executive hire who is a woman."
Read/Write Web: What Stanford learned building f acebook apps (nice list).

Adam Kazwell, a kick-ass up and comer who worked with me at Yahoo! Personals, just started a tumblr blog about his interest in getting into product management in the Valley. His new blog is about his job search post layoff and his transformation fron analyst/trendspotter to product manager.

He writes: "Before this becomes a blog about product management it will be about me trying to get a job in that field. In general I want to document what it takes to go from idea to reality...what some might call: product management."

Adam is someone I think highly of, and mentored; I know if he keeps writing this, it will be a fascinating read, and a complement to my own layoffs 3.0 story.

(Translation: I wish him all the best, but kinda hope I have something to offer him before any of you snatch him up.)

Labels: layoffs 3.0

Mmmmn, lots to read:
NYTimes: GetSatisfaction founders get a big story in the NY Times. "Get Satisfaction, which is backed by venture capital and aims one day to be financially stable, has little if any revenue and has not decided if it will sell ads; rather, its goal is to persuade companies to buy the software it has developed."
VentureBeat(and others): Glam.com raises $84.6 million in latest round, predicts $100 million in 2008/09 in ad revenue. Susan sez: I've always liked this company's vision, but what this says about focus, and targeting and niche as a means to deliver a wide array of advertising, is powerful. Take that, big media.
Marc Canter: This dude's got crabs, big time.

Boomtown: super piece by Kara Swisher on who Facebook should hire as a chief exec, with Hilary Schneider and Marc Andressen getting top votes
Paid Content: iVillage shutters healthology; cuts staff again
NYTimes: Reed Elsevier selling off magazines; ad market too *cyclical.*
Forbes: Starbucks cuts 600 jobs (Susan says: Does MSFT want to buy them?)

MSNBC: Study shows that online sexual predators target young teens--and are straightforward about wanting sex. ""The great majority of cases we have seen involved young teenagers, mostly 13-, 14-, 15-year-old girls who are targeted by adults on the Internet who are straightforward about being interested in sex."
Susie Gardner and Shane Birley: The brand new Blogging for Dummies, 2nd Edition ( Amazon)is out--I am buying for newbie friends.

Mitchell Astley: Fail early, fail often--here's why (via Brad Feld)

Arrington: Yahoo Board To Determine Fate Of Company Today
NYTimes: Is it too late for Yahoo?
CNN: Clock is ticking on Yahoo's board
PBS, Robert Cringley: What's really happening.

This is going to be a big news day, obviously.

Fingers crossed.

"Total local stories per day 22,293
Number of populated US ZIP codes 32,500

We started by trying to add more sources. We added government, weather and industry sources, and then we added 25,000 blogs to the mix to see what we'd get. And, pretty much, they still didn't provide the breadth of coverage around local news, especially around small towns.

Don't like the news? Make some of your own!"

Wired: Clinton/Obama donations by company--yep, a MSFT/YHOO candidate split.
Arrington on the Hoo: What's the next step gnna be?
Paid Content: TW to announce AOL breakup plan?
More Paid Content: Elizabeth Osder joining CN as editorial program director--and Rafat announces a partnership with Fast Company (Susan sez: this is going to be an interesting conference...)

Bonus: Mark Bittman has a new food blog over at NYTimes...sweet

Huffington: Bush and McCain's displaced ardor for war
Darren Barefoot: Fronm 0 to 2000 blog subs in 90 days-here's how
Max Levchin: Developer incentives in social networking platforms
Ben Metcalf: MySpace developer platform opening soon
Jeremy Pepper: The question of community-how PR is making the transition (good post!)

Bonus: The beefsteak-great NY Times food piece on meat, men and stuffing yer face, Jersey-style

Kent Brewster: My bloglog API and social data integration Great to see these APIs evolving!
Jack Lail--Didja notice how watch sales decline as people tell time with PD
Howard Owens: How to engage Luddites, newspaper edition.
Jeff Birkeland: Web speak vs plain straight talk.

Problogger: Types of blog posts that get the most traffic (Darren is spot on).
Mr. Product: Beach's got a brand new bag, I mean, blog.
Coudal Partners: Link to super inspired Xmen poster (Via Scott B)

Huffington Post: Rachel Krame Bussel's terrific essay on living one day at a time in 2008.
MayMay: The Sexism of Politeness (this guy is so smart, so articulate on sexual politics and social and gender issues)
Copyblogger: The Nasty Four Letter Word that Keeps you from Writing(Via RKB)
Read Write Web: Marshall Kirkpatrick, 5 ways you can fall in loive with tagging, again

Open Media Web: New site, new interviews, open media/open source, yay! (Lucas Gonze first interview)

Ev Williams: Will it fly? How to Evaluate a New Product Idea---a great post for everyone creating products.
NYTimes: Nick Denton takes over as ME, Gawker.
PEW Internet: New study on privacy and identity--Internet users are becoming more aware of their digital footprint; 47% have searched for information about themselves online, up from just 22% five years ago.

Ralph Meijer: Federated Social Networks aka "citizen centric web services”--distributed, portable, open-what is next, beyond RSS.
(Via Chris Messina's tweet)
NY Times: Ask goes private
Rich Skrenta: PageRank wrecked the web. "Two years later and rel=nofollow is still bugging folks."

Before they were stars: Carla Blumenkranz writes about deconstructing Gawker & recalls Liz Spiers circa 2003

RIP Facebook: "A lot of people say that Facebook has jumped the shark. That's flat out wrong. In fact, Facebook is now being devoured by the shark. There's so much blood in the water, it's attracting other sharks." Quitter sings it.

Compete.com: "Believe it or not, based on the top 100 domains (unique visitors) FanFiction.net has the fourth highest average time spent per user. That's right, they beat out Facebook, MySpace, Google, Yahoo! and MSN."

NY Times: Top Model contestant Heather Kuzmich has Aspberger's--in front of 10 million people.

electrolicous: What is post-feminism?

USA Today: Can widgets cure cancer? No, but they can pretty darn near revolutionize everything else, according to this seal-of-approval story with nice quotes from Jeremy Liew and Adam Rifkin.

InfoWeek: Cory Doctorow on FB, privacy, time wasting and stalkers--"Emails from Facebook aren't helpful messages, they're eyeball bait, intended to send you off to the Facebook site, only to discover that Fred wrote "Hi again!" on your "wall."

Valleywag: Is Julia Allison the woman Valleywag loves to hate? If yes, this fluff is a maybe amusing, in a lock your high school buddy in a locker for no reason kind of way. But maybe VW is digging deep for filler this week... Hmmn. I think Julia's a damn good writer, and that's what she's doing-- writing.

Skelliewag: How to turn readers into fans (via Darren R)
Marc Canter: Ads vs. Widgets, a well worth a read rant, uh, I mean well thought out post, that shows Marc always knows he's right (and is usually worth hearing).
Jason Goldberg: Al Gore joins Kleiner Perkins
Compete: Member overlap between FB and OpenSocial, or,. more accurately--what percentage of users share or overlap on which networks?

( Chart from compete)

Andy Beal: Avoid an online reputation mess, here's how
Hollywood Reporter: Endemol hooks up with bebo for Gap show
Privacy: Google and AOL highlight their policies. We know this is highly relevant right now.

So Techmeme, Gabe Rivera's addictive aggregator, launched roughly two years ago. Boy, things were different back then. As I remember it, Gabe was crashing at Arrington's house, TechCrunch was a way to study start-ups and Edgeio took off,and Scoble, Winer, Kos and kottke were among the fellas who ruled the blogosphere. Ross Mayfield was a huge influence.

Here we are in 2007, and Techmeme's much more fully featured, TechCrunch is today's CNET, and the top blogs on the lists are mostly commercial ventures with scads of writers.

This is a post about some of the changes and what I've noted:
1) The top 100 blogosphere seems even more male than it was in 2005. We don't see many women in the top 100 tech links these days--and the ones who used to have great play-- Shelley Powers, Halley Suitt, Mary Hodder--have dialed in way down-- Halley's blog is invite only. Shelley is still writing, but seems less linked to, and Mary is running a company--and posting less.

2) Many of the top blogs are commercial ventures--the Lifehackers, Engadgets, Read/Write Web, GigaOm--often spawned by good bloggers who saw a business opportunity in their passion.

3) Tech blogs today--especially those on TechMeme--tend to be more about breaking news stories--truly replacing CNET--and less about tech insights and reflections. Dave Winer, Fred Wilson, get some play as commentators (as do I) but the prevalence of bloggers with observations--as opposed to those playing the role of the tech press-get much less play now on TechMeme--or are just outnumbered.

4) Have the commentators become a smaller part of the tech blogosphere? Or is it that the new-driven folks, sensing the great ability to get ad dollars and audience, have stepped it up so much those other voices seem quieter by comparison?

5) And what is the balance of women's voices on TechMeme? Does the service (which I love) reflect the best commentators and bloggers out there in the best and most diverse way? (Yes, when you love something you ask more of it--Gabe--the service rocks, so these are in the search for perfection questions...)

6) And how about that sk-rt? Anything there?

CN Networks: San Diego fires links and stories.
Doc Searls on the Live Web here.
NYTimes: Good piece on Lee Miller, muse and war photog.
Om Malik: A new way to view news.

Barely Political is rocking the house (and just got acquired): See
Obama Girl: I have a crush on Obama

and the amazing I like a boy,which manages to support soldiers who fight in a war nobody wants.

(Yes, I just crawled out from under a rock --but I am in awe of Leah Kau ffman.)

Valleywag: Rumors on the AOL Layoffs--4,000 to go?
NY Times: Paper Tiger: The joys of shredding.

Polyvore.com: Put together clothing outfits on FB and share with friends--the fashionista's FB app.

Face Reviews: How do users spend time on Facebook? *("Interaction with Facebook Profiles, Photos and Applications are the 3 most common activities....It is important to note that facebook photos is the the biggest photo sharing site on the internet.")

Read/Write Web: The Structured Web, A Primer. ("Among the evolving aspects of the new web are Semantics, Attention (Implicit Behavior) and Personalization. Regardless of what we are decide to call this next web, the information in it is going to be more meaningful, more automatic, and more tailored to each of us.")

Planblog: Wiki Meets Facebook

Beth Kanter: How Nonprofits can use social media--If you're an NGO, start here.

Brad Stone, NYT: Industry Standard may be brought back (Susan sez: To beat TechCrunch, eh?)

TBDB: Robin Wolaner writess about her eyelift (good piece).
Allan Mutter: (Old) media's brain drain (aka does anyone cool under 3p want to work in print?)

• NYTimes: Use my photo? Not without permission: story about f lickr, photo-sharing and digital rights. As in you need permission to repost, dudes.
• Howard Owens: 12 things journalists can do to save journalism. Susan sez: Are there many journalists left? (Okay, I didn't mean that.)
• Kara Swisher: Yahoo's big Friday meeting gets an A. K sez: "To my mind, that means cutting deadwood and allowing employees to feel empowered. It means saying yes a lot more than no. It means making some big, bold and maybe even dumb moves in the areas targeted to shake a few trees. It means laser-focus on the promises made."
• TechCrunch: Mike's got the scoop on TechMeme's new Leaderboard of blogs:"...To be exact, top blogs will be ranked on presence - “the percentage of headline space a source occupies over the 30-day period.” (Congrats, Gabe.)
• Scripting News: Winer's post of the TechMeme 100. Not that guys are into size or anything.

RoshHashona/MySharona
I Gotta Love You Rosh Hashona

The Day of Judgement (Jewish hip hop)

and my total favorite--the amazingly clever and funny chris crocker doing
britney this is for you
and--seen by 3.5 million people in a week or so--
Leave Britney Alone!

Smashing Magazine: Well designed blogs

Jeremiah: Goes to Forrester as an analyst--welll-done!

The Economist: Semantic webs gets practical with trip organizer tool Tripit.

43 Things/Robot Coop launches Should do this, another listy/taggy community site as suggestion box.
Knight News Challenge: Enter and win funding for cool participatory media projects and newspaper disruptors/extensions.
Renegade Goddess: Midlife discovery (and sexuality) from an old friend...a great read.
Sex 2.0: Atlanta unconference on XXX is really happening and gaining some cool people/participants.
Via Amy Gahran. a tremendous interview with writer Lisa See, feminist must-listen, as Amy says.

Sugar Delirium: Dating the only child(thanks, Alana)

• Scott Karp and partner Robert Young are launching Publishing 2.0(with support from Jeff Jarvis, Howard Weaver and drupal guy & CTO Jonathan Lambert as a digg/faux t echmeme/ facebook for journalists, whatever that means. (I think Scott rocks, and if he wants to sign me up, I'm there!)
• Forbes: Classmates.com files for an IPO.
• NSBA: Long-time kids, tweens, teens analyst Peter Grunwald & NSBA have a new sudy of kids and online. Short version: "96 percent of students with online access use social networking technologies, such as chatting, text messaging, blogging, and visiting online communities such as Facebook, MySpace, and Webkinz."

Editor & Publisher: AP ending ASAP,a youth-oriented syndication package launched in 2005, in October. The cause? "A number of marketplace changes that were happening with the U.S. newspaper industry." (Susan sez: Is that corporate speak for we're screwed?)

Kingsley Idehen: The way to inject Facebook data into the semantic web (ie RSS feeds and more). Techie, and fascinating.

Inside Facebook: What are the hottest apps?

Kara Swisher: Why Yahoo! and MySpace should merge

Jackson West: Interesting summer reading, including the interesting Ken Nunn, author of Tijuana Straits.

The Register: MySpace finds and removes 29,000 sex offenders--that means they committed a felony.
BlogHer's got a redesign.
WSJ: Facebook hires a new CFO, from YouTube. (Susan sez: If an IPO falls in the forest, is a CFO there to receive it?)

Read/Write Web: 3 Years since AOL dissolved Netscape Corp--and look what happened.
WJS: Blogging is 10 years old today; Duncan Riley: No, it isn't!
Jeremiah O: Is Facebook mail replacing email? Mebbe.

Ian Kennedy: A lovely post on social networks and the growth of the Net (and our Net experiences.)
Jeff Jarvis: Newspapers local challenge.
Subjectivity: How do we map identity?
Tara Hunt (and Sam Rose): Individual and collective focus, as in how we think..and organize experiences
Anne Truitt Zelenka: Amazing Anne is going to write longer pieces, keep blogging--here's why.
and
Back in Skinny Jeans: "You know you are getting fat when you discover that you have back boobs so big that they need their own bra."

Online News Squared: RIP, Backfence--local community service outta cash, winding down.
Seeking Alpha: PlanetOut goes to a group of institutional investors, including Special Situations funds, Cascade Investment, SF Capital Partners, PAR Investment Partners and Allen & Co.
allfacebook: Send real flowers on FB even if you don't know the person--Is social flowers a stalker app or a cool tool?

dina mehta: "The cost of failure is carried by the individuals at the edges of the network, while the value of the successes magnifies and value to the whole network. "
deep jive interests: "I would like nothing better than to see Jim Buckmaster and Craig Newmark challenged on their hippie ethos at Craigslist." (reference to eBay's Kijii, a new free classifieds service.)
Beth Kanter: Lee LeFevre vblogs how to use social networking to improve your lifetime learning.
Lindsayism: 1993 CBC Canadian news video about this thing called "The Internet."

Matt MacAllister likes Freebase, a structured data clearinghouse:"In some ways, it seems like the whole Web 2.0 era was merely an incubation period for breakthroughs like Freebase."
Mark Evans: 5 things that could kill Facebook.
Danah Boyd: Facebook is squewing upper-class, MySpace below.. great thoughts

Josh Porter: Facebook and relationship circles, as in how FB helps leverage them.
Sarahpr: Comments on Josh's post--and the uniqueness of each social network (Yeah, maybe...)
Robin Sloan: Snarkmarket is rocking the quotes these days.

Bob Harris: The ultimate Sopranos exposition.
Kara Swisher: Speculations on (more) possible changes at Big Purple.
Molly Holzschlag: How do we fix the web? (Really.)
Phil Wolff: Managing the spew.

Simon Willison: Doing local--a look at the Lawrence Journal-World and addressing problems of how to slice and dice local right.

Blogspotting: How Craig Newmark fights stress.

Adrian Holovaty: Did you know he's a star on YouTube?

MediaBistro: Seventeen launches an only in New York flash game called Editor's Assistant.

Jeremy Liew: Ecommerce is easier all the time; here's why.

Noah Kagan: Every major web company started..Local.
Kara Swisher: "...each one of those qualities that allowed MySpace to soar were once the major elements of AOL and, I dare say, where such online practices were invented.

Deep Jive Interests: "It makes no sense to join another network if none of your friends are on it."
Businessweek Blogspotting: Heather Green got married (congrats, girl)
NYC's Midtown lunch blog--and accompanying flickr page.
Babble.com: Nerve's baby.
Dan Pacheo: Bakotopia's got a brand new mag!

Jeremy Liew: Facebook & x me

"The whole thing could have been avoided by two more emails back and forth."

--Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, writing about his rants about the failure of Plazes founder Felix Petersen to show up to speak at a conference--and the real time Plazes data streams showing him chilling at, geeze, another conference.

Niall Kennedy launches StartupSearch, a new analytics and reporting service (think Paid Content/ Tech Crunch meet Web 2.0 Google Zeitgeist). (Susan sez: Looks great!)
Yahoo: Zod's retiring; Yang's filling in.
BizWire: eBay buys stumbleupon.

• Yahoo! Publisher's Network blog: Cat Seda, SEO guru, How to Win Sales and Influence Spiders: Boosting your Business & Buzz on the Web
• Trashonista: Judith Levine: Not Buying It--My Year Without Shopping:Could you give up high-speed Internet access, Q-tips, any soap fancier than Ivory, and new clothese for a year? Judi Levine did and tells the tale here.
• Smart Mobs: Visualization of the 100 most viewed Wikipedia pages--fascinating.
• Minority Report: Facebook is stickier than email--"Abandoning Facebook is like you flattening your house, burning your photos, changing your name, skipping town and not telling your friends."
• TechCrunch: Hotornot goes free.

Yahoo News: Andrew Braccia leaves for Venture firm; Y! acquires right media.
Reuters acquires ClearForest, atextual analytics (and data extraction?) tool. (Go, Gerry.)
eBay launches auction widgets to go--embed on your website. (Susan sez: One more tool for recommendation/shopping.)

IAC announced yesterday that Match.com CEO Jim Safka was moving to San Francisco to lead a new venture and that the COO was taking over. Safka's done a good job at Match, and it is going to be interesting to see what he develops in the Bay area as he takes over what sounds like a new incubator/venture fund/M&A operation.

The press release says "The mission of the new and yet-to-be-named company will be to identify new business opportunities for IAC, ranging from start-up ventures to existing entities in various stages of development. The new company will actively seed and incubate new concepts and leverage the strength of the overall IAC network to get them launched."

One would assume this means:
a) IAC looked at buying numerous sonets--and didn't--and it stung
b) Acquisition is the path to growth for them
c) They are worried about their base with 18-35.

Susan sez: Funny, that sounds like just about every big company I know--but is also sounds like Safka's going to get some neat runway to play with. Sweet.

• Niall Kennedy: Google Reader has an AJAX feed API
• CNET: R evolutionHealth is live--and founder Steve Case is blogging!
• PEW: Teens, privacy and online social networks--new research paper well worth a read (I have just skimmed so far)
• Paidcontent redesigns--looks great!

Ian Kennedy: Live blogging SXSW panel on Web 2.0, bubbles and busts
The Future of Communities: Community 2.0 conference coverage
Caterina: On the Brickhouse, life and big co innovation efforts

Sexerati: Melissa Gira on digital nomads and yes, sex
David Zizencenko: What makes men fall in love? (Susan sez, yep, he's in my blogroll)

Benjamin Christie: Round up on social shopping web sites.
Valleywag: What tribe really went for.

Gary Goldhammer: The rise of social media as an element of everything.
Michael Gartenberg: I am going back to Jupiter, leaving Microsoft. (W0w!)

Julie Leung's got an inspiring post on diets and health, with links to other bloggers fighting the good fight on fitness and weight.
Julie's list:

• Liz Lawley
• Susan Mernit
• Jeremy Zawodny
• Chris Pirillo
• Fatblasters
• Jen Zug
• Maryam
• Jenny Lauck
• Lisa Williams
• Beth Grigg
• Jenny on the Spot

(Susan sez: This is really an excuse to tell everyone reading my blog that dieting is a bitch...but that I have lost 20 pounds since December 1st, mostly due to relentless brainwashing...but that it doesn't get easier, it just becomes more of a habit.)

keith teare: edegio launches selfserve classifieds board for bloggers and small biz

stowe boyd: traffic and flow--the platform is the medium for the message
doc searls: NPR hosts bloggers, thinks visionary about public radio 3.0
start up review: jumpcut--acquisition case study (via Chad)

Baseline Mag: the (fairly interesting) technology powering MySpace
TechCrunch: Jobster gets a boost
GigaOm (and others): Facebook testing virtual gifts.

Financial Times:NBC Universal chief Jeff Zucker tells YouTube to grow up and behave.

• Om Malik: Linked In co-founder Konstantin Guericke jumps to phone startup Jaxtr. (Wow!)
• Techcrunch: Glam Media announces Hearst distribution partnership,a new $18MM in Serices C funding(bringing t otal to $30M) and new CNET exec investor. And that's just today. Rafat says: "Glam is becoming what iVillage was to Hearst before it got bought by NBC."
• Aaron Schwartz: How Google keeps employees by treating them like kids. Or not.
• Matt McAlister: That Valleywag is so goddamned good now that Denton's writing it. (And Fred Wilson thinks so too).

BizWeek profiles Paid Content and Rafat Ali. Rags to riches, they say, but with lotsa hard work in between.
MTVNetworks starts a new *guy* brand--COMEDY CENTRAL, Spike TV, TV Land, AddictingClips.com, Atom Films, IFILM, GameTrailers.com and XFire in the mix.
NYTimes: 10 million invites a month go through Evite.com and the Nos all carry reasons.
Jon Strauss: Yahoo guy publishes Terry Semel's all hands talk, doesn't hold back (Yep, it's the culture that brought you the peanut butter thingy).

Jonathan Safran Foer: My life as a dog (in NYC) --lovely essay for pet owners everywhere
NYTimes: IAC plans AskCity, new local service
USA Today asks what geeks would do with newspapers. Answers--nothin' you ain't heard before, but amusing
Who has time for this? VC writes on the theme of how start-ups need to get big cheap
emergic has more to say on this topic

• Business Week: Google to sell ads for newspapers--Owning the tools and the distribution and the platform--with 100 partners signed up.
• Paid Content: Quincy Smith in at CBS Digital; Larry Kramer out, but will stay and advise.
• The Polling Place Photo Project is a nationwide experiment in citizen journalism to capture, post and share photographs and document the local voting experience. Check it out!
• Calcanis: Need some morning gloating? Read this rant on newspaper circulation decline--classic Jason--"Come on people, this is really simple... wake up and accept the fact that 90% of your audience does not want a newspaper on their doorstep every day. Why these executives are so obsessed with dead trees is bizarre."

Friday links:
Wired: Steve Job's greatest quotes, like "It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them."
Jason Calcanis: Holding forth in a podcast and donating the bucks to charity.
BizWeek: Digger Jay Adelson advises old farts to remember younger workers "want a mentor, not a taskmaster" and more juicy bits of goodness.
YouTube: KungFu versus Yoga--this little video is beyond priceless!
Six Apart: Vox goes live and open to the planet. Nothing like a new mass market blogging platform with lots of visual details (--can't wait to see the adoption curve on this one.)

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?

Scarborough Research white paper: Web-only newspaper readers are typically between two and fifteen percent of a newspaper brand?s total audience--and they're younger and more affluent than the print base. (Susan sez: Of course audience in other categories is growing far more rapidly, right?) (Via Paid Content)
Ad Age: Will myspace launch a print magazine? (Susan sez: And will it make (enough) money from advertisers?)
NYTimes: Breaking news story--couples take laptops to bed! (Okay, I wanted a third link so I could publish this..story is insipid but cute.)
kottke: What's a tumbleblog?

Steve's holding forth on what data matters, and it looks like I've made the cut in his pantheon.
Even better, he's pegged me as "the synthesist" while Calcanis is "the lightening rod."
Thanks, Steve.
It is fun to watch Steve hold forth in net spaces that are increasingly his own, spinning his lore till the language reaches a pinnacle somewhere between NeoPrimitive VRMLer Mark Pesce and gonzo journaliste Hunter S. Thompson, while the younger guys in sneakers first snicker a little and then hungrily ask for more.
Sometimes I feel like I get Attention, other times it feels like the Emperor's New Clothes, but yes, I care what this man has to say--and it's usually pretty interesting, thought-provoking, and okay, sometimes obtuse.
As people in the Valley ponder the new mediarati--the Arringtons, Maliks, and the swam of snarkers in their wake--Steve's move from tech columnist to finger in many pies maven needs to be noted as well.

Bizweek: A gushy story on digg's kevin rose and other "punk millionaires." Like, breathless.
CrunchBoard: TechCrunch spawns an insider's jobs board. $200 and your job is inside.
Ted Leonsis: Ted takes over 2,0000 words to tell why AOL giving up its access business is great news.

Washington Post: Reporter takes 1200 words to explain why this great news means AOL is laying off 25% of its workforce.
Battelle's SearchBlog: Realtime and virtual: Others Online launches--a high class way to be stalked or the coolest thing since, uh, Orkut?
Lisa William s: How many blogs about real places are out there? Lisa bets she can find 1,000.