Why should your daughter or stepdaughter participate in sports? To be more healthy (in mind and body), feel better about herself, learn new skills, stay off alcohol and drugs, defer sexual activity, and, oh yeah, TO HAVE FUN!  Sadly, some people worry that girls are too delicate, unskilled, or inadequate to play sports.  To which the smart father and stepfather reply: "Baloney."  Here are some tips to help you provide the kind of support your girl needs.

1.  MAKE SPORTS FUN FROM AN EARLY AGE. Keep a relaxed approach when she's young. For example, have athletic-theme parties, like pizza and kickball.

2.  DEMONSTRATE INTEREST IN HER ATHLETIC ACTIVITIES. Attend her games and other extracurricular activities. If you live away from your daughter, be sure to talk with her after every game to hear how it went.

3.  GO TO THE GAMES TO CHEER. You can cheer hard for your girl, and then cheer for everyone who is playing. Every kid (and parent) should remember why they call it "playing" a "game."

4.  LEAVE COACHING TO THE COACHES. Tina Syer of the Positive Coaching Alliance says, "You're there to fill the kids' emotional tanks and make sure they bounce back from mistakes, not to tweak their throwing motion or tell them where to be on the field." Be smart about choosing coaches tuned in to her age and skill level. If there's a lack of adequate coaches, sign up to volunteer!

5.  BE A MODEL FAN. Think about what you would look like on the sidelines if someone were videotaping you instead of the game. Be sure you (and your daughter) would be proud of what you'd see.

6.  ASK, "WHAT DO WE EACH HOPE TO GET FROM THE EXPERIENCE?" Then tell her what you hope she gets. If you don't talk (and listen), she may assume all you care about is a winning record or how good her stats are. Make sure she knows you want sports to be a fun way to make friends, test herself, be healthy, and feel good about herself.

7.  LET HER PLAY WITH BOYS. In Raising Our Athletic Daughters: How Sports Can Build Self-Esteem And Save Girls' Lives, authors Jean Zimmerman and Gil Reavill suggest utilizing coed or single-sex programs according to your daughter's comfort level and what will contribute most to her learning and growth.

8.  HELP HER USE "MISTAKES" PRODUCTIVELY. When she messes up, she'll look to you first. So illustrate how to put mistakes in perspective by 1) showing her how to let go of them & 2) encouraging (not demanding or requiring) her to use mistakes as motivation to improve her skills.

9.  MAKE SURE GIRLS & BOYS HAVE EQUAL SPORTS OPPORTUNITIES. Support Title IX and encourage school and other sports programs to be aware of and promptly address inequities in opportunities and resources.

10.  KEEP A RELAXED, FUN APPROACH. Team sports teach girls how to be self-reliant while also working collaboratively to be competitive. If she loses interest in sports, you and she can still be physically active together--and there are plenty of other ways to relate and have fun as a Dad-Daughter team.

Learn more about healthy fathering @ www.TheDadMan.com.

I still regularly ask folks around town (Portland) if they read/subscribe to TechCrunch and remain amazed at how many folks have either never heard of it, or, only read it occasionally.  While shamelessly showcasing Panels while I am at it, here are some but of course not all of the interesting tidbits in just the last 24 hrs from the venerable TechCrunch:

• Apple, sans Steve Jobs, featured long time VP Phil Schiller and today has been widely regarded as a relatively lackluster affair. The Macworld Expo keynote in years past has been home to some very major product announcements, including the Macbook Air, the MacBook Pro, and perhaps most notably, the first iPhone. This year was a bunch of new software, a 17” MacBook Pro, and the removal of DRM from iTunes. More…
• Otalo, a vacation rentals search engine site, was just launched and looks impressive. What surprised me about this TC article is that some company called "HomeAway" raised $250 Million (with a valuation of a billion. Vacation rentals, who knew? More...
• Move Networks, which powers the Web video streaming for ABC, Fox, and others, reportedly streamed 180 million hours of premium video last year to 55 million viewers. More…
• Pandora, a free personalized internet radio service that has remained among the most popular iPhone apps on the iTunes App Store since its inception today released Pandora 2.0. According to TechCrunch the application will now include artist biographies, streaming samples for songs you’ve bookmarked, and perhaps most notably, the ability to create a station using a single song (much as you would using the iTunes Genius features). Other features in the new release include a CoverFlow-like view for song history, the ability to share stations with friends using Email, and a song progress bar (which has long been annoyingly absent). More…
• Intel reportedly isn’t happy about 12 Inch NetBooks, according to TechCrunch’s editors, who claim that new models from the likes of Dell, Samsung, and others are becoming more popular with consumers despite their serious limitations. More...

So, there’s five stories yesterday from TechCrunch. Sure there are other stories, and there are many other great tech sites, but for light, fun, informed, and a steady stream of tech news. I'm thinking of doing this once a week with the top web 2.0/software stories for my readers. But in the mean time, visit and/or subscribe to it.

ReadWriteWeb is in this same category of "must read" - I'll post about that useful and more technically oriented blog soon.

P.S. The article is much more useful with Panels, don't you think?

Image via Wikipedia

Now, enter Panels, and a much more interesting way to post about things that are of interest to you and your readers. As you explore these panels, please make sure to try out adding a review yourself right in the panels, and check out the integrated "Yelp" reviews too. So, without further adieu, in the first example that I hope will inspire and inform, are some worthwhile places to experience in Portland, Oregon...

1. Portland has some great restaurants, and while I will save my prioritized top ten list for another post, which clearly leans French, I’d encourage all to visit Sel Gris, Le Pigeon, Fenouil, Fratelli, and the late-night staple, The Gilt Club.  It’s worth noting that Portlanders also have a great local magazine in Portland Monthly, which just launched a comprehensive website that covers everything Portland quite elegantly, and a great blog for serious foodies worth a visit is portlandfoodanddrink.

2. For kids, there is much to do in our wonderful city, but everyone likes a trip to OMSI, The Oregon Zoo, The Children’s Museum for the little ones, and last but not least our annual Rose Festival offers many events each summer.

3. Don’t forget the Arts! Though we don’t go as much as I’d like, the Portland Art Museum is truly Image via Wikipediaa treasure, the Portland Opera and Oregon Ballet are both top notch, and the Oregon Symphony is no slouch either.

4. Portland is a college town (kinda)! Sure, Oregon and Oregon State are not too far away but PSU, UP, Marylhurst, George Fox, and Lewis & Clark College are right here in the Rose City.

5. Beer lovers rejoice year round in Portland with the Oregon Brewer’s Festival (the nation's largest microbrewery celebration) in the summer, the upcoming Portland International Beer Festival, and the winter brings us the Holiday Ale Festival in the heart of downtown. Local downtown microbrewery destinations include the first, Bridgetown Brewing, and the latest pub in "The Pearl District" was opened this year by Deschutes Brewery.

Please let me know what you think about Panels, or even better, try them on YOUR blog!

It was actually the winter of 1999 to be exact, and it was around the time I shook hands with the CEO of ImageX (then a high flying newly public company) to sell my company – Extensis, for about $140 million. Extensis also started and owned CreativePro.com, the first portal for the creative professional market segment. This is important for the story, as you see Extensis/CreativePro.com had grown to be an industry leading, profitable $24 million business selling graphics software to creative professionals all over the world. Funded by Adobe Ventures and H&Q Ventures (now Granite Ventures), we sold to the exact same customers as Adobe and, like them, had millions of users. It was a lot of fun, we built great products and kicked-ass.

This was the same time that the new bubble bible Industry Standard dominated the conversation in our industry. Back then, and for those who didn’t get it or are too young to remember, this magazine was often ½” thick and made it very clear that the web was taking over. “Creative Professionals” in particular were being affected so it dominated my thinking. Print was moving to the web in a big way, banner ads were the rage, and our customers were the ones creating them. We all have our own recollection of what happened next with Internet advertising, but what’s important for the story here is that we recognized as many have since 1999 that banner ads were wrought with problems and the industry needed a solution.

Knowing that I had the proverbial “desk by the door” having just signed to sell my company, I got a lot more serious about solving the “problems with internet advertising.” Dissecting a lot of research available at the time from Jupiter and others, and having a lot of conversations around our proposed solution, we distilled the “problem” down to two main, directly related, reasons why Internet (banner) ads didn’t work:

We developed the “panel” to solve these two problems for any ad of any size from any network. The same problem still exists today, and though some ads are more targeted, these two keys problems persist. The nutritional panel was and remains our model and inspiration. We figured, and tested the hell out of it too, that if people could find out the who/what/where/when/why etc, without clicking or being interrupted – everybody would benefit! Specifically, users would get the info that want/need without leaving the page, Publishers could keep users on the page, and lastly the Advertisers’ ads would ultimately work better. Yes I know there are rollover from Pointroll, and others, we tested all of this before all of that in 2001/2002.

This is what panels looked like then vs. what you see today (examples on this blog.)
This is demo of a panel coming off of a BMW banner ad for the x5, back then our panel was the same width as banners by default. Today our panels are standard white, much smaller, and tabbed rather than specific regions as you see here - though we had tabs then too. You'll also note the "call to action" box on the bottom right, which have not yet exposed in the "new" panel.

We finished the system and rolled it out privately in 2002. And, it worked great, really great in fact. For now I’ll spare the details, but we delivered panels as a component of national campaigns for BusinessWeek, InFocus, and Adidas. Results were amazing. But, investors didn’t care. And we needed them. You see as we rolled it out the bubble had burst and we ushered in the “internet advertising nuclear winter.” We needed about $5 million basically just to turn on the system and run in for a quarter or two. There were just no funds available. “Internet advertising is dead, didn’t you hear?!” I heard this 20 times at least from VCs up and down Sand Hill Road and Highway 101. So, despite stellar results, proven success with real campaigns, there were no funds to be had. Zero. Zilch. Nada.

So, we mothballed the system, and the team and I started another company now called Attensa – focused on Enterprise RSS. We raised a little over $12 million for it over several years, which is not nearly enough for the enterprise business incidentally, but we built a best in class offering nevertheless. I left in April 2007 to focus on resurrecting “panels.”

“We’re getting the band back together”

The team has worked together on a few dozen projects over the past 20 years at Now Software, Extensis, Attensa, and Panels and our software is in use by millions. The guys have won a lot of awards too including various editors’ choice, eddy’s, people’s choice and even an “Apple Design Award.” Panels mainly consists of my long-time collaborator Eric Hayes (CTO), Eric Barnes (BizDEV), Russ Hayes (Web Czar), Kevin Fox (Product Manager/New Guy), and several other all-stars that we'll just have to call the horn section for now.

Panels Network a.k.a. “panels” is what we are now sharing in our public beta and rather than waste the space here just check out the web site at www.panels.net where there is a video demo. We have improved, streamlined, and retrofitted the technology to make blogs considerably more useful than ever before. Early stats and feedback has been phenomenal.

The objective of panels is identical to the original vision of satisfying the readers desire for real-time information, without interruption and doing so in a standard, predictable user interface. Panels is a rich platform, built to scale, and is already making people’s blog reading lives better.

It’s great getting the band back together.

OK, panels was early, sure, but it is by no means too late!

Here’s an excerpt from the letter I sent all of our shareholders about a year ago. 2003 was indeed a very tough time as we were just “too early.” I’ve been doing this for a long time and I’ve entered markets “late” and “just-in-time,” and with Panels we were simply too early. When I say too early, we were not too early for the market, we were too early for venture investors. To be clear, we finished and tested the platform, but the internet advertising bubble had not recovered.

What a difference 6 years makes: Back in 2002, our solution was self-serve (users will never go for it), all text by default (boring), required a line of javascript on web page (too hard, nobody will go for that!), and of course – “internet advertising is dead, didn’t you hear?” Google , especially with AdWords, was able to capitalize on all of these things – we weren’t, but now all of these things are understood and expected. Now, the timing is right for panels. Thanks Google for making all test, self-service, user-first, java script enabled technologies commonplace!

Here’s an excerpt from a letter I wrote to Panels shareholders early this year on our "timing":

Panels Beta 2008 and beyond

Panels is a massively scalable platform designed to give users a standard “nutrition panel” for any object on the internet – starting with breathing life into your blog’s links for businesses, schools, and non-profits. Users love them, they don’t interfere, and they just work! It takes a few minutes to add to any blog and automatically make it, well, amazing!

Our javascript implementation for blogs (and the widget) represents just the tip of the iceberg, as we will be rapidly extending the platform in many directions. As we move the system forward we see a lot of utility and potential with mobile platforms, rich data sources, plug-in clients, and more.

Panels is a game-changer. And we think you'll agree that blogs are much better with them than without them. There’s no reason to not give panels a try.

Please drop me a line any time with thoughts, ideas, comments at cbarnes@panels.net

We have enabled our "community reviews" capability, so to check it out simply go to any panel you encounter and be the first to write a review right inside the panel! Try rolling over this Home Depot panel to get a quick look at the "Reviews" tab! (Look for integrated "Yelp" reviews soon too!)

Widget Preview: Notice here, on the right hand column of this blog, a very early sneak preview of our widget with the heading of "info on some of the things that matter to me." We'll be releasing this widget with a one-click install for the various blogging platforms. Please, try it, roll to see the panel info now!

The panels widget will allow you to proudly display "panels" for things that matter to you...in my example here you'll notice my preferred charities, my Alma Mater, favorite companies, our local zoo, etc. but can include literally and entity of any kind as long as it has a web site. Bloggers will be able to display panels for any of the potentially millions of entities that will grace our system when we roll out live. Other examples so far include a VC that lists all of his portfolio companies, a sports fan shows his or her favorite teams, or even a foodie who's panels display her favorite or recently reviewed restaurants and wines! This is one line of javascript that automatically creates panels based on the link, bloggers do nothing and blog readers benefit!

Panels in Action: Check out IDG SVP Colin Crawford's blog post entitled "2D barcoding poised to take off?" and the truly exciting developments in that emerging sector. This thorough post is a great example of how panels lets the user learn a lot more about a subject, and the industry players, without ever leaving the page. I'll be positing more frequently with results from other blogs that will be rolling out the capability on an ongoing basis. If you are interested in helping us out and I haven't contacted you please contact me at cbarnes@panels.net.

Dear friends, investors, partners, former colleagues, bloggers, and those that may have just stumbled here for the first time…I am ecstatic to informally announce that our latest endeavor, “panels” is close to launch. We’re in a small private beta phase right now so if you’d like to try it out on your blog or web site please contact me ASAP and I’ll get you on the list at cbarnes@panels.net.

In the spirit of “show me” versus tell me... simply roll over any URL that has the panels icon (several are in this post after various company names) to see our standardized information panels.     < Yes, these little blue icons!

Panels appear for any company or organization ranging from the biggest public companies such as Apple, Ford, AT&T, or WalMart to up and coming startups such as WebDiet (launched at the Demo Fall 08 technology conference this week) and Yammer (launched at TechCrunch50 this week and chosen as winner!) By the time we go live there will be millions of entities in the system with improvements and features appearing almost daily.

About “The Panel”

Panels were inspired by the nutritional panels found on food that are mandated by the federal government. Like nutritional panels, our panels have a standard text-centric user interface that delivers consistent, predictable, detailed, real-time information from a variety of data sources across several categories.

Panels’ categories are organized as tabs across the top of the panel and so far we have exposed;

• “About” - Basic company and contact info, URL, logo, and summary (sometimes from aboutus)
• “Site” - A full preview of the home page, stats, tags and other goodies about the actual web site/blog
• “Map” - Beginning with Google Maps, and others to follow, a place for geographic data
• “News” - Headlines, Blog posts, News, Press Releases and more from a variety of sources
• “Jobs” - Employment listings across numerous providers such as monster and simplyhired
• “Financial” - If a public company, real-time info and quotes appear in several sub-categories
• Coming Soon over the next few weeks are “Reviews” and “Shop” - both with some very exciting and useful capabilities
• Site Search - Lastly, notice in the lower left hard corner of our panels, you can easily search just the target site right from here, with results opening up in a new window or tab. Give it a try.

What is the benefit of Panels?

It’s all about the reader, baby! However, everyone benefits in the panels ecosystem; users, publishers, and yes even advertisers. We’ve tested and the people have spoken. Panels make any blog significantly more useful for readers and more successful for the publisher/blogger/website owner because;

• Users will stay on the page because they can get deep information via panels and,
• Clicks on links - including ads - will dramatically increase (and we've seen 10-fold!)

We’re going to start testing it out quietly on a handful of selected blogs and websites in various markets before making a lot of noise or turning on the ability for it to “go viral” - which we hope and expect it will. Not all of the features are in yet, but the panels are already quite useful, and delivering a rewarding user experience and improved metrics by any measure.

Please drop us a line and let us know what you think, or request an invite from me at cbarnes@panels.net

P.S. For fellow Oregonians, tomorrow (Friday September 12) I’ll be at the Silicon Forest Forum at Intel, so please track me down. Same goes for former colleagues at Attensa and Extensis! Look for new features around linkedin.

Thompson writes this about Glen Kelman, Red Fin CEO:

Like some crazed convert, he trumpeted his epiphany: "I honestly believe that if Redfin were stripped absolutely bare for all the world to see, naked and humiliated in the sunlight, more people would do business with us." Follow me, he urged.

All I thought was, wow. That's bold. I like this guy already. I am a very aggressive competitor, and I love going to toe-to-toe with whomever, but sometimes it's the marketplace that needs to be hit over the head. Playing nice (or traditionally) just doesn't work sometimes. Take now for instance, I am spending an inordinate amount of time with powerpoint assisted "water-is-wet-and-the-sky-is-blue" pitches like there is no tomorrow. Changing the status quo is not easy and perhaps "transparency" is a key ingredient for paradigm shifting in high growth markets.

Stealth, Secrecy? Enter Steve Jobs.

Steve Jobs practices the exact opposite of transparency - maybe we could call it paranoid stealthaphrania. To say steve fixed Apple and then some is an understatement. I think we can all agree that for a 1.0 the iPhone is pretty fucking cool. And it was all a secret. Yes, I know he is a CEO rockstar with bottomless pockets and arguably the world's strongest brand - but aside from that lame cube the products coming out of Apple are extraordinary.

So, yes, stealth works. And you don't have to be a rock star in my opinion to reap the benefits.

FeedBurner founder/CEO Dick Costolo talks about why stealth is dead, and transparency is good and he makes some good points, but I am still leaning Jobsian. Make his blog "ask the wizard" a must -read. So, since leaving the CEO post at Attensa in April I've been in stealth and getting ready to write about it. Not sure how I'll go about my blogging yet. But there will be a little bit of RSS in there somewhere! ; )

So, in the PC World article entitled "Companies Tap RSS to Tame Info Overload", Juan Carlos Perez hits the nail on the head about what is going on. Finally.

"The first problem we see addressed regularly with enterprise RSS systems is e-mail overload. Most knowledge workers these days are just about completely fed up with e-mail," said Oliver Young, a Forrester Research analyst.

Also in the past week Network World's Jim Duffy informs his enterprise readers that "Web 2.0 inevitable in the enterprise...", and describes how that with rampant user-driven utilization of web 2.0 technologies, if they are not careful they are going to get caught with their pants down....

"Companies should establish strict guidelines for employees' use of  social-networking platforms, RSS feeds, wikis and mash-ups, the panel participants said. Companies must consider the content and amount of information employees are sharing on easily accessible Web pages."

I have been pitching and explaining this for years, and unfortunately, the main people that don't get that this revolution is happening are INVESTORS. It guess now that is so obvious perhaps it will loosen up investments. But to be clear, e-mail is only part of the problem, RSS is in heavy use in pockets of enterprise companies already, independent of any e-mail overload problems. In the past I posted here a lot on the subject including this one about year ago about the "stellar demand of enterprise RSS." There are many other similar posts.

I am no longer affiliated operationally with Attensa, but with a vested interest I do keep my ear to the ground. Attensa apparently has finally closed a seven figure deal with a major company who will be deploying the enterprise solution to thousands of seats worldwide. Great job folks! Attensa beat out its competitors hands down...and it it only took TWO YEARS. Reportedly other purchase orders are now finally rolling in despite the lack of meaningful marketing spending by the company. This is a clear sign to the meek that the market is "real." That said, this may be a fast-paced, white-hot, changing-all-the-rules Web 2.0 world to many in the media and with the conference-going digerati, but conventional, proven, enterprise-wide sales methodologies are still alive and well - and are a long haul.

Still puzzling to me is Lotus and their new, strange and sometimes cool, Lotus Connections. While interesting they totally missed the mark. The research even says so, so not just my opinion. I wonder if they even spoke to any actual customers. How the hell did they decide to include tagging, blogging, and a wiki environment, and not enterprise RSS. Go figure. SpikeSource's Suite 2.0 got the feature set right, but it is a cobbled together "frankensuite" (as the folks at Jive Software called it.) Incidentally, s far as Jive goes, their ClearSpace is worth a look for installations who want a rapidly deployed, affordable suite for collaboration (though like Lotus Connections it is sans RSS enterprise capabilities.)

As far as Enterprise RSS via Suite 2.0, I dont see big business biting other than those early, early in the cycle that realize there is nothing else out there from one vendor that does just the critical stuff...that said, and to make matters worse, Suite 2.0 isn't even on one platform, as most of Suite 2.0 is apparently on the LAMP stack, Attensa competitor NGES is all .net. Ugh.

Looks like Enterprise RSS is here. Some of us already knew. But hey, ROCK ON!

At Attensa we've raised some $12 MM to date, and I'm going to guess based on press releases that NewsGator has raised around $20 MM and KnowNow (for this effort anyway) raised about $10 MM. For all of the companies one thing I know for sure, it is not nearly enough. Not even close. The opportunity is the enterprise and it has always taken tens of millions and very long sales cycles. The real bitch with enterprise RSS is that only a few investors are drinking the Kool-Aid; Mobius, RSS Investors, SmartForest, MastHead, KPCB and a few others. I've been in the business a long time and I can attest to this - enterprise RSS does not impress investors. Investors don't see the "pain." Companies, they DO see it, the inquiries from major corporations are considerable. Having the necessary capital to go after the business however is the hard part.

All of us (though for the record I left Attensa in April) have done a lot of pitching about not only the future of RSS in the enterprise, but that it is in fact here now. It is still early, and there remains a lot of tire-kicking, but the potential is clearly huge. Unfortunately, and in my opinion, the vast majority of venture folks see RSS as a big garbage truck driving by and pay it no attention. At least I took a picture.

Winer's first post was spot on, in my opinion. I have had these same thoughts and similar conversations with others over the past 6 months or so. There is new FUD out there now since Google's acquisition of FeedBurner, and with good reason, and Winer articulates it clearly in this post;

So now someone at Google "owns" Feedburner and all their feeds. And they could, if they wanted to, change the feeds to another format, overnight, without asking anyone. Reader software might have trouble working with it. They would say "Oh but the new feeds work better with Google Reader, and that's the one most people use." And by the way, more and more that's true these days. But what about other feed suppliers? Do they have to change to work with Google Reader? They will say no, but there may turn out to be practical reasons why they must.

The second post ponders how "doesn't work as well" can lead to "not at all"...

"It's quite possible in the second or third iteration that Google drops support for non-Feedburner feeds. It wouldn't be unprecedented, far from it. Google Blogoscoped has a list of Google products that "prefer" other Google products. I've never seen Google not do this when they had the chance. The instant they bought Blogger they tied it to their toolbar. If they had used an open API the toolbar would have worked with all blogging tools. Google just doesn't think that way, sorry to say."

I think businesses of all shapes and sizes, especially larger commercial publishers and the G2000 at large, need to take a very serious look at replacing FeedBurner (just to be prudent) given the relentless focus of Google on monetizing properties with targeted advertising. Businesses can still opt out and get their data, and I'm betting many of the will. In the meantime, I like FeedBurner and not going anywhere - because I can't they are still the only game in town!

What would take me away? an iPhone. What you say? Yes, an "iPhone." It's an analogy. So let me put it this way. I've had several Treos over the years, and, loved them all for the most part. Thankfully, several years back Steve Jobs and some other people at Apple tried the Treo too. They in turn realized that there was 1) a lot wrong with the Treo and 2) there was the potential to do a lot more. I mean, A LOT more. Now the Treo feels like an 8 track tape player.

FeedBurner will be "Appled" just like the Treo was. There are just too many ways to make it all work better.