Okay, from the no surprise department, you all know TIS 2.0 and I have had a rocky relationship of late, what with the no (as in 0) women in their Top 25 B-Z List Blogs and let’s not forget Our Friend Jordan, The Industry Standard writer who enjoys gagging on his own foot.

But I am nothing if not forgiving.

(shut.up.)

I’ve since met Cyndy and realize she’s my sisterfromanotherplanet, having graduated out of the English and Comm/Journalism program at the Same College as Yours Truly (except it was DOUG Howard who kept my piano for me Cyndy, not Wendell–significant diff… we’ll talk…), and she’s a mom AND a writer AND does the social media dance, like me, PLUS Cyndy did a much needed interview with Hank on the Feldboy dustup, so….

I am declaring a truce with The Industry Standard and encouraging you to GO VOTE for the Top 100 Innovators starting now!

BTW I have to say that I’m glad Cyndy staged that coup at Profy so now she can spend time making The Industry Standard actually good.

(sorry, I had to.)

(first posted to Allied in August 2006)

I just got back from NEBCamp and I am exhilarated and exhausted at the same time.

I met so many great people, late night television characters mostly but so what–video casting is really just TV++–and learned so many new things!

At NEBCamp the action goes on late into the evening - no one can keep an eye open. Who could sleep with so much thinking and conversation and innovation, all taking place in one location with the best and the brightest in attendance? The inhaling and the exhaling and the input from the tubing to the receptacle to the mask was one (won) word wide, as in WWW. In a word? INCREDIBLE!

The best part of NEBCamp is the feeling of peace. You’re among family there. It is safe to be who you are. For example, At NEBCamp I roomed with Jenna and couldn’t believe I was actually. sleeping. through. that. coughing. It wasn’t a problem that she couldn’t get out of bed–At NEB you get your tentside meals and take them where you want.

What was great was when the developers actually showed off the CRUMBY, which sucks the crumbs from Lunchables off the $90 Linens-n-Things comforter while simultaneously searching Google for Bird Flu updates–and I got to use it.

Totally. Geeked.

At NEB camp I also got a chance to sing the mucus from my lungs during jam sessions, suck the aluminum off methylprednisolone pills, and explore my Burningbird tote bag to see if maybe there was one valium left in the bottom.

The people at NEB are folks, good folks. I know you may envy my time off-blog these last few days while at NEB. But you also should understand that just because NEB is RX only, it’s NOT exclusive. O.Really folks should have the right to to hand out prescriptions to those of their choosing without having to face the wrath of the mob for exercising that right.

And if you want an alternative that isn’t RX-only, you can go to ROOTCANALCamp. At ROOTCANAL, things move faster, and deeper. If you want Drill Down and Open Sores, go to ROOTCamp. No prescription is needed. Just a referral from your HMO.

In the mean time, if you want to be a team player and maybe get invited to NEB next year, check out my pix on Flickr to see what’s in store for you–and I mean it’s. one. big. good. time.

(first published as For the Hamster Weaning Question Cell Phone Guy, November 2005, on Allied)

One cool thing about blogging is that we become seen as experts on stuff that we’re not.

One scary thing about blogging is that we become seen as experts on stuff that we’re not.

Thanks, Google. I remember the time a man emailed me from Europe because his daughter was in the hospital. He wanted me to know that he found my writings about Jenna’s Strep Throat and how I could usually tell it was strep by her strawberry tongue. Strawberry tongue is self-explanatory if you’ve never seen it. If you have seen it, you know what I’m talking about.

Anyway, this father who had googled my writing about strep wanted to let me know about Kawasaki disease - a rarer-than-strep and often more-serious-than-strep illness that is also frequently accompanied by a strawberry tongue (among other symptoms). The man who wrote wanted me to know that strawberry tongue does not always mean strep–it can be part and parcel of many illnesses, including Kawasaki Disease. Why is this important? Because a delayed diagnosis of Kawasaki’s can lead to permanent heart damage, even death.

That’s one example of how my sorta-knowledge had realworld impact by NOT being the expertise Google had suggested.

Another example is from today. Luckily I’m a bit more qualified for this one.

Today I got a voice mail from Hamster Guy - HI! - I forgot his name. He was asking about hamster weaning. First, Hamster Guy, let me say congratulations on the new members of your family. (HAHAHAHAH!)

Now, as far as weaning goes, you’ll see the little kids start leaving the nest in about 10 days. They can’t really do anything much but slug themselves around with their big heads. This goes on for a couple of weeks until they look like real hamsters, but smaller. Between 3-4 weeks old you can separate them from the mom. There’s a whole other ballgame involved in telling the sexes apart, and you don’t want to mess that up or you’ll have more hamsters on your hands. Allow me to include a helpful diagram for the hamster sex newbie.

It took me about two weeks after weaning for me to find homes for most all of them. We still have one - the runt - and the two parents. It’s a royal pain in the ass because they’re Syrian hamsters and they will fight bloody as adults, so we have 3 separate cages that need to be CLEANED and WATERED and so on. There are lots of good hamster sites. Which in itself is amazing.

I’m sorry I didn’t call you back Hamster Guy–my cellphone is in the car, and I just remembered your message. I hope this helps. Have fun with the babies.

Don’t bring any over here.

Sincerely,
Miss Manners

(originally published on Allied, September 2003 - yes, that’s 2003)

[editor’s summary: when push comes to shove, the business model decides who goes off the bridge.]

(originally published on Allied, May 2006)

I’ve been online a long time. I’ve done what I do for a living for a longer time. Those two areas of my life collided in 1996 with my first corporate website and online communications initiative.

You should know these things not because it’s a good way to rev up my rant, well maybe, but also because I’m tired. Tired as an online participant as an online user.

I’m  tired of telling companies how to do business with me—NAY, not just telling, but showing: look, do it like this: 1, 2, 3. Wait, even better, get out of the way and I’ll do the work of doing business with you myself.

If my enthusiasm for changing the world, or at least the world of business, took a hit during Web 1.0, it’s been run over during this recent iteration of business as usual by any other name.

Enter the keepers of all media lists, Bacon’s, and competitor Vocus, to name two. Now, understand that I have been a user of MediaMap (now Bacon’s MediaSource(?) (How much did that re-branding exercise cost?) for almost 10 years. I haven’t been able to afford access the last two years, having completely severed my agency ties and stopped begging email-password combos off friends.

I’ve said before, these high-priced ($3-$5K per year per license) services are among the most important barriers left keeping the small fish from taking over the practice and processes of PR from BigPR firms.

As such, the business models of BigPR and BigMediaListKeepers are tightly intertwined. Hello: That’s really important. And maybe that’s a good thing. Because where there’s a barrier, someone with smarts and a nose for opportunity will come crashing through it eventually.

More on that another time, as models for ways of crashing through this barrier are forming, and deserving of posts of their own.

But back to my story. Not only have I been a user of MediaSource, once Map, for nearly a decade, but I have been listed as a pitchable outlet in MediaMap, now Source, for more than three years, as writer/reporter/journalist (hee) of this very weblog, which is listed in the heretofore mentioned databases. When blogs were added as news sources, there I came. Kind of an early model of consumer as producer, I’d say.

Pitching myself was always the easiest answer. I rarely was rude, except when I caught myself on a bad day.

Anyway, typical with all of the media sources added, I wasn’t asked; they added me. That’s how it works. And, the reason so few object to being added as a journalist or media outlet is because – yes you do get pitched with bogus stuff that everyone in blogland can make fun of – but generally you find out some interesting stuff about interesting products from PR people who are just itching to tell you everything you want to know while you treat them rudely and make them do a lot of work for you. Win-win or what?

Except that it would be nice if Bacon’s made at least SOME opt-in and customizable options available online for those they pimp, like the old airline menus where you could choose Kosher or vegetarian—but that was before the airlines took food away altogether, put you in a coffee can seat with a strap and a fuse, lit your ass on fire, and called that air travel.

I digress.

The relationship between BigMediaKeepers like Bacon’s and uberPR firms like Ketchum, for example, is a happily dysfunctional and expensively enmeshed co-dependency based on the way things worked before the conversational Web developed.

BigPR says to Bacon’s: you tell us who to send emails (used to be faxes) to, and we’ll pay you enterprise license fees so that we don’t have to get to know those people ourselves, because they don’t like us and we don’t like them but we both need each other. And Bacon’s says: Okay that’ll be lots and lots of thousands of dollars for an enterprise license, thank you very much, here’s your username and password, or would you like us to integrate our offering with your extranet for a little bit more, and train your thousands of users for—oh never mind we’ll throw that in for *free* with (some strings attached) after making sure no one can truly get what they need without the training.

This shit is SO ripe for an intervention.

Again, because these tools are essential, if dysfunctional, I’ve been looking at ways to get into MediaSource by sharing or creating an entity of likeminded solo practitioners who want to share a license. I don’t know if that’s legal—the two or three of us who’ve emailed back and forth saying, HEY, that would work for me, haven’t checked into all of that yet. Does this sound silly yet in the age of open source? Well it should.

That being said, I’ve tried to play by the rules, and have emailed inquiries to both Bacon’s and Vocus to try to find out how much their services actually cost.

I’ve gotten straighter answers out of used car salesmen.

First of all, let me say this to them about that: If you are going to ENGAGE me online and INTEREST me in your service, then you better give me a way to INTERACT with you online and—heavens!—even purchase online.

Instead with both of these companies, you have to submit your contact information and agree to be contacted by phone, at which point (I can tell you this from experience with both providers), if you have out of the ordinary questions, ass meet crack, you’re kicked out of the buying process.

With Vocus in particular, they are keen on setting you up with a 30-minute demo, which I can’t believe folks would spend time on BEFORE they know if they’re really interested—i.e., how much does it cost?

Nonetheless, I have one voice mail back from Bacon’s (man, when will they let you podcast directly from voicemail?) asking me to call back to talk about the service (I DON’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT, I want you to tell me how much and care that I’m a Blogger and I’m going to write about you), and I talked to a polite gentleman at Vocus who quoted me $4,900 annually, but implied that the price was somehow negotiable.

Eh?

I stopped him half way through and said, look, what I need are the media lists, that’s all. And I need to know if you can make it affordable to a solo practitioner like me. And I won’t spend a half hour of my time until I know those things. I’m a Blogger and I’ve used MediaMap for years and I’m IN it, so if you can do what MediaMap does, and you have some affordable pricing, I’m sold.

At this point the Vocus guy tells me they are BETTER than Bacon’s because they update their databases DAILY, and he would have another person call me to discuss pricing, which, dear friends, I doubt would result in a satisfactory price for my solo modest means, but nonetheless the point is, I haven’t heard from anyone.

And I don’t want to. I WANT this information to be available ONLINE and I WANT them to show me they UNDERSTAND what I need by interacting with me at the point of engagement, not by wasting my voicemail on my cell phone. I want them to not keep their pricing options a secret. I want them to EMAIL me because I gave them my EMAIL. I want to see their sample lists without having to sit down for a half-hour time-share pitch.

I swear to you, it makes me want to learn how to design software because HOLY shit there must be a better way, and I already know what it is, and every day I don’t have it I wish I could pay someone to give it to me or build it myself.

I have to go take some ibuprofen now. Yes, that means you can pitch me on herbal remedies for pain. No spaam please.

(originally published on Allied, March 2006)

It is with some sadness that I bring you this news today, this explanation of why things don’t feel right just now. And yet it is with hope too that I come to you.

Because with knowledge comes understanding, and with understanding comes… understanding.

The Shitting Point is a natural part of creative evolution. It’s something to be embraced (don’t think about it) as much as mourned. It’s a time for celebration and a time for grieving, for letting go.

It’s a time to discover what’s next.

Just don’t forget to wash your hands.

I called him on it here 3 years ago.

He tried it again on Oliver Willis in comments.

So I said it again.

And by the way, I said it first, back in April.

Blogging is becoming a repetitive exercise in outing the goobers.

Duncan Riley has an interesting post on his experiences and learnings with regard to Techmeme. He has determined that yes, there is life for him since falling from Gabe’s grace, and that working his way back to big traffic numbers hasn’t been that difficult, even if letting go of his standing on Techmeme’s influence scale was a little tough. He offers some advice and wisdom on life after appearing on Techmeme, including the following:

Write for your audience, not the headline

Techmeme thrives on sensationalist headlines and big exclusives, real or imagined, but it doesn’t track quality. It’s extremely easy to chase quick headlines, but harder to provide substance. See more here.

I have a couple thoughts of my own that might soften the landing for others who have fallen off the Techmeme train:

There Will Be Other *Memes - Techmeme activity, readers, and buzz are not loyal. The first-thing-in-the-morning visit to Techmeme is being replaced by the intranetedness of sites like FriendFeed where conversations are “promoted” not based on the blessings of the few, but based on the participation of people you decide that you like, trust, and want to hear from specifically.

The Disintermediation of TC - While Techmeme and Techcrunch remain industry standards in tech coverage and news breaking, Duncan shares a story that implies Gabe’s secret-sauce algorithm may have an Arrington parameter that favors stories that have hit TC - perhaps above all else.

Rivera has always maintained that there is a magic mix of inbound links not showing that determine content on the site. There is no magic mix. Some sites are given precedence over others. One example: a headline hit Techmeme July 25 that detailed the details for a TechCrunch Party. There were no links showing on the site, and given it wasn’t really a news headline as such, it was rather strange to see it there. At the time I ran every single test I could possibly find to see what may have been linking in to it, including social bookmarking sites and social voting sites. Technorati and Google Blog Search both showed one spam blog that had copied the post in full linking in. De.licio.us showed one bookmark via my Shareaholic plugin, but no links on the site proper. There were no other links in on any other service when that post hit Techmeme. It was either placed there manually, or hit Techmeme based on a formula that favors TechCrunch over other sites.

That’s an interesting experiment - I can’t say I know any more than Gabe or Duncan or Mike as to how all of that works. However, several women bloggers, me among them, have shared our opinions that by favoring the status-quo, female bloggers have missed the Techmeme link wagon.

In the last year, since waging debate on the topic on blogs and with Gabe via email, I have noticed a significant increase in women’s posts being included as sub-items and even main headlines on techmeme. Like Duncan, I also noticed that in direct proportion, I showed up less frequently, and finally not at all. Could be coincidence.

Could be my writing was sucking this past year. Could be a hundred reasons. Could also be I annoyed Gabe both in my word and my associations, and that was enough to get me the final bump.

I used to check Techmeme every day. Now, with the advent of Twitter and Friendfeed and better writing across the web than ever before, my attention span shape-shifted, and my click-efforts have moved on. I wonder if visiting Techmeme every day plays into the algorithm of inclusion? If so, I shot myself in the foot long ago.

Again, I find myself not caring much either way.

I’ve made more great friends than great enemies this last year. It feels almost like the first time.

I enjoy and encourage the tapestry of tools and services that are emerging to democratize conversation as they steal the link-power from the hands of the few and distribute it many-to-many.

As it should be.

Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture story on ABC news tonight was moving, as I expected it would be. I am so impressed with his wife, with his family, and with their honesty in media res, which is when most of the segment was filmed. It’s hard to watch him with his children. I was those children. It was that disease. We didn’t get as much time. I am grateful for all Randy has done to raise awareness for Pancreatic Cancer. As he said in his testimony before Congress, there is rarely a spokesperson - a celebrity face - because people with pancreatic cancer don’t live long enough.

Watching him practicing with the Steelers now on ABC - and I’m smiling.

Randy lived.

He sure did.

Consider donating to the Randy Pausch Memorial Fund or PANCAN.

Of all the good things that happened from the outing of Loren Feldman’s “dark” side, finding Shey is right up there. Following Shey on FriendFeed is a joy because he comes up and out with witty, interesting, and blunt comments and contributions all. day. long.

I’m really enjoying FriendFeed. I like the rapid fire contributions and the rapid fire comments. What makes FriendFeed different from Twitter is that FriendFeed lets everyone weigh in on a given item, and doesn’t limit us to 140 characters to cheer or snark or add our two cents. It’s simpler and richer than an aggregator; it’s faster than a blog. FriendFeed is like my best-of real-time, nearly click-free blogravator. With comments.

Bonus Link: Shey’s WeekCap.