" There is a consistent set of themes explored in Gaga's videos, with the three most notable strands being: the intersection of sex, mortality, and public image; the ambiguity and blurring of sexuality and gender roles; and pop music and its attendant fame as an infectious, devouring monster. These themes are bound and unified by a distinctive visual style: at once literate and hedonistic, and possessed with a beautiful alien eroticism."

--Oscar Moralde, "Pop Ate My Heart": Lady Gaga, Her Videos, and Her Fame Monster
(via melissagira)

"Being broke and growing up in a not exactly small, but not exactly book friendly city, these reviews were often as close as I got to the books themselves and it was comforting to know that somewhere out there were folks that got off on that new novel smell just as much as I did.

Most of my working life pre-writing was split between libraries and bookstores and that's where I first discovered the holy trinity of Kirkus, Publisher's Weekly and Poets and Writers, along with a whole gang of other writing related rags.

After this revelation my productivity dwindled to just above nonexistent, as just about every moment was spent with my nose between the pages of one of these wordy journals. Luckily I was surrounded by other booksluts who shared my addiction. I mean, these were books we were talking about-serious business! Plus PW came out like every week and I didn't pick up my 1st copy until I was like 19, I had a lot to catch up on."

--Kwan Booth, Boothism, describing his inner life as a book review fanatic

"Last night a friend was telling me that I was arrogant, in a nice way -- which I took as a compliment. I really think I'm audacious. I learned early in life that the hard part of doing something big is deciding to do it. From there it's often a lot easier than people think it is."
--Berkeley resident Dave Winer, writing about whether Berkeley is the blogging capital of the world and who else might want to chip in a few thousand dollars with him to launch a blogging newsroom in his town.

Update: Oakland Local reports 182+ active blogs in Oakland, think Dave would chip in to support a blogging newsroom down the road in Oaktown? Kinda doubt it.

"For users, Web2.0 was all about reorganizing web-based practices around Friends. For many users, direct communication tools like email and IM were used to communicate with one's closest and dearest while online communities were tools for connecting with strangers around shared interests. Web2.0 reworked all of that by allowing users to connect in new ways. While many of the tools may have been designed to help people find others, what Web2.0 showed was that people really wanted a way to connect with those that they already knew in new ways. Even tools like MySpace and Facebook which are typically labeled social networkING sites were never really about networking for most users. They were about socializing inside of pre-existing networks."

--dana boyd, talk given at microsoft, feb 2009

"That was the house that I stayed in this past weekend: a girl I'm dating, her friend whom I tried to date, a girl who dated multiple friends of mine, and a girl who has asked me out and is the twin sister of another girl that I dated. And until this weekend, I knew each of them entirely independently of each other. Are you kidding? Is that not a little ridiculous? The whole thing was one degree of Andrew."

--Andrew, Igniter dater, writing about his (weekend) dating life and the six degrees (or 46 degrees) of seperation he had with every other women in the weekend share house.

Susan sez:  The world is really small till you want to paint it.

"Many comments are complaining about comment moderation. This isn't about free speech. It's about dozens of death threats and hundreds of others saying pretty horrible things about one of of us. You may think that your comment needs to get heard and that calling for someone to die shouldn't be taken seriously. But multiply that by hundreds and maybe you'll get a sense of this. I was rude. I made the problem worse by saying things because I thought he was play-mad. and then i apologized. i may be a lot of things but i don't think i deserve to die over this. please. stop. i can't deal with the death threats after what happened last year and then this year in europe. leo won. you guys won. i surrender. just stop. please. stop."

--Tech Crunch's Mike Arrington to his readers, post the Leo LaPorte/Gillmor Gang dust up.

Susan sez: Do you have a comments policy and/or community guidelines?  If you're of any size at all, you should

(And yes, I am writing one for Oakland Local)

"Dr. Tiller was the only person in his state that performed a variation of the procedure that saved my life. In fact, he was the only doctor in the entire middle of the country that did that procedure. His loss will cause more than just grief for his family and friends; his loss will quite possibly cause the death of women like me. It will certainly cause unnecessary pain and grief.

I'm trying hard not to go off into tangents, like the outrageous hypocrisy of MURDERING Dr. Tiller in the name of "saving lives." Or how enraging I find the argument that babies matter more than women, how I feel that at the heart of that argument is really the possibly male babies that matter. Or the fact that the crowing of joy on the internet (twitter in particular) at Dr. Tiller's death makes me sick to my stomach in a way that makes me want to shuck off being American."
--Cecily K, UpperCase Woman, writing an essay entitled RIP Dr. Tiller,

Susan sez: My dad, Dr. Arthur H Mernit,  was an OB-GYN, solo practice, who made house calls and practiced till late in his life because of his sense of committment and dedication to  his (mostly working class) patients. Dad prescribed birth control and did procedures for young women who had no money (like a couple of my friends) and was very committed to freedom of choice, within responsible limits, It is hard to read about Dr. Tiller and not think of my dad.

As everyone probably knows already. Dr. George Tiller, A Wichita, Kansas late-stage OB-GYN who performed late-stage abortions when the mother's life was at risk, was shot and killed this morning at his church.

Here's what his family--his wife, Jeanne, his four children and 10 grandchildren--issued as a statement:
"Today we mourn the loss of our husband, father and grandfather. Today's event is an unspeakable tragedy for all of us and for George's friends and patients. This is particularly heart wrenching because George was shot down in his house of worship, a place of peace. Our loss is also a loss for the city of Wichita and women across America. George dedicated his life to providing women with high-quality healthcare despite frequent threats and violence. We ask that he be remembered as a good husband, father and grandfather and a dedicated servant on behalf of the rights of women everywhere."

The LA times story also quotes Warren Hern, a Colorado physician and  friend of Tiller's who said he is now "the only doctor in the world" who performs very late-term abortions: "I think it's the inevitable consequence of more than 35 years of constant anti-abortion terrorism, harassment and violence. George is the fifth American doctor to be assassinated. I get messages from these people saying, 'Don't bother wearing a bulletproof vest, we're going for a head shot.' "

And Christina Page, in The Huffington Post, talks about the pattern of violence and murder against doctors who provide abortions, and says--chillingly: "

Today's assassination of Dr. George Tiller comes 5 months into the term of our second pro-choice president. For anyone who would like to believe that this is a statistical anomaly, a coincidence that doesn't portend anything, again, you are wrong.

During the entire Bush administration, from 2000-2008 there were no murders."

In the initial design of the web reading and writing (editing) were given equal consideration - yet for fifteen years the primary metaphor of the web has been pages and reading. The metaphors we used to circumscribe this possibility set were mostly drawn from books and architecture (pages, browser, sites etc.). Most of these metaphors were static and one way. The steam metaphor is fundamentally different. It's dynamic, it doesn't live very well within a page and still very much evolving.

A stream. A real time, flowing, dynamic stream of information -- that we as users and participants can dip in and out of and whether we participate in them or simply observe we are a part of this flow.

http://www.borthwick.com/weblog/2009/04/19/699/

"This planet came with a set of operating instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don't poison the water, soil, or air, and don't let the earth get overcrowded, and don't touch the thermostat have been broken. Buckminster Fuller said that spaceship earth was so ingeniously designed that no one has a clue that we are on one, flying through the universe at a million miles per hour, with no need for seatbelts, lots of room in coach, and really good food - but all that is changing.

There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn't bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: YOU ARE BRILLIANT, AND THE EARTH IS HIRING. "

--Paul Hawken's amazingly moving speech to the Class of 2009, University of Portlalnd

"This is a true grassroots effort that is shows that growing influence women in social media. We want to focus on taking advantage of that growth and momentum with this new funding."

--Lisa Stone, BlogHer CEO and co-founder, quoted by Kara Swisher in a story about BlogHer's $7MM in new funding, bringing the total investment to $15.5 million (way to go, ladies!)

Susan sez: This rocks! Lisa, Jory and Elisa, so proud of you all and the work you are doing; this is inspiring news.

"I will say that people in Silicon Valley really do want to change the world, but they want to change the world from one in which they're poor to one in which they're rich. They'll try to say they're trying to save the planet or change the world of media, or what have you, but people don't come to Silicon Valley because they want to live in poverty knowing they contributed to the betterment of humanity. People come to Silicon Valley because they think they can do that and make a bundle at the same time."

--Owen Thomas, departing Gawker editor, interviewed by Bloggasm's Simon Owens

I got a phone call--a text message actually--at 7 am this morning from a friend working at Yahoo! who wanted to know what I knew about negotiating severance packages.

Called him and found out today was the layoff day at Big Purple.

Do you know I didn't bother to tip off anyone?  I mean, this sad exercise has happened so many times before, where is the news, really?

Ans you know what? My friend, who is dispised by his (much older) manager--didn't lose his job. Yea! (I guess)

"... this is a good example of how insular the software development environment is. It is a boy's club, where locker-room behavior is overlooked, and indeed, not even acknowledged."

Rubty on Rails programmer Julia Evans, commenting on how a truly clueless human being who also happened to be a programmer didn't get it that filling his oh so public and supposedly professional presentation  on  Perform like a Porn Star with images of half-dressed women was offensive.

(Though of course, if he'd filled the screen with images of himself in a similar state, I would have thought thei stupidity to be of a different order--and one more worth of pity, instead of the annoyed rage I feel. Asked his wife, whoppee)!

"TechCrunch came calling with a lot of intriguing opportunities -- intriguing enough to shake me out of my comfort zone...When I joined VentureBeat, it was the 21st most influential blog on Techmeme, according to its leaderboard. Just a few weeks ago, VB reached number 2 on that same list. The only site ahead of VB? Yes, TechCrunch."

MG Seigler, aka Paris Lemon, on his move from VentureBeat to TC.

Susan sez: Nice to read a tech writer who seems thrilled about his new job at the biggest Tech blognetwork around.

"But this, my friends, is the new normal: a generation that primps and dyes and pulls and shapes, younger and with more vigor. Girls today are salon vets before they enter elementary school. Forget having mom trim your bangs, fourth graders are in the market for lush $50 haircuts; by the time they hit high school, $150 highlights are standard. Five-year-olds have spa days and pedicure parties.

And instead of shaving their legs the old-fashioned way--with a 99-cent drugstore razor--teens get laser hair removal, the most common cosmetic procedure of that age group. If these trends continue, by the time your tween hits the Botox years, she'll have spent thousands on the beauty treatments once reserved for the "Beverly Hills, 90210" set, not junior highs in Madison, Wis."

--Jessica Bennett, Are we turning our kids into generation Diva? in Newsweek.

"After 12 months of hard work dismantling the company -- during which A.I.G. reassured us many times we would be rewarded in March 2009 -- we in the financial products unit have been betrayed by A.I.G. and are being unfairly persecuted by elected officials. In response to this, I will now leave the company and donate my entire post-tax retention payment to those suffering from the global economic downturn. My intent is to keep none of the money myself.

I take this action after 11 years of dedicated, honorable service to A.I.G. I can no longer effectively perform my duties in this dysfunctional environment, nor am I being paid to do so. Like you, I was asked to work for an annual salary of $1, and I agreed out of a sense of duty to the company and to the public officials who have come to its aid. Having now been let down by both, I can no longer justify spending 10, 12, 14 hours a day away from my family for the benefit of those who have let me down."

--Jake DeSantis, an executive vice president of the American International Group's financial products unit, writing his resignation letter (published in the NY Times)

"We believe our brands will become the blue chip editorial brands rising out of the ashes" of newspapers and magazines. We are aggressively pursuing the creation of the new mainstream media."

--AOL's Marty Moe, describing how America Online is launching a new politics site edited by Melinda Henneberger, a former NYTimes, Newsweek and Slate reporter.

Susan sez: The content space is crowded, and the niches get narrower. Will this new effort take eyeballs and dollars away from TPM, DailyKos, and others? Will selling across the network make a critical difference? (ie are we back to the old days when Conde Nast could reportedly require advertisers to buy pages across magazines to get the best rates?)

"When someone demands to be told how we can replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won't break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren't in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie...."

--Clay Shirky, Newspapers and thinking the unthinkable

Susan sez: 50 years from now, much if our coastline will be underwater; Right this very minute, old media paradigms are dying. Change faster, people! Fun, huh.

"Media executives are going into self-preservation mode. They know that all media businesses are going digital, eventually. But right now, they are more concerned with sheltering their core business than with pushing forward a digital business that will leech attention and profits from the core business."

-Erick Schonfeld,, Tech Crunch, writing in an article about how The Digital Divisions Are Dead At Big Media

Susan sez: Ain't this the truth!  It's getting harder and harder for these large business to compete at appropriate profit margins.

"While blogs are increasing in quantity, their authority-as currently measured by Technorati-is collectively losing influence."

-- Maven Brian Solis, writing at TechCrunch about how other measurable forms of influence--like Twitter, retweeting, building community and so on, are ways to measure impact, reach and attention.

Susan sez: This is so true, and why I love the web--Mao's law of continuous revolution is always in play. Conversation and community are continually created, distributed, sifted, filtered, redistributed--we're just one big ameboa, redividing and growing.

"The jaw dropping dysfunction of Oakland Unified Schools administration, next to the school campuses that are lovingly neglected, stand in stark contrast to the whip smart appeal of many of the students and the dogged determination of many teachers, school alumni and grass roots organizations."

--Jennifer Ward, writing on the phasing out of Oakland schools in a Spot.us supported story,

"My life has been a series of well-orchestrated accidents; I've always suffered from hallucinogenic optimism. I was broke for more than 10 years. I remember staying up all night one night at my first company and looking in couch cushions the next morning for some change to buy coffee. I've been able to pay my father back, which is nice, and my mother doesn't worry about me as much since I got married a year and a half ago."

--Twitter co-founder and CEO Ev Williams, reflecting on his past in the NYTimes.

"...Alot more people are going to show up to soup kitchens with camera-laden cell phones and other artifacts of their former lives.

Should these people be stripped of their last dignities before anyone is willing to help them? From the ecological systems perspective that undergirds sustainable ideals, that's destroying your foundation for future wealth every bit as much as eating next year's seed or letting livestock varieties go extinct.

If 'human resources' are treated like disposable napkins, there is no sustainable future waiting for us."

Natasha Chart, writing at Change.org

"Ice cream and social media have alot in common, thanks to free tools like blogs,podcasts and videosharing."--Lee

Susan sez, this little video is a good stage setter for why building your personal brand is important-if everyone, or many of us, are participating by creating our own content, commenting and ranking others' work, and linking together in affiliate and affinity groups, how do you organize your own digital presence and identity to reflect who you are?

(thinking ahead to my Maynard Institute presentation on Building your Own brand for journalists and media entrepreneurs)

1. Listen to your body.
   
• Eat when you're hungry, not starving..
  
• Stop eating when you don't feel hungry anymore, even if there is just a bite or two left, and even if it's dessert or something you love that is super delicious
  
2. Love unconditionally and make it known.
   
• Cuddle with someone in your warm cozy bed before starting your day. Take the time to greet the world slowly and with love.
• Say "I Love You" several times a day, even if you have to scream it to the person in another room when you cannot pull yourself away from what you are doing.
3. Trust yourself.
   
• You make good decisions for yourself.
  
• Trust those who love you. They'll make good decisions to help you.
• Demand what you need and don't give up.
  
4. Use your body.
   
• Use more muscles by putting up your arms to fly.
  
• Smile while you run.
  
• Get others to run with you, it's more fun with friends.

There's a lot more here, at Hip Organic Mama,.

"It is with great sadness that we say goodbye to you today. Our time chronicling the life of Denver and Colorado, the nation and the world, is over. Thousands of men and women have worked at this newspaper since William Byers produced its first edition on the banks of Cherry Creek on April 23, 1859. We speak, we believe, for all of them, when we say that it has been an honor to serve you."
--Rocky Mountain News closing statement on the web

Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.

Susan sez: Not only does content go on the web "forever," I have the sense the folks who had this video are speaking to future audiences and historians of this time.

"the unthinkable has become the commonplace."

"I've noticed that a lot of us on the inside don't spend enough time looking to the outside. That's why I'm creating a new Customer Advocacy group. After getting a lot of angry calls at my office from frustrated customers, I realized we could do a better job of listening to and supporting you. Our Customer Care team does an incredible job with the amazing number of people who come to them, but they need better resources. So we're investing in that."

--Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz, writing on the corporate blog

Susan sez: This is getting exciting, it would be a pleasure to watch Yahoo! right itself and transform (and bring the value back up).

"Part of being a successful artist is to make amazing art-- seemingly effortlessly. But this is the rub-- to make amazing work you have to make a lot of stuff that kinda sucks. That may seem obvious, but when you reach a place where you're work is selling at a consistent pace and supporting yourself and your, ahem, habits, it's very easy to feel like you've got it all dialed out. Making work that sucks suddenly doesn't seem like an option, it feels like a waste of time.

 It's very easy to convince yourself that everything that comes off your fingertips should be good and reflect your masterful craftsmanship. When it's not, failure is something to be disposed of quickly."

--Potter (and blogger) Whitney Smith reflecting on her work.

"Google devalues everything it touches. Google is great for Google but it's terrible for content providers."

--Robert Thomson, Managing Editor of the Wall Street Journal, speaking on a Charlie Rose show on the future of news.

"When business is booming, a buyer may not care about a quarter-million-dollar issue, When it's not, they start looking for every nickel."

--Paul Koenig, a trained M&A attorney and one of the cofounders of Shareholder Representative Services (SRS), commenting on the number of sold startups having trouble collecting their cash in this rotten economy.

"My first epiphany occurred in August 2007, when The New York Times ran a story revealing my identity, which until then I'd kept secret. On that day more than 500,000 people hit my site--by far the biggest day I'd ever had--and through Google's AdSense program I earned about a hundred bucks. Over the course of that entire month, in which my site was visited by 1.5 million people, I earned a whopping total of $1,039.81."

--Daniel Lyons, the fake Steve Jobs, describing the 2 years he spent trying to make blogging bring in the bucks.

Bonus quote: "Take it from someone who dreamed the dream: I wish it were true, but right now it's looking like yet another high-tech fairy tale."

Susan sez: Great to hear as print is crumbling, eh?

"But if there's one thing that people like Adrian Holovaty (lead developer of Django and founder of Everyblock) have shown us, it is that broadly speaking, content -- including the news -- is just data, and if it is properly parsed and indexed it can become something quite incredible: a kind of proto-journalism, that can be formed and shaped in dozens or even hundreds of different ways. Doing this with all of the various elements of the news -- names, places, events, details -- on a large enough basis can reveal hidden patterns or connections that might not only improve an existing story but lead to new and completely unexpected ones. At the moment, only the research departments of newspapers have the tools to do this, but opening up an API the way the New York Times has can put those tools into anyone's hands, allowing them to pursue projects and avenues that newspaper reporters and researchers might never think of."

--Matthew Ingram, writing at GigaOm on The New York Times' API and what it makes possible.

Susan sez: Truer words never spoken--and there is a NYT Developer's conference on Feb 20th that is waitlisting folks.

Update: Got a kick out of the blog post comment from Mashery co-founder Scott Rafer reminding everyone Mashery made the APIs for the Times (and could do it for you, too).

"One of the paradoxes of the digital age is that the boundless freedoms of the Internet also constrain our identity. Before the ubiquity of search engines you could go on a date or a job interview and construct a narrative about your life that fit the situation. No one in your book group had to know that you were a punk-rocker in high school. But it's much harder to package yourself in the Google era. Online, your digital identity often comes down to the top 10 links on your SERP, or search-engine results page."

--WSJ reporter and author Julia Angwin, writing about how she gave her Google Juice ID a makeover.

"When all the trees have been cut down, when all the animals have been hunted, when all the waters polluted, when all the air is unsafe to breathe, only then will you discover you cannot eat money."

--Reputed Cree prophecy, all too relevant right now.

I love this idea of a series of posts called things I learned the hard way. I have a long list, some of which I had to learn twice--and once-three times, to not repeat the same mistakes. Derek's post from today, Don't work for assholes, has particular resonance, since this can be a tough one to learn--till your decision to work for the the asshole bites you in the butt.

A short quote: "Nine times out of ten, the first impression someone gives you is exactly who they are. We choose not to see it because we need the money, or we want the situation to be different. But if someone rubs you the wrong way at the first meeting, chances are, it's only going to get worse."

and: "Nowadays, the only asshole I work for is me."

Hey, do you think I am being obsessive as I continue to curate this meme? 25 things you didn't know about me is just so much fun to read, whether you know the people or not. So, some other posters I found (or who messaged me):

• Ryan Kuder:"I will eat anything once. Although the last time I was in Beijing, I had spicy fish that put me in the hospital. Note to self: Lay off the spicy fish."
• Happy Robot/Lisa Says: " My biggest passion in life is hating my job."
• Chez Pim: "I make butter for a Michelin-two-star restaurant, and it's the best damned butter in this country. And no, you can't buy it."
• Lisa Nowak: "I spent 13 years building and driving race cars before I wised up to the fact that it was a second full-time job and a total money suck. Now I just write YA books about stock car racing."
• Sarah Nelson:"I group my candy by colors before eating it."
• Britt Bravo: "I saw Long Day's Journey into Night with Jack Lemmon, Kevin Spacey, Peter Gallagher and Blythe Danner in New York during high school. My class sat in the front row. I cried so hard at the end, I couldn't stand up to applaud. We waited at the side door for the actors to come out. When Jack Lemmon saw me he said, "I was so happy that you were so sad."
• Deborah Elizabeth Finn: "I love Victorian literature, and have even gone so far as to read novels by Charlotte Yonge and Mrs Humphry Ward."
• Deanna Zandt: "went from being the grrl who could sleep till 2 in the afternoon to the grrl who can't sleep past 7:30 in the morning in just under 6 years."
• Glen Gleason:"I think I would have made a good Jedi."
• devvieish: "I have a love/hate relationship with programming. I know that it ought to be possible to tell a computer do to anything you can define... so I keep trying to do exactly that, and keep being frustrated with failure at poor documentation and not-all-powerful languages.""
• Jennifer Burdette Satterwhite: "I am better at talking in front of a large crowd than I am at making small talk with one new person."
• Shmuel Moshe Yonah: "In the past three years, I have become nearly completely fluent in Hebrew. This has mostly taught me that being bilingual means being completely incoherent in two languages."
• Bernard Moon: "While learning to ride a bike, I was knocked unconscious. My father tried a short cut and placed me on an inclined road and let it ride! My brother was given the slow route on flat surfaces when his time came.:
  
• ink and vellum:"I often quote random lines of Old English poetry. And I've done it in a bar. Drunk and sober. On multiple occasions."
• Phase: Next: "For the past few weeks, I haven't gone a day without consuming something blueberry flavored or filled (or the actual berry). "
• Obsidian Bladed:"I got into the whole online furry thing by moving on from S.W.A.T. Kats communities and fanart pages to Yerf when I was in middle school."
• Many Good Things: "My husband and I went to the same grade and high schools. He was a year behind me and I knew his little brother but not him."
• jump off the bridge: "I am 100% addicted to Twitter. I'm not ashamed. In fact, I'm ashamed that you AREN'T addicted to Twitter."
• a granite sack and legs of log: "i have stumbled into nearly every job i've ever had by some combination of accident, luck and being a comparative peon in the right places at the right times. i recommend the strategy.
• life begins at thirty: "In order to go to sleep, I usually take 4 to 5 digit numbers and factorize them down as much as I can in my head. So ... 12345 = 2469 x 5 = 823 x 3 x 5 ...etc. It's comforting that it takes all my brain power to hold the numbers in my head which means that I can't fret about anything else."
• random thoughts and acts of stupidity: "Thanks to my Irish/English heritage I have to get my chin hairs zapped on a regular basis."
• Izoro Bend Blog:" I always have to hold back tears when someone sings the National Anthem (if they do a good job)."
• mysterious blisterious:"I wonder if being horny all the time is just me or if it is a guy thing."
• e-moleskining:"f I could adopt a pet monkey, I would."
  
  

""And there are times when we are lying in bed and I look over and sort of have a start. Because I realize here is this other person who is separate and different and has different memories and backgrounds and thoughts and feelings. It's that tension between familiarity and mystery that makes for something strong, because, even as you build a life of trust and comfort and mutual support, you retain some sense of surprise or wonder about the other person."

--President Barak Obama, quoted in a New Yorker piece.

Former Yahoo! Santa Monica guy Scott Moore is heading back to his previous corporate employer, Microsoft, to run their internet business, says Paid Content, adding the news will become public on Monday.

My favorite quote in Staci Kramer's story, echoing a quote from an earlier piece, is that corporate people don't usually go off into start-up land, despite noises they make to the contrary. The exact quote: "othing hard and fast to it, but the longer someone has been in the system, the less likely it is that person will leave for good--unless they can't find a suitable spot. Moore was at Microsoft for a decade before he moved to Yahoo."

Next question: What is happening with the Santa Monica content business--as opposed to the Front Doors team-at Yahoo?

"The virality of Web 2.0 has had one very negative side effect: the devaluation of unique users as a metric for selling advertising, Web 2.0 startups have figured out how to leverage each other's uniques, which makes all uniques less valuable."

- Roger McNamee, managing director and co-founder of private equity firm Elevation Partners and an adviser to several new-Web companies, quoted in a Biz Week piece by Sarah Lacy.

"I am out, but not unified. I've decided I'd like to feel unified, for once. I'd like to have a space on the web that can contain all of myself. Right now I have two sites and neither of them do what I what them to do. Both are limited, this site by its very narrow scope and my professional & personal site by its attempt to be clean. I would like a site that can be a little naughty, be professional, host my writing and my job hunt alongside my queer politics and community work. I don't work well when I'm not fully integrated.

I've decided that I'd like to speak as myself, and that I can no longer accept the fragile, imagined protection of using other names and putting on a great pretending show. I am not a conjurer in that way. I am forthright, and know no other way to be.

My name is Sara."

--Sara Eileen, closing down her old blog, and starting anew.

Susan says: Sara is am amazing writer, a wonderful person and her post captures so much about transparency and identity, I want to write a long piece spurred by this,

"The pool of graduate students is no longer dominated by young men with stay-at-home wives. Nearly half of our graduate students are women, and this generation wants a different kind of life -- not one where the men work round the clock and the women take care of the home and children. Instead, these students envision dual-career families with both parents sharing in child raising."

--Mary Ann Mason, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education about how the interest of women in doctoral programs who want to pursue academic careers has declined in the past year by 30%, men by 20%. A student's telling comment was "There is a pervasive attitude that the female graduate student in question must now prove to the faculty that she is capable of completing her degree, even when prior to the pregnancy there were absolutely no doubts about her capabilities and ambition."

Final bonus quote from another study participant: Don't get a Ph.D.! Just don't do it: There are so many other things in life that you could do for a living that are as intellectually challenging, pay more, and where women having children is not a big deal. Academia is stuck in the 1970s at best on this issue."

"I have been pondering what advice to give them about money. What I keep coming up with is this: Do not act like typical Americans. Do not fail to save. Do not get yourself in debt up to your eyeballs. Work and take pride and honor from your work. Learn a useful skill that Americans really need, like law or plumbing or medicine or nursing. Do not expect your old Ma and Pa to always be there to take care of you. I absolutely guarantee that we will not be. Learn to be self-sufficient through your own contributions, as the saying goes."


--Ben Stein, writing in the  NYTimes about his 21 year old son and the economy, boomers, debt, boomers, diminished expectastion, boomers, and so on. Really well-done piece.

Susan sez: I especially like the part about being a freelancer with no steady paycheck as a means to learn how to manage budget and spending; I spent my first post-college years self employed, and it has made a difference.

"America, a nation of free-spending Peter Pans." Yesh.

"I can't turn off the feminist analysis. I don't look at the world thru a set of feminist glasses, I see the world thru feminist eyes. I can't take them off. I see questions everywhere, I see women missing in a larger story, especially if women are disproportionately affected."

--Veronicaeye, Viva La Feminista, writing about how feminism colors her view of everything (as it increasingly does mine).

"The reality is my fellow bloggers we are entering a game where everything is stacked against us. The real money being earned in kept within a smaller and smaller group of top bloggers and we are having to scrounge through the breadcrumbs hoping to make enough to keep us alive until that magic moment when we do break through."

--Blogger Steve Hodson, railing about how tough it is to pay your bills from blogging, no matter what the marketers tell you.

"In the last few months, we've been taking a long, hard look at all the things we are doing to ensure we are investing our resources in the projects that will have the biggest impact for our users and partners. While we hoped that Print Ads would create a new revenue stream for newspapers and produce more relevant advertising for consumers, the product has not created the impact that we -- or our partners -- wanted."

--Google's Spencer Spinnell, Director (now former?) of Google' Print Ads pilot, explaining that while Google will honor committments through March 31st, the plug is being pulled.

Susan sez: Given the dire state of revenue for print properties, this is a clear indicator that Google thinks the margin just isn't there, another thread in the this is going to get worse before it gets better meme. It also makes me wonder if this increases opportunities for Yahoo's newspaper consortium, which has mostly focused on online.

Note: It's striking to go back to the Yahoo! newspaper consortium site and see that it doesn not appear to have been touched or updated since September 2008.  The APT platform site looks up to date, but the newspaper site...dead quiet.

"...the idea of  "Job" as a full time object that can support a person or even a family, is disappearing."
--Robert Paterson, consultant, writing on his blog.

(Hat tip to Amy Gahran for the link)

"I am the first Do It Yourself pop-star: I wrote the music, I designed the show, I make the clothes. The vision and the product are 100 percent from the artist, and it's completely pop."

--The marvelous Lady Gaga, aka Stefani Germanotta, a 21 year old New York singer and artist, whose single Let's Dance just hit #1 in the US and the UK. (Check out poker face, the poker face piano arrangment, and her other songs as well.)

"Before the phone call I had 30 years of retirement savings in a "safe" fund with a brilliant financial guru. When I put down the phone, my savings were gone and my genius financial guru, Bernie Madoff, was in handcuffs."
and
"Then I realize that, for me, the real suffering is not living without money; it's living with this rage. The devastation is horrible, but if I don't allow myself to feel this, then I can't learn what there is to learn. I will not see, for instance, that I participated in the fraud by being willing to close my eyes about what Madoff was doing."

--Geneen Roth, Break free of emotional eating guru, writing in Salon about how Bernard Madoff stole her savings

"

As I write this there are no less than 6 helicopters circling overhead in downtown Oakland. On the first day of the 10th year since Amadou Diallo was brutally gunned down by police in New York City, Oscar Grant was fatally shot in the back by a BART police officer, and the event was caught on video.

As I write this, rumors are flying and media is fanning the riot flames - car and trash fires, police in riot gear and tanks, restaurant windows being smashed, tear gas and rubber bullets being used. We won't know the full picture till the night is over and the smoke clears, but the story of the successful nonviolent protest earlier this evening has been overshadowed by this angry chaos.

What is absolutely clear is that folks are furious about the murder of Oscar Grant, furious that a week has passed with no statement or acknowledgment of what happened. What is clear is that we currently don't have community accountability over our police here in Oakland. In this bubble of progress we are hampered by the same brutal power dynamics that plague the rest of the nation. Racially driven policing that allows the use of lethal weapons in the pursuit of justice is a failed model."

--Adrienne Marie Brown, Ruckus Society, writing at Racewire about Oscar Grant's death at the hands of a BART officer  in Oakland and next steps for healing and accountability.

"I don't think our purchasing a newspaper would solve the business problems. It would help solidify the ownership structure, but it doesn't solve the underlying problem in the business. Until we can answer that question we're in this uncomfortable conversation.

I think the solution is tighter integration. In other words, we can do this without making an acquisition. The term I've been using is 'merge without merging.' The Web allows you to do that, where you can get the Web systems of both organizations fairly well integrated, and you don't have to do it on exclusive basis."

--Google CEO Eric Schmidt telling Fortune magazine that he cares deeply about news, as does Google, but that they don't have an answer to solving the new industry's problems (besides admiring ProPublica).

Susan sez: I guess this means they won't be buying the NY Times, and that they run out of high quality content to index and put ads on they will do a cost/benefit analysis and see what the next step is to keep news pumping through their ad network.

"To have two of the top male entrepreneurs in both the US and European tech scene, post two, blatantly sexist items within a week of each other is just depressing. And infuriating."

--BitchBuzz's Cate Sevilla, writing about how pissed off she feels about how women are casually objectified in our culture (and not just in the tech community), with examples from LeWeb and TechCrunch.  The comments are totally worth a read.

""The only person I can rely on not to screw me--hopefully--is myself."

--ThisNext.com founder (and former Weblogs Inc.biz dev guy) Gordon Gould, quoted in a Business Week article on user generated content and the impulse to contribute without monetary gain, a behavior that has served his site, digg, Yelp and countless other platforms/communities extremely well, generating tons of page views with no fees for content production.

Susan sez: What Gordon was actually referencing was the push toward self-sufficiency and the interest in publishing platforms participation in his site demonstrates--and the business imperative to keep the ranks stocked as any particular individual's interest rises--and falls.

(Bonus quote from author Steven Baker: "The trick in the volunteer economy is less to keep a superstar from quitting than to make sure that plenty of eager volunteers are ready to work to take her place."

"We are a land of idiots. Idiots care about who is following them. Idiots care more about celebrity news than science. Or technology. Or geeky stuff.

Idiots try to rank things based on who has the most followers. Idiots can't be bothered with thinking about adding value like Tim O'Reilly or Jay Rosen, all guys who teach you something in nearly every tweet and who I can't remember ever caring about how many followers they have."

--Robert Scoble, a wonderful person and amazingly hardworking blogger who is right that it all comes down to the split between conversations and sharp marketing for some people and that the most followed people do not neccessarily stand as the thought leaders.

"I want to use power tools and cook scones, and date women, and date men, and date everyone in between. I want to be a woman who wears suits and a boy who wears skirts. I want to start a PR business, and live on a sailboat, and bike across the country, and be a fashion designer, and run conferences the right way 'round. I want to be a country singer, and a travel writer, and a sex god. I want to make the world better, and I want to make the world work. I want high, rounded breasts like doves hung from my collarbones, and I want a girl with long hair to go exploring over. I want shoulders and arms like a man - like my first kinky boyfriend's shoulders, triangular and etched in the hard flesh of military life - and I want a man to fuck who has those shoulders, and also long hair, and also the thick softness of a good life tucked into the curve of his swelling hips, ass in the air. I want people who love to cry for me, and with me. I want everything. I want to know who I am. "

-writer, blogger, 26 year old activist Eileen, writing about her goals/identity/life at her blog, a place to draw blood laughing,

"There's also a growing presence of people who are living today as a different gender than the one they were assigned at birth. Sometimes you notice them and sometimes you don't.  (Hint: You won't know how many you aren't noticing -- that's the point.)  There are people born intersex -- with the biological features of more than one gender (and there are more of these than you might expect).  And you may have noticed this in cities and among young people -- there's also a growing presence of folks whose genders you just can't identify.  Some of them, if you ask them respectfully, will tell you they feel like both genders.  Or neither gender.  Or a gender that needs a new name.  They might answer to both "he" and "she," or they might prefer something different.  They're in-between, and that's where they belong."

--Sarah Dopp, writing about drop down menus on web sites, profile pages, and the general restrictiveness of tech tools as things for developers to be aware of--and avoid.

"2008 has already seen more than 15,000 jobs lost at U.S. newspapers. I believe 2009 will be a defining point in time for U.S. newspapers and not in a good way. Many promising young journalists and students are leaving journalism for other fields.

So, I have to ask: When this financial crisis is over, who will be left to rebuild journalism? Will there be enough talented journalists left to rebuild? Will the journalists left have the Web skills that journalism sorely needs?"

--Pat Thornton, the journalism iconoclast, writing on his blog.

Susan sez: This is a question I am starting to think about alot. At this point, the people left trying to practice online journalism are as passionate--and as practical?--as poets. What will their world turn into? What will the revenue model and business look like? (More on this to come.)

"By purchasing a puppy instead of adopting, Mr. Biden is setting a poor example and is unwittingly promoting breeders and puppy mills. There are millions of dogs, puppies, cats and kittens who, through no fault of their own, end up in shelters and abandoned by owners who weren't prepared to take on the responsibility of a pet. Because not enough people are adopting homeless animals, over 65% of healthy, adoptable, loving and lovable pets are being killed every day for lack of homes. It's appalling and tragic and cruel to keep popping out pups on the one hand while killing so many on the other."

--Cheri Shankar on HuffPo, denouncing VP elect Joe Biden for choosing a breeder pup, not a shelter dog, as his new pet.

Susan sez: While I agree that too many animals are overbred and homeless animals need care, this rankles me. A family pet is a personal enough choice that this feels a little too close to telling people that choosing to have children is akin to abandoning foster kids. I don't think that equation really computes--what matters more than whether people adopt shelt pets or breeder stock is that people who get animals don't abandon them after they lose their cute--and don't get pets in the first place if they can't handle the care.

"Part of being a successful artist is to make amazing art-- seemingly effortlessly. But this is the rub-- to make amazing work you have to make a lot of stuff that kinda sucks. That may seem obvious, but when you reach a place where you're work is selling at a consistent pace and supporting yourself and your, ahem, habits, it's very easy to feel like you've got it all dialed out. Making work that sucks suddenly doesn't seem like an option, it feels like a waste of time. It's very easy to convince yourself that everything that comes off your fingertips should be good and reflect your masterful craftmanship. When it's not, failure is something to be disposed of quickly."

--Whitney Smith, ceramiv artist, production and artisan potter, reflecting on her craft in a way that is true for so many more creators, of every type.

"...the joy of life is great, but all these two hour lunches over a bottle or two of great wine and general unwillingness to do whatever it takes to compete and win is the reason why all the big public Internet companies are U.S. based. And those European startups that do manage to break through cultural and tax hurdles and find success are quickly gobbled up by those U.S. companies.

The crowd jeered but the stark reality of it all is unavoidable. And the fact that the panelists on stage, all either American or living in America, suggested that you can somehow succeed with a startup while maintaining a healthy work-life balance is unfortunate. Too many people choose to be entrepreneurs as a lifestyle, without realizing that it takes everything you have and more to win. And if you aren't in it to win, why not just take that nice job down the street that gives you five weeks of vacation."

---TechCrunch's Mike Arrington, reflecting on his experience at LeWeb and European mores and his view of the entreprenurial mindset and what it takes.

Update: Sarah Lacy's thoughts: "couldn't agree with Michael more. I think we're going to see entrepreneurship explode globally over the next decade; but as of now, there are very, very, very few examples of startups that have become billion dollar, stand-alone companies that are not at least headquartered in the Valley. So as a result, sharp entrepreneurs around the world who I've met want to know what the Valley does well. And what the Valley does well is tireless work."

-

"'The biggest thing I'm paying attention to is what some people call participatory or network democracy. The notion that people can come together in great numbers not only for an electoral campaign but for new forms of governance. The notion of customer service for local governments. In New York and San Francisco, you can call 311 and get a pothole filled or figure out how to get a license. I think that applies to government at all levels throughout the country. There are now millions of people--mostly young--getting involved in politics for the first time."

--The always low-key but rarely boring Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.org, quoted in US News and World report

"Hire me to help them get on track. Just one example: Whoopi Goldberg is the only women of color on the masthead, and she hasn't bothered to fill in her profile. Of course, that gets "read" as them saying, at the last minute, "Oh, we'd better get Whoopi, cause we'll drop a big piece of the audience if we're all white." (Well, guess what, ladies?  The whole dern rest of the country is actually serious about pluralism!  [Ms. Tomlin's support of Richard Prior earns her a lifetime street cred on this issue.]) 

And of course, they've already dropped the Asian demo -- and trust me, that's where their lack of inclusion will hurt them, cause my Asian-American friends drop more cash at Tiffany's and on designer bling bling than anyone else I know.  As to today's blunder of talking about how they "confuse" their "hired help" with "friends," oh, well, where do you even start with that? Hire me. I'm worth my weight in gold."

Wowowow community member  Mugsy Peabody, talking with Marketing Diva Toby Bloomburg about the community on the site, which seems to have an active role despite NO interaction with the founders.

Susan sez: I love the world we are in, where community members know their power. Go, Mugsy!

"Thank you, Aarom, for coming in. I have some information regarding our organization that I want to tell you in person.This was a very difficult business decision supported by senior management.  I appreciate what you have done for Yahoo! What is important right now is to focus on what is next for you."

--Start of reputed Yahoo! layoff script obtained by Valleywag, to be used in today's mass layoffs at Big Purple.

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.
.
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.

"The real world won't change for the better till 2010, when greed has overcome fear yet again."

--Martin Sorrell, the chief executive at WPP, commenting on the dismal year ahead of advertising, particularly for newspapers, when speaking at a recent media/ad summit in NYC discussed in a NYTimes article.

"The ability to see what'll happen next is a trait that's been common among many of the great entrepreneurs and business people I know and have met. (snip)...It's something I've found especially consistent among New Power Girls. They have that Murdoch-esque sixth sense, and most of all, they're not afraid to leverage it.

--Patricia Handschiegel, writing on Huffington Post about the traits of women entrepreneurs, particularly the go with your instincts (but still check the data) thing.

--

Wowowow, the upscale, post-70s web site for todays' women, over 50 division, raised a reported $1.MM from Bob Pittman and the other shrewd (and wealthy) graybeards at Pittman's The Pilot Group (n top of a previous from the oh so affluent founders.). If you recall, Pilot is the funder that bought (and recently sold The Daily Candy), proving early on that someone was willing to fund media plays on the next a few years ago.

This is thrilling news to me because it proves VCs are closely watching the success(and explosive trajectory) of BlogHer and looking for other properties that can deliver those highly prized female decision makers. Wowowow is so upscale I don't know that it will speak to the folks in the heartland, but with the big, shiny names and the liberal tone, it's certainly got sparkle.
Peter Kafka  quotes Wowowo was saying they had 600,000 unique visitors in November, 10 months after it launched. Even if they're buying SEM traffic to get those numbers. they're a good, strong start.

"Big news organizations spend hours wondering how do I create the hyperlocal presence, you don't have the infrastructure. NPR can do it. It already has the trust and the infrastructure in every town and campus in America. I want to find a way to create indispensable local media hubs."

--New NPR CEO Vivian Schiller, talking with Paid Content's Staci Kramer about how NPR, which she left the NYTimes to join, cold be the one to crack the hyper-local nut (Susan sez: This is like the Hoy Grail; many brave knights die trying.)

"Large organizations will start to do worse now, though, because for the first time in history they're no longer getting the best people. An ambitious kid graduating from college now doesn't want to work for a big company. They want to work for the hot startup that's rapidly growing into one. If they're really ambitious, they want to start it."

--Start-up guru Paul Graham, writing in a new essay entitled The High-Res Society, on large companies, inertia, initiative and business success.

"One noticeable difference from last year was the increased number of women on Man KCrew. It was pretty rad working with so many strong, competent, and creative women. We represented many different fields of vocations including small business owners, biologists, photographers, comic book illustrators, yoga teachers, and pyrotechnic artists. The Rosie the Riveters of the aughts!"
--Crafter Nifer, blogging about her June 08 trip to BlackRockCity to prep and build the man.

"I never planned on being an entrepreneur. Independent contractor, yes. Freelancer? Uh huh. But an entrepreneur? I never thought I had it in me....(snip)...
We just created what we thought was missing. We had the time and the energy. Considering all of these factors that just fell into place I'm amazed that I became an entrepreneur. The opportunities where pure passion meet a market where it can be leveraged is SO rare."

--BlogHer co-founder Jory des Jardins, writing at Pause, her blog

"I'm a bad gay myself. I keep sleeping with boys. I'm a bad straight. I keep on fucking, and not getting married. I don't think I'll ever get married, even though I almost did when I was 23. I don't think I'll ever be gay or straight. Bisexual is a term that barely even fits. I gave up on this notion that I'd only ever want to sleep with or love someone of "my gender" or its "opposite" a long time ago. I don't even know what the "opposite" of my sex is anymore. I forgot before I even moved to San Francisco."

--Melissa Gira, writing in a marvelous hope it lives forever post about being geeky, queer and a troublemaker, or what she describes as "queerdo" as a lead in to a call to action to come to Equality Camp, a Bar Camp for supporting/building a movement to support marriage equality.

(Details for Equality Camp, and yes I will be there: Saturday, January 3, 2009
9:00 a.m. - 6:00 p.m.
Citizen Space, #300, 425 - 2nd Street, San Francisco, CA  94107 (unless it gets bigger than 50-70 ppl. Link to sign up here.)

"t's all part of a big boom that has been growing across the country: The new modern women's entrepreneur. Women who aren't just interested in taking a slice of the corporate pie, but owning the pie, the bakery and the manufacturing company that supplies it -- and are making it happen. Fueled in part by strong mothers from the Working Girl era of the 80s and power women role models like Oprah Winfrey, and Hilary Clinton, women today are more driven than ever.

Only this time around, we don't just want to work at a company. We want mogul status, and we're working for it."

--the marvelous and talented and so dead on right Patricia Handschliegel, putting her own lavish LA spin on something I am seeing all across the country--women wanting to run their own business and now doing it for themselves.

"Can you imagine the impact of Yahoo Personals on the dating scene between the Taliban and the Pashtun? It's like Romeo and Juliet with a happy ending."

--a playful Sylvia Paull, writing on her blog

This just in from the Women's Media Center in NYC--the WMC's 2009 Progressive Women's Voices program is accepting applications with a December 15th deadline.

Here's what the call to action says:

The Progressive Women's Voices program has become a cornerstone of The Women's Media Center. We are "changing the conversation" by making sure that there are plenty of qualified, authoritative, progressive women experts available to editors, reporters, producers, and bookers.

In our first year of the program, we intensively media trained 33 women who have gone on to earn over 1000 media hits year to date. Our inaugural class was a stellar group, with experts in foreign policy, reproductive rights, environmental issues, racial justice, voting rights, the history of feminism, immigrant communities, outsider cultures, national security, and many more areas of expertise.

With our training and help, in 2008, our PWV women wrote Op Eds in the Washington Post and The New York Times, features for Elle and New York magazine, were quoted in USA Today, Forbes, Variety, Mother Jones, the Wall Street Journal, Slate, Salon, The New Republic, the Los Angeles Times, on the Associated Press and Reuters wires, appeared on Good Morning America, CNN, MSNBC, CBS Nightly News, Fox News, ABC News, CNBC, The Tyra Banks Show, PBS's "To The Contrary," Bill Moyers, on numerous NPR shows, and in hundreds of other significant media outlets.

We are now accepting applications for our 2009 Progressive Women's Voices classes. We have three classes scheduled for the year. The first class will be training in New York Feb 6-7, March 6-7, and April 3-4, with all travel expenses paid for by the WMC. Applications for the first class will be open from now until December 15th.

If you know of a woman whose voice should be heard in the media, please forward this email to her and encourage her to apply. If the first class does not work for her, we have two more planned later in the year, so please encourage her to check our website for complete program details

Susan sez: Who needs this that you know? Pass it on..

"despite the external environment we face, the fact remains that yahoo! is now a significantly different company that is stronger in many ways than it was just 18 months ago. this only makes it all the more essential that we manage this opportunity to leverage the progress up to this point as effectively as possible. i strongly believe that having transformed our platform and better aligned costs and revenues, we have a unique window for the right ceo to take ownership over the next wave of mission-critical decisions facing the company."

--Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang, explaining how his work in moving the stock price from $31 to $10 has set the company up for success.

Is it totally old school to watch when two media pundits turned new media pundits get into a blogosphere cat fight?  How do we evaluate the winners--by their stance on the side of right, their chest-thumping, their clearly superior logic, or what?

In the case of this week's Ron Rosenbaum/Jeff Jarvis smack down, I propose we use their rhetoric as the battleswords--let him with the best insults, put-downs and sound bites win.  After all, isn't that what punditry really is? Twitter meets The Quotation Dictionary?

Rosenbaum, Slate:

• "Dedicated guys who did great work at the dying dailies are being made to feel by Jarvis that they deserve to be downsized. Yet who has the most honor, the men and women who did the work or the media consultants who mock them?"
• "Firing people on the writing side because of the incompetence of the business side is a long tradition in the media business, and Jarvis gives management a New Age fig leaf with which to shift the blame from their own incompetence."

Jarvis, BuzzMachine:

• "He's mad because I'm not acting sufficiently mournful and respectful at the demise of his friends' journalistic careers (and perhaps his own). I'm "increasingly heartless" about these "beautiful losers".

• "Rosenbaum accuses me of "living the good life" as a consultant, professor, blogger, blatherer. I wish. When I worked for Advance and Conde Nast, I made many times what I do now. So why the hell did I leave? Because I wanted to be more a part of the future and believed I could best do that by working with students who will be that future, by helping companies from the outside with one other perspective, and by joining in and sometimes prodding the urgent discussion about new and sustainable models for news."

Susan sez: Is Rosenbaum hitting out in the wrong direction attacking Jeff?  Does trying to take Jeff down a peg do anything to affect positive change?

Blog by blog, quote by quote, I say Jeff wins this one--what do the rest of you think?

Update: A no name poster on Jeff's blog sex Rosenbaum is irked by Jeff's ego--and that it gets in the way--but hey, do you know many successful execs w/o big egos?
 
Jeff's deeds matter more than his desire to be recognized; without the work, there would be no chances to get flown to Dubai.

John McQauid sez:"Radical innovation is the only way forward for journalism, and is incredibly promising. Whining about the bygone days (five years ago!) of newspapers and magazines may provide a necessary emotional outlet, but it's a huge waste of energy and a distraction from the challenges at hand."

The Observer's Gillan Regan jumps in to cover the story--but adds nothing.

Rosenbaum, 1, Jarvis 10,
:

"From conglomerates to internet ventures, executives should be planning now on a decline of up to 40% in advertising spending during this cycle. Instead they're sleepwalking into economic extinction--even those lean online ventures which were supposed to take up the mantle and preserve New York's position as a media capital."

--The ever-direct Nick Denton of Gawker Media in an extended post about the economic downturn (when do we start calling it a depression?), onlne media and ad revenue. Nick's cautious here in his projections--but his calling out the moanin' is right on.

"...now we have the delicious irony that a white president from a patrician family, whose administration was so negligent about America's poor and black citizens, was so incompetent that he helped elect the first black president."

--NYTimes op-ed columnist (and personal favorite) Maureen Dowd, writing about Obama's election and racial identity,

David Cohn's Knight News  Challenge-funded project, Spot.us, which I have been a bit of an advisot to launches today--and is the subject of a NYTimes story.

Spot Us,  is the Craigs' List/marketplace approach to bews, allowed reports to propose coverage and seek funding, and funders to advertise journalistic topics or stories they want to fund. The focus is  reporting in the San Francisco Bay Area--the public puts up the money for the work.

Dave is one of the most energetic and bright people I know, with wonderful energy AND approachability--this is exciting to see move ahead.

Great quote from Dave: " "Spot Us would give a new sense of editorial power to the public,"I'm not Bill and Melinda Gates, but I can give $10. This is the Obama model. This is the Howard Dean model."

"There's an obvious line that I can see being drawn in the world of food.  While many people won't want to take a side I think that there isn't really a choice.  We have a group of people that recognize that people have been hunting and gathering since forever.  It's in our nature to hunt animals and fish, cooking is really an evolutionary tool we developed to overcome plant and animal defenses.  This group appreciates the food that we've been eating since before the industrial revolution (If it ain't broke don't fix it) and is skeptical of improvements to nature's design.  I believe I fall into this group.  While a butter making machine is very cool, I image hand churned butter tasting better and being more satisfying to eat.  My understanding of my preference for this is that I have a better connection to what I'm eating.

 The care that went into the butter, the attention to detail, the fact that grass-fed beef is beef from a cow that lived life how nature intended. In short the other side is the group who doesn't buy into that and appreciates things like molecular gastronomy (bullshit gimmicks), nitrogen ice cream, Monsant, Vitamin enriched cereal, Fast-Food, Cheesecake Factory, and all the other 'innovations' of the last 50 years.  If that sounds one sided, that's because it is.  Fuck it, start your own site."

--Zach Jarrett, whose journey into cooking and blogging is just fascinating to observe, writing on grass feed beef and locavore issues.

"We had a monster plan with bells, whistles and a cherry on top. Impossible to fund and even more impossible to get to market without a thousand moving parts. I can still feel the sting of our pitch to Selby Ventures when we got 30 seconds into the pitch and a partner shouted out "Not another plan to change the world! I am out of here!" and he got up and walked out."

--Gerry Campbell, reminiscing on Bounce, a music network idea, on his blog and how small ideas can be better than big ones.

(Susan sez: What makes me love this story is the VC walking out of the room; I am personally sick of small ideas, they often have small impact.)

"My sense is that this financial crisis is going to amount to a coming-out party for behavioral economists and others who are bringing sophisticated psychology to the realm of public policy. At least these folks have plausible explanations for why so many people could have been so gigantically wrong about the risks they were taking."

--David Brooks, NYTimes columnist, writing about how analyzing situations incorrectly is one of the key problems that led us to the financial crists we're in today, and how behavioral economists like Dan Ariely will have more impact going forward. (Susan sez: Well worth a read for the comments on Alan Greenspan.)

"This is the perfect storm for garage sales. We're coming off a 20-year boom in which consumers filled ever-bigger houses. Now people need cash because of the bust."

--" Gregg Kettles, visiting professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who studies outdoor commerce, quoted in a NYTimes article about the thrift economy and the surge in garage sales as folks need cash.

"While I anticipated and prepared for the 'internet winter' we're now facing (you've read my posts and e-mails about the startup depression I'm sure), I failed to realize how bad the situation would get. It's much worse than I thought it would be, and ignoring market conditions today would only mean deeper cuts down the road."
--Jason Calcanis, blogging (!) about laying off 10% of the Mahalo staff and the cash that will provide.

"begin to picture the brain metaphorically as a tangled ball of Christmas lights. When you plug it in, there are strands that light up perfectly and there are dark zones where a single burned-out bulb has caused a line to go out. If the bulb for Exchanging-Smiles-With-Mother doesn't light up, then Empathy won't be kindled farther along the strand, or Playfulness, or Theory of Mind (the insight that other people have different thoughts from yours). The electrical current won't reach the social-skill set, the communication skills, creativity, humor or abstract thinking."

-Melissa Fay Greene, writing in the NY Times on autism and development

"Not too many woman play football. Very few men do much knitting. Do we need outreach and mentoring to change make sure that all groups are a mirror of the world's demographic makeup?

Women and men are different, and perhaps the reason that software startups are
male-dominated speaks to that difference rather than a social issue. In other words, perhaps our society is that way because of how we are rather than how we are being driven by our society."

--Hacker News contributor and ycombinator alum Tony Wright, posting on a comments thread around a group of women (myself included) offering to mentor women who wished to apply to this cycle for YCombinator. 

Susan sez: The comments thread is more than 90 posts long, mostly by what sound like men who just don't get why anyone might need or want peer support--after all, they're doing just fine, so what's the big deal?  I don't want to pick on this one guy, but the general tenor of "hey, men are just better at this stuff, naturally" is ROFL funny--until I remember these are my well-meaning peers, the ones who don't see themselves as discriminatory.

(And yes, I know there are women who make untrue assumptions about men as a group, too.)

"Data Portability is not about 'Web 2.0′ - it's about any web-based service. A typical user might use CNN, Yahoo Mail, Facebook, AIM, their cell phone and their PC or Laptop. That's a lot of apps. Imagine the possibilities of having them sync some aspects of your data."


---Chris Saad, posting on his blog after announcing funding for a company he advises about why data portability is not just for geeks.

"When I look back at the dotcom apocalypse that was 2000 - 2002, I realize some of the best companies I've ever been involved in were created during that time.  In the midst of this, I remember the endless stream of "the Internet is over" and "the information technology business in now a mature business and there will never be innovation again."  Yeah - whatever."

brad feld, feld thoughts, sharing his view of the current meltdown and how startups should respond.

So,  I spent a chunk of the weekend at Arse Electronika, the conference on erotica, sex, fturism, technology and enjoyed the mix of people (geeks, sex nerds, academics, techies and the diversity (peversity?) of the talks. It was also great fun to be at a conference that didn't have to have 800 people to be interesting or successful; this little band of 30-50 keep themselves enthralled.

One of my favorites talks was by Aaron Muszalski aka sfslim, who did a great preso on "sex toys of the future" ranging from bioluminescent lube(likely) to robot/human pets (unllikely). Aaron can talk for days, and after his talk, a gaggle of people went and talked more with him..I went off to lunch and came back and they were still talking. (And then he went off and did this Folsom tea party thing, which is another story...)

Our talk on Oversharing, blogging, transparency went well, and we've just posted it to slideshare. MP3 of the talk is here.

Fulls links to all the MP3s, are up as well. Bonnie Ruberg (who writes the Click Me column for the Village Voiceand the Clickable Clit column for SF Weekly) had the stamina to Twitter the entire event. Notes & quotes for our talk over at Blogher:

The Arse Elektronika 2008 Flickr pool is here.

I've been writing the talk for Arse Electronika that I am going to give with Viviane on Friday. It's been fun to gather pictures, twitter quotes, and to interview bloggers and talk about ideas with Viviane.

Remarkably, there are people in the world who think the Barbie doll incarnation of Julia Allison (the one who always talks about dresses), amusing; less remarkably, there are people I know and respect who break out into virtual hives at each mention of the phrase over share.

Working on the Arse talk, which is about managing attention, transparency and your audience if you're a sex and relationships blogger (or just play one on the InterTubes), I'm struck by how gender-based some of the swirl turns out to be.

Reading through much of the brouhahah of the blogosphere, I can't help asking: Are women who blog about their sex lives punished for being' sluts' ?  Is Emily Gould holding her place in society by recanting all the fun she had?

Or, to put it another way, which Melissa Gira did when I talked to her for this piece: Is a guy writing about his coke habit kinda okay, while  a woman writing about sexuality is just shocking?

The question I've been asking myself is How could this story be different?
 Or, to put it another way? Do most people understand how to control their own mage on the net?

"I never played against my own intelligence to make men comfortable around me. I come on strong by being open, not teasing. I don't look for strength in men's eyes that way. As temporarily delightful as cocktail conversation may be -- until our cabs come -- I get my real and lasting courage from my own vulnerability. I can only trust my sense of worth to be safe with those unafraid to love me, not someone who finds me amusing five minutes ar a time."

--Melissa Gira Grant, writing in her tumblr blog

Given that Nick Douglas and Melissa Gira and others have just started promoting their sex social network, boffery, this quote from amber rhea seems apt.

"How can anyone know who or what to support, when language is used the way it has been used in this election, with Barack Obama tilting to the right as John McCain becomes the Maverick bringing change? It's like Alice in Wonderland - or better yet, Through the Looking Glass. The Obamas, although black and "liberal," are the Brady Bunch, while the conservatives have the DUI and the pregnant teen-ager.

What does this all demonstrate? That no ideology is pure, no set of principles too sacrosanct to compromise to the realities of life. The Republican platform said no gay marriage, but Dick Cheney's lesbian daughter has a civil union with her partner, and the Vice President hasn't rejected her.

In human situations, people are both better and worse than political ideologies."

--Francine Hardaway, writing on her blog.

"Enthusiastic Republicans don't see the choice of Palin as affirmative action, despite her thin résumé and gaping absence of foreign policy knowledge, because they expect Republicans to put an underqualified "babe," as Rush Limbaugh calls her, on the ticket. They have a tradition of nominating fun, bantamweight cheerleaders from the West, like the previous Miss Congeniality types Dan Quayle and W., and then letting them learn on the job. So they crash into the globe a few times while they're learning to drive, what's the big deal?"

--Maureen Dowd, surpassing herself in sarcasm as she comments on McCain's choice of Sarah Palin for VP nominee on the Republican ticket.

"...And yes, I know, I'm a flash in the pan and I'm getting a big head and this will all be over tomorrow, but here's the thing: it's been going on for three years now. It slows down after each video (praise be to Allah), but it hasn't really ever stopped. I've been busy the whole time. It confounds me and it confounds my friends and family, but for whatever reason, people keep on watching the videos and crazy offers keep coming my way."

--Internet-famous dancing guy Matt Harding, writing in his blog about becoming a CAA client. Matt's around the world travels doing that joyful little dance everywhere remind me of the community--and humanity--we all share (which is the point, right?)

"America's back in the cold war and W.'s back on vacation.

Talk about your fearful symmetry.

After eight years, the president's gut remains gullible. He'll go out as he came in -- ignoring reality; failing to foresee, prevent or even prepare for disasters; misinterpreting intelligence reports; misreading people; and handling crises in ways that makes them exponentially worse.

He has spent 469 days of his presidency kicking back at his ranch, and 450 days cavorting at Camp David. And there's still time to mountain-bike through another historic disaster."

--Maureen Dowd, op-ed piece in the New York Times.

Sites aimed primarily at women, from "mommy blogs" to makeup and fashion sites, grew 35 percent last year -- faster than every other category on the Web except politics, according to comScore, an Internet traffic measurement company. Women's sites had 84 million visitors in July, 27 percent more than the same month last year, comScore said.

Advertisers are following the crowd, serving up 4.4 billion display ads on women's Web sites in May, comScore said. That is more than for sites aimed at children, teenagers or families."

--NYTimes article on the popularity of Dooce, and the rise of women-targeted media.