unstruc chitchatting about information delivery

This Ain't your Mother's Craft Fair

2011-12-18T21:17:00.000-08:00

This weekend i headed over to the Renegade Holiday Craft Fair in San Francisco. In general i love crafty gatherings, from the beloved summer street fairs to special events like the one i went to today, i always get inspired and of course find some scores that i would never fine anywhere else.

One thing that i noticed is that this wasn't your typical holiday craft fair of yesteryear. Here are some of the highlights:

- Many reclaimed items made from recycled materials- these crafters are reusing materials from drum symbols and skateboards (yes i got me one of those) to vintage chair upholstery and creating beautiful items

- Almost every vendor had a Square (or similar) credit card reader- no more 'i don't have enough cash'- a good thing because some things were quite high-end and costly

- and last , more and more i am becoming a fan of etsy- the craft fair was a in person etsy convention- the majority of the vendors i took a close look at had an etsy store.

So aside from some new things i bought, i am also feeling pretty crafty- with a stayaction coming up for the holidays i am looking forward to some creative time- now off to look around the house for items that i can reclaim and get started with.

The Dead of a Pair of Pumps and How Dreamforce has Become an Executive Conference

2011-09-01T09:45:00.000-07:00

I have been going to Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference for about 7 years in one form or another- from a full conference attendee, to a expo vendor, a virtual attendee and a keynote/expo attendee which i did again this year. Moscone center is nearby the office and I find it extremely valuable to attend conferences- great for networking and for seeing and hearing first hand what the big vendors or technologies are coming up with.

Last night after putting the baby to sleep, I was catching up on my work after spending the majority of the day at dreamforce and was watching the tweet stream from #df11. It was late and the conference attendees where at the Metallica gala concert. Pretty entertaining tweets- from 'they handed out earplugs as we walked in' to the always entertaining @jowyang 's tweet:

But these funny observations was something I had noticed myself- a lot of suits and slick back hair. Now I am not against this (maybe the slick back hair I don't particularly like but whatever it's better then a mullet)- and I myself wear 'proper' business dress to all conferences since I am always running into clients. But I thought the conference looked like more business types then before (I refuse to believe that developers are wearing suits now a days- but they seem to have upgraded to the standard valley dress of khaki's and button downs).

My friend Kevin Marks, who is now at Salesforce and was wearing a snazy jacket, pointed out that Dreamforce11 had all the developer sessions in Moscone West while the business sessions where in Moscone North - we were chatting in the north area and I agreed - and there were a lot of suits there.

With 47,000 attendees, there was a different feeling- Dreamforce seems to me to be a growing must attend for top execs- from the hallway and expo floor conversations I observed . I am sure the developers sessions are still important but the "visionary" stuff that Marc Benioff (CEO) is pushing seems to be working on these guys (yes mostly guy- and yes it was nice to see Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts on stage and loved her talk on the Social Enterprise). All the keynotes are now available on YouTube.

Anyway- on the way from Moscone West to Moscone North through the massive crowds- a street grate got the best of my most beloved shoes- the ones I wear to every conference because they are the most comfortable- I would say that over the years (do I dare admit that these shoes at around 10yrs old?!!)- these shoes have seen hundreds of keynotes and strolled through miles and miles of expo halls- from the small intimate conferences like the beloved defrag to the biggie 'close out Disney World' Gartner conferences.

I will miss you dear shoes.

PS: for those lady friends of mine who we have discussed that the Shoe Mender is a girl's best friend and good shoes are worth fixing and over again. This pair has spent its share of time at the shoe repair shop- this morning as I walked past Jack's shoe repair on market street on the way to the office I suddenly almost had a change of heart- but no their time has come. (Sounds like a trip to DSW is called for!)

Notes from my 5 Minutes of Internal Twitter Fame

2011-08-12T09:25:00.000-07:00

I had five minutes to share some 'best practices' and 'real-life' twittering stories with my fellow co-workers on an internal Twitter 101 Session that our Social Media Marketing Manager put together. The attendees where mostly sales and marketing colleagues. It is a relatively new program we have in place, and i applaud them for taking this step. They went through general how-tos which would be useful for any new user.

My notes outline follows at the request of @tjsweeney to share some context of what i talked about.

I have been tweeting since March 2007, currently have 2,811 followers (since the presentation it has gone up to 2821) and have over 4,000 tweets (so tweeting for 1601 days so an average of 2.5 tweets a day)
I started tweeting during the famous 2007 SXSW Twitter tipping point- where Twitter hit 'mainstream' well the mainstream of Silicon valley that is. During that conference, tweets went from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000 tweets per day. We all shook our heads and said how will i manage all this? Today there are over 200 million tweets per day. I still find value every day in my tweet stream.
I use Twitter to be smarter, hopefully provide some value to my followers and to help me build my personal 'brand'
How do i let people know i tweet? Beyond engaging with them if they are on Twitter, i link at bottom of my corporate and personal email (currently linking to my aboutme page) and also tie it into my LinkedIn account- when i tweet it gets posted there- provides a somewhat different follower list
I currently use Tweetdeck to manage my streams, Blackberry Twitter or Twitter Ipad when i am on the road. Flipboard i use mostly in the evenings to catch up on my evening 'tweets' and deeper reads
Have various saved searches on Tweetdeck (e.g. Competitive Intelligence, Librarians, Supply Chain, Enterprise Sales, semantic web) and follow companies and people who are prospects/clients or just plain smart peeps.
Lists are very helpful, and there are a lot of wonderfully curated lists or you can create your own and make them private or public
Hashtags- for example to follow a conference like #sla2011 , even if you are not there you can still 'attend' and interact
I use bit.ly to shorten my URLs and find their tracking data very valuable to see how many clicked on my link.
I have many Clients who follow me- i can see that they follow me but they also tell me- often before a meeting starts instead of talking about the weather we might talk about a certain tweet i made earlier in the day- and vice versa- i try not to get on the phone with a client without checking their 'output channel'
I have clients who Direct Message (DM) me and i might do the same to them i find the engagement and response rate to be much higher
To my last point, Twitter has a big vanity aurora around it. regardless of who you are you want to see who retweeted, @ed you, DMd you , favortied your tweet- instantaneously
I spend a lot of time finding (mostly through google search although i recently found the twitter advanced search feature) and listening to what prospects may be saying . One thing i try to do sometimes is wait for someone to tweet something - then i know they are in front of a device (laptop,mobile,table etc.)- per my previous vanity point, they want to see who replied. i might not reply through twitter because what i want to talk to them about is not a conversation to start there - but i might send an email or give them a ring because i can assume they are working on their 'device' and are connected

My last point and probably the most important for people in sales and marketing was to be authentic. For example, i follow our Twitter brand accounts , i retweet things from the Dow Jones twitter accounts that MY followers will find valuable not as an advertising . I have seen others do a dis-service to themselves and the company by blatantly retweeting or promoting product specific things and nothing else. It is ok for the brand twitter account to do that but your personal account needs a good mix of personal and business.

Tweet away my friends.

The Flipboard Experience Will Become a Regular Way to Consume Content

2010-10-25T14:07:00.000-07:00

Here is a prediction: It might not be called Flipboard- but the Flipboard experience will become a format for publishing content, just like today content producers publish content in PDF, Word documents, video embeds, etc.

This weekend here in the Bay area was nothing special thanks to all the rain. We certainly need it so the rain was welcomed and did stay away from most of the Neil Young Bridge School Benefit on Saturday which was nice since that was the only outside plans i had. So Sunday was a perfect day to sit on the couch (when the baby was napping) and spend some quality time with the iPad. Flipboard continues to be my favorite and most used App on my iPad (that is my own usage otherwise it is Angry Birds and Peek-a-boo Barn- you decided which one is addicted to what ;-)

I really enjoy the experience of using Flipboard- if you haven't had the pleasure i have embedded a well done video that will show you the general idea of how Flipboard works. The idea is that Flipboard becomes a living changing social magazine- of things that you are interested in and your network is pushing to you. The content of course is only as good as the 'feeds' you add/follow, and the network you currently follow on twitter and facebook- but the interaction with the content is just beautiful.

Aside from the interaction with the content being visually stimulating, i think it is the alignment with how i enjoy and productively consume content- yes many times i still print out things to read because on a flat screen i have troubles consuming it, the Flipboard experience i think changes that.

Now applications like CoverPad who has a new add-on for Wordpress are coming out with tools to make your content act like Flipboard which i think will lead to other tools that will easily allow content produces to provide a Flipboard like experience for their content consumers.

Imagine a user using a tablet with touch screen visits:

your corporate website, they quickly flip through your product offerings, customer stories etc.
your employees visit your corporate intranet and flip through articles from corporate (video included), HR announcements, sales wins, product brochures, proposals etc. (how cool would a SharePoint add-on be??)
your customers visit your retail store, (e.g. REI, Nordstroms) and flip through your catalogs.
Your daily newsletters (internal and external) are sent out and the content consumers interact with them by flipping through current and past 'issues'
Any many other ways....

Content creation will need to be richer on the production side so producers need to think about that, just like Instapaper and other "read it later" services i believe will change the way online content is written.

Some of you may say, hey Daniela isn't this something the Client Solutions group at Dow Jones can do? Well yes, i sent a note out to corporate a couple weeks back and heard crickets- but we have a lot going on so i need to re-ping. Plus the way we work best (and fast) is to have a client who wants/needs. So i need to find a good use case that we can test this on!

My ebooks now self 'published' on Scribd

2010-10-24T21:03:00.000-07:00

Finally got around to uploading my ebooks to Scribd which is a service that provides social reading and publishing that has a easy to use interface for users and content owners.

The following two ebooks i wrote while working at Dow Jones (where i am still currently). One is about Hybrid Approaches to taxonomies and folksonomies in the enterprise that came out in 2008 and the other one is about how social media is changing the enterprise which i co-wrote with Robert Scoble, Shel Israel and Greg Merkle in 2009.
~enjoy!
The Taxonomy Folksonomy Cookbook: Finding the Right Recipe for Organizing Metadata

You can also view the French Version of the Taxonomy Folksonomy ebook.

Conversational Corporation: How Social Media is Changing the Enterprise

You can also view the French version of the Conversational Corporation ebook.

More Twitterers Following then Getting their Fingers Dirty with Newspaper Print

2010-10-22T08:47:00.000-07:00

Currently the New York Times has fewer print readers than Twitter followers.

"The last set of figures released, on 31st March 2010, put the New York Times’ print circulation at 951,063 and reports this week say revenue from circulation is in decline. However, with 2.6 million followers, the paper’s Twitter account is a roaring success. Particularly when you compare it to its rivals."

Following on Twitter could be something pretty passive especially for people who follow many, while physically picking up a paper (and having to go to the store to buy even more) is definitely not passive. I think a more interesting statistic to compare to print readers would be what the referring traffic is from Twitter to the New York Times site and engagement time- how long does a consumer spend reading the physical paper and how long does a vistior that comes from Twitter spend on NYTimes.com?

Image|Flickr|Jarjan

Creative Interesting Work on the Internet

2010-10-17T22:54:00.000-07:00

The world is full of interesting things that intersect with technology on the internet. Every once in a while if you have good filters (for me it is usually real humans i follow on twitter) you get interesting links that will bring you to a site that will wow- you. This presentation from the Creative Lab at Google has over 100 'interesting' things on the web- from a combination of pure technology to interaction with 'real' life, art, music etc.

Make sure you use full Screen version for best experience since the embed below plays and the full version you can control easier.

It has a lot of content in it- and a bit hard to consume. A couple of things i would have been liked which i believe are just limitations of Google docs:

The ability to link to specific pages , the URL is static for the whole presentation. There is a move to slide feature but you can't link to specific slides.
Someway to record the slide # you like- besides the stickie on my desk
A table of Contents (probably not a technical limitation just a manual process for 120 slides that a google creative person probably would rather not spend time doing!)- but even the top level categories (Audio,Tech, Sports, Politics, Books, History, etc.) could have been valuable to get through the entire presentation

Working Mamas

2010-09-23T15:15:00.000-07:00

Whenever i think about being a full-time working mother (mind you all mothers are 'working' mothers), I feel really lucky that the company i work for supports working mothers regardless of their roles. I think a big reason is that we are a global company, and our side of the business (formally Factiva) was from the start a Dow Jones/ Reuters company with a large European staff. Now that we are NewsCorp, and even bigger global company, i feel there is still good support for working mothers that perhaps is better then other American companies based on my experience of having a kid 9 months ago. My colleagues around the world however do have better benefits and longer paid maternity leave then we do here in the states, but obviously that is because our government does not support mothers (and fathers) like other countries.

Yesterday morning, on my Mamas Circle mailing list i received a note about Lucia Ronzulli. Ronzulli is an Italian politician representing her country at the European Commission, i don't know what her day to day politics are and for this post it doesn't matter. On September 22nd she attended a Commission meeting carrying her 1-month old baby in a wrap as you see in this picture. According to the note i got, she got applause by all her politician colleagues, and then requested better rights for working mothers in Europe.

This picture made my day, probably my week.

CAPTCHAs are not just Crummy or Lame they do good (and already make revenue)

2010-09-20T15:15:00.000-07:00

Just saw this on Techmeme about CAPTACHAs turning into yet another advertising banner. CAPTACHAs are the text strings that Web sites often force you to read and retype for security reasons. Peter Kafka calls them 'Crummy' others, 'lame' - that could possibly be improved with what Solve Media is trying to bring to the market as ad units that are easier to read.

But CAPTACHAs have another purpose and are already making revenue as i blogged about in August 2008:

The Effort is to help digitalize print and is quite interesting use of the technology that many people just find annoying (i tend to enjoy the challenge!):

"Efforts to digitize (really) old books and newspapers were being hampered by faded ink that confounded OCR software. The solution Luis von Ahn came up with was to use the words that the software couldn’t recognize and insert them into these so-called reCAPTCHAs and use the power of human brains to decipher them. CAPTCHAs serve up two words, one is the security word, the other goes toward the book digitization effort."

The New York Times is using this service to digitalize their archive that goes back to the 1800s (and paying for it). This ReCAPTCHA service as been a project at Carnegie Mellon where the CAPTCHA technology was born (but is being spun out as its own company) . The project is also doing work for free for the Internet Archive’s project to digitize every book published before 1980 which is pretty cool.

[Edited] - adding another CAPTCHA for good, a prototype from a reply to my post by @kentbrewster : Missing Kids CAPTCHA -- a Hack for Goo d

Aside from not wanting to see more advertising on websites i visit, i would also miss the inappropriate CAPTCHAs that pop-up every once in a while but perhaps they can be replaced with inappropriate advertising....

Enterprise Social Bookmarking Neglected Stepchild

2010-09-02T12:10:00.000-07:00

Luis Suarez is the Knowledge Manager, Community Builder & Social Computing Evangelist in the IBM Software Group division and has a great blog and Twitter feed that always has great tidbits on enterprise adoption of 2.0 tools, especially within the realm of knowledge management. IBM has always been an early and successful adopter of enterprise 2.0 tools.

Via the ReadWriteWeb Twitter Feed i saw this post from Suarez on the The Business Case for Enterprise Social Bookmarking: $4.6 Million a Year in Cost Savings! . Nothing like throwing those kind of numbers to get someone interested in reading more. The numbers he references are from 2008, but i agree with the point that he makes that enterprise social tagging/ bookmarking keeps gets ignored but is still an important and rather critical part of a successful Enterprise 2.0 adoption strategy.

If you have been reading my blog for a while you know that i have always been an advocate of social tagging and in 2008 published an ebook on Hybrid Approaches of using Folksonomy (social tagging) and Taxonomy in the Enterprise.

Image|Flickr| AMagill

National Breastfeeding Month: Whip 'Em Out!

2010-08-29T09:17:00.000-07:00

A little late on my public service announcement since August is almost over, but August is National Breastfeeding Month. World Breastfeeding Week was August 1st-7th, but i guess here in the states we have extended it to the whole month (good because we need more awareness of the benefits of breastfeeding!) . Hey what the hell, let's celebrate it all year around- knockers that's what they are for!

Yes I Did It and It Feels Great (and Productive)

2010-08-28T13:33:00.000-07:00

Saturday afternoon. Ramona is asleep taking her afternoon nap. Me? I got tons to do but am sitting on the sofa playing with my iPad so I thought I would give Blogger (the platform my blog is hosted on) a try.

I unwrapped my iPad on wednesday taking the day off to enjoy my new toy and spend the day with the kid. I proceeded to do more YouTube watching of Elmo's song then anything else as my 8 month old is already asserting her control of the iPad as a toy that I will have to share with her. So be it, on my list of why I should get one was that she could play baby games on it.

I didn't rush out to buy the iPad - I actually did not buy it, my husband sick of hearing me talk about the pros and cons, if I should wait for the next version (primarily because of the camera) came home with it on Monday - there was no reason to return it once it was in the house. I am a lucky girl. I do like Apple products, our home computer is a Mac, I have an iTouch (which I won but probably would have bought) but work revolves around windows and blackberry and those are big parts of my digital life.

I am going to love my iPad for personal use, consuming content from browsing the web, reading books, playing games, watching videos, etc. But straight away i feel that this is a great tool for work as well. I have only had my iPad for 4 days, but I have already used it at two client meetings and sketched an outline of a solution I am putting together for a client (using sketchbook pro app). One of the meetings i had to be on the 3G network in downtown San Francisco, which was slow as a turtle which was disappointing but expected. The other i displayed a presentation in PDF format that i had emailed myself and it worked fine. Keynote is one of my next Apps that i need to download.

Aside from being a good tool for client meetings it is important for me to know and understand consuming media on a device such as this because it will go beyond the iPad to other devices and this will happen quickly. Our customers are already starting to aggressively ask about iPad solutions (especially for the executive set who tend to be early adopters and important consumers of our content delivery solutions). Lucky for me, because of our alignment with the digital content side of our consumer business (the folks that brought us the WSJ iPad app) we already are a few steps ahead of the game in delivering.

A recent Wall Street Journal article 'Businesses Add iPads to Their Briefcases' on how
"Some Companies, Which Barred the iPhone, Build Apps for Tablet Computer and Give Apple Gadget to Employees" points into the direction this will be going, hopefully i didn't jump the gun too early and miss the handing out of iPads by corporate? (ok ok i would just have two :-)

Note: I had to jump on my computer to do some of the links, Blogger works but it could either be my inexperience with the iPad (e.g. copy and paste), or it is just not not optimized which i reckon will be the case with many sites and services on the web that do not have native Apps. i am ok with that.

A little Friday learning with HTML5

2010-08-27T15:57:00.000-07:00

Although Summer ends closer to the end of September, traditionally the last friday of August is the last day of "summer" as the mind-shift shifts to Fall. Work on friday however is just as important in the summer as any other day of the week according to our leader here at Dow Jones (which i honestly agree with) so today a little Friday learning for all of us.

I used to have a small .txt file that had all the HTML tags that i thought people should know regardless if they ever had a chance to code a web page. Things like how to bold and italic text, add images, links etc. Useful tips for adding rich text to web forms, text inputs etc.

This blog post on HTML5 for journalists reminded me of my well distributed .txt file and perhaps the need to update it once again. If you have heard about HTML5 it is probably because of the HTML5 Video element for playing videos and movies that directly competes with Flash. The Spec being worked on by the W3C goes way beyond video and its a great opportunity to create mark-up that will moves us towards the semantic web by adding valuable semantic meaning to your pages in non-structural ways which is typical of HTML

Martin Belam's post is targeted to journalists (he is an Information Architect at the Guardian) but relevant to everyone that is producing content for online distribution and outlines some key markup that HTML5 is making standard. Here are some of the elements he highlights that are interesting:

aside, is used to mark-up something tangentially related to the main body of text. In a news context, that might represent a factbox, some links to related stories, or a sidebar detailing the key points of a story's timeline.
details is intended to provide a way of including extra content or information that can be optionally expanded or collapsed by the user. That might be something like additional information about an album release, or the opening times of an exhibition.
replicate the print feature of having an image, chart or diagram that sits in the main flow of content, but that is not actually part of the main article. These elements will be marked-up as a figure, with figcaption specifying, as it suggests, a caption to go with the image.
mark tag provides a way to highlight or signify text. Visually you can style it however you want, although a yellow highlighter pen effect seems to be the favourite so far, but the point is to allow you to distinguish portions of text.

At the bottom of his post he also points out some other articles on the subject that are good reads if you want to dig deeper. There are over 100 elements in the HTML5 specs that the W3C that is working on and the HTML5 draft is also a good reference point. Of course RDFa specifications are also being recommended as an add-in to HTML5.

HTML5 is early in its use in the wild but with the W3C making progress (and yes of course there is always some controversy that they have to work through) to finalizing the spec hopefully web developers who understand the value will start making more use of it- so get yourself ready....

Image|Flickr|justinsomnia

What You Need To Know About Data Portability

2010-08-12T17:16:00.000-07:00

As many of you know i have been involved with the DataPortability Project from the start being one of the co-founders and the first chairperson of the board/steering committee. Having Ramona last December pulled me back from a lot of my DataPortability duties and since i have gone back to work my time continues to be limited- but one thing that has not changed is my belief that Data Portability is a topic that both users and service providers should not only be aware of but have standards to implement.

In June of this year we launched the DataPortability Policy after many months of work .The heart of the Portability Policy is a set of plain language questions that should become a common vocabulary between software users and providers. Through these questions, a provider can disclose what they do or do not, to enable data portability and the users can have a clear understanding of what they are about to 'sign-up' for as they select new services to share their data.

Elias Bizannes, the current chairperson just posted an article on Mashable titled "What You Need To Know About Data Portability" that is a good read as it gives an overview of why it should matter for both users and companies. As Elias writes, the technology to enable data portability exists but what we lack, is a cultural acceptance that a company opening up your data to competing services is beneficial. Coverage of the topic on well read sites like Mashable will help this discussion proceed even further!

Don't Read your Daily Newspaper Any More? Then Just Wallpaper Your Room with It.

2010-07-27T08:58:00.000-07:00

Mathew Ingram over at GigaOM posted this morning that Newspapers have hit new low as an information source according to a survey by the The Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism.

Is your daily paper collecting dust in the corner? Thinking of canceling your subscription for sure now since none of your 'friends' can discuss the paper with you?

Please don't, you can now wallpaper your office or house by recycling read or even unread paper, don't worry your guests won't know that you get all your news online. (according to the same report a growing number of Internet users do not believe that information they find online is reliable.)

All kidding aside, it is pretty cool wallpaper.

Meeting face to face with 8,475 miles/ 13,637 km between us

2010-07-08T21:07:00.000-07:00

I have been doing business with global companies for many years and remember the excitement of the early days of the built-in conference room video systems. I always thought video conferencing was helpful to touch base with clients or internal colleagues at other locations- seeing someone speak was worth the effort of setting those systems up (yeah you know it, they never worked without getting the local IT person involved!). In today's world with Skype or web-enabled screen sharing/video sharing technologies, many meetings have a certain element of 'seeing' the other attendees at a very low cost so many of us settle for using them to get that extra interaction in our meetings.

If you read my profile in this month's 'Faces' column in EContent magazine you know that some of my favorite work days are when i am on-site with clients drilling down on requirements. So tie an on-site with using cool technology and there was no doubt that i would truly enjoy my meeting this afternoon.

Thanks to HPs Halo telepresence system, 8,475 miles / 13,637 km didn't stop me from having a frank and honest discussion- and honestly it felt pretty close to having the other person in the room while sitting in one of the HP Halo conference rooms.

It did take a bit to get 'used to it' (mostly because i was interested in the setup, camera angles etc) but the things i liked the best were:

that there was no image of myself (or the others in the room) on the screens which i always find distracting.
the person was presented 'life-size'
eye contact and verbal cues were easy to read just like if a person was in the room
within a very short time, i forgot about the 'technology' and was just having a conversion

We didn't share any screens or presentations so i would be interested in seeing what that experience is like. The good thing is that we agree to do more meetings using Halo going forward, which is quite alright with me!

The "Face" of EContent for July and August

2010-07-02T13:51:00.000-07:00

I was delighted when Nancy Davis Kho over at EContent Magazine contacted me a couple months back to tell me that she had chosen me for her Faces of EContent column (visit her personal site for an overview of more on her writing including pieces in The San Francisco Chronicle). I have read many of Nancy's articles before and we have also had good conversations at various content related conferences about enterprise content trends and opportunities.

So via Twitter (ah how else!) i was notified by @daviskho and @graubart that my profile has been published in the July/August Faces of EContent. I take responsibility for that oh not so great photo, we wanted an action shot in the office and this is the best i could do - at least i am smiling!

On a Digital Vacation: Be Back Soon

2010-06-05T20:05:00.000-07:00

Image|Flickr|Giorgio Montersino

Sunday Morning Readings : May 16th 2010

2010-05-16T10:56:00.000-07:00

---apophenia: Facebook is a utility; utilities get regulated [good argument about looking at Facebook as a utility, hence it needs to be regulated. i agree that facebook is a 'utility' powered by its users data. without the data they have nothing except the "assembly line" to make that data useful. Fair enough then they provide value but as the Electronic Frontiers Foundation says : “The information you put into social networking sites is yours, and you should be able to access it, export it, and aggregate it as you please,”but alas Facebook claims data portability is criminal. Author danah boyd's "research examines social media, youth practices, tensions between public and private, social network sites, and other intersections between technology and society." and is a must read resource for lucid discussion on these issues. For the time being (and from the start of my facebook usage- i really don't share anything private that is not already public somewhere else on facebook)

---Washington Post: New baby boom fosters culture clash: Parents vs. public spaces. Babies in bars never bothered me but i think a lot of it has to do with my up bringing as i remember being in taverns in Portugal as a very young child- but also like in Portugal, in California we are allowed to drink in most eating establishments and a lot of bars serve food- so bars can be family establishments. When we first moved to California from New Jersey one of the things that i was pretty happy about was being able to drink beer at the pizza joint- although the pizza was crap, the beer was cold and on tap. Brooklyn is having these fights as well based on this article Brooklyn brewhaha: Babies in bars. On the dogs in the park, interfering with kids and vice versa- as a dog owner (of a huge great dane) i agree, both parents and dog owners need to control their broods. On it being a baby boom- hell yeah, San Francisco is producing babies like a bunny farm you can't go anywhere without seeing top end strollers and daddy baby wearers. All good.
---WebNewser: NBC's Today Connects With Foursquare. Another Media company leveraging the location based service Foursquare. [see: Location, location, etc: What does the WSJ’s Foursquare check-in say about the future of location in news?] I am too square to be on foursquare. look at my profile above, 0 0 0 0 check-ins like a zero down car commercial. ok maybe i am not so square but over the last few months i have rarely left the house unless i am going to the store, to see clients or go for a neighborhood walk. i also am one of those people that feels unsure about showing my every location for various reasons (security, privacy, annoyance with strangers). But none the less, i just registered because i have been paying attention and agree that it is a "shift in the platform/content relationship" [Nieman Journalism Lab]

---New York Times: Google Tells Sites for ‘Cougars’ to Go Prowl Elsewhere. Just when i thought that women's sexuality equality was making progress with my support for Cougars (although it comes with giggles often when i see it play out- but to be fair the same reaction goes for those sugar daddy's) 'Go Cougars'- Google shuts it down.

and quick videos (yes i watch videos and read at the same time, while drinking coffee and nursing a baby-multi-tasking at its best):
---Musings of a VC in NYC: Draw Your Ideas. A video of Jack Dorsey (Twitter co-founder)- a bit if how Twitter started and advice: draw out your ideas before you start coding them.

---Mashable: The Semantic Web: What It Is and Why It Matters.
Image|Flickr|Andreas W

From the Young to the Old: Why the iPad is Revolutionary

2010-04-23T10:37:00.000-07:00

A 2.5 Year-Old Uses an iPad for the First Time

iPad has 'changed' 99-year-old woman's life

Sorry To All the Charlies and the Other Followers

2010-04-10T10:07:00.000-07:00

Every Morning /Afternoon/ Evening that i don't tweet, i feel guilty. The other day someone asked me if i had become a weekend tweeter (is that like a weekend warrior i wonder?) and i answered with my stock answer, no i am just too busy- work, new motherhood, sleep, and of course i am still 'listening' (thank goodness for TweetDeck). But not tweeting good content, still makes me feel guilty for not providing more value to my followers because i get so much value from the people i follow.

In addition to all my followers (current count 2,145), I am currently also listed on 109 Twitter lists (unfortunately i can't figure out how to view all 109 but when i do i will update the list below!), some pretty impressive ones that i am proud to be on include:

@techmama/tech-moms curated by @techmama
@techpundits curated by @Scobleizer
@all-the-geeky-ladies curated by @StephanieBamBam
@top-web-devs curated by @carsonified
@techwomen curated by @sarahebourne

So good morning Twitter friends and here is a blanket sorry to all the Charlies and the other followers....i won't feel guilt anymore. It is what it is at this point. hope what i have to offer is good enough for you to stick around. thanks for understanding.

Image|Flickr|Earl- What I Saw 2.0

MediaGazer a New Addiction

2010-03-31T22:23:00.000-07:00

I have been a HUGE fan of Techmeme for a while and now i have a new addiction from the Techmeme team with Mediagazer their aggregated view of coverage about the media business. Well done!

From their about section:

Mediagazer presents the day's must-read media news on a single page.

The media business is in tumult: from the production side to the distribution side, new technologies are upending the industry. Keeping up with these changes is time-consuming, as essential media coverage is scattered across numerous web sites at any given moment.

Mediagazer simplifies this task by organizing the key coverage in one place. We've combined sophisticated automated aggregation technologies with direct editorial input from knowledgeable human editors to present the one indispensible narrative of an industry in transition.

David vs. Goliath Battle for 100 year old Palms

2010-03-26T11:23:00.000-07:00

This fall i moved into a new neighborhood in Pacifica called Vallemar and we absolutely love it- especially the gorgeous large trees that line the neighborhood streets. So it was quite upsetting to hear a couple months back that PG&E was going to cut down up to 11 trees immediately due to issues with the power lines.

Of course the trees were there before the utility poles were put up by PG&E in 1950s, and although there are not as many as there used to be they are still core to the community identity so a good old David vs. Goliath battle to save these 100 year old Canary Palms as begun:

And i hope you can join us in the battle either by:

Giving a Tax deductible donation that will be used to relocate utility poles, avoiding the palm tree removal [would $ have helped David in his battle i wonder??]
Showing up this Palm Sunday [how appropriate!] from 12-2pm at the corner of Reina del Mar and Nataqua in Pacifica, where kids and adults will gather, collecting donations of books and money for the cause

From a Community announcement by Elizabeth Sendil :
---------------------------------
This Sunday, March 28th, in a David vs. Goliath face-off, a group of children and concerned citizens will be gathering in a Pacifica, California neighborhood for a book recycling and fundraising effort to save 11 century old palm trees from being cut down by PG&E. Kids 4 Change, a non-profit children's group which performs charitable services and funding, voted unanimously to make saving the palms their current cause. They will be rallying Sunday with other children and adults to raise awareness about the fate of the trees they love.

The trees, Canary Island Palms, were planted in this urban forest, circa 1906, more than 50 years before the city was incorporated. Stunning in appearance with large fronds that drape majestically from the crown, the trees are threatened not by disease but by poor urban planning. Though they are only one third of the way through their estimated 300 year lifespan, on Tuesday night, Pacifica's Parks, Beaches, and Recreation Commission voted to allow PG&E to kill the first 3 of these trees because the city does not have the money to move the utility poles or underground the wires which are at risk of becoming a safety hazard. The core issue is that the trees have now grown close enough to PG&E's high voltage lines to present a fire and electrocution hazard. Citizens have argued that this was a foreseeable consequence of placing lines directly above these trees, which have, naturally, grown taller. As of now, PG&E is not willing to fund environmentally friendly solutions such as redirecting lines, extending poles, or undergrounding the wires.

In the past 50 years, hundreds of trees have been removed from the rarefied tree-laden neighborhood of Vallemar, many of which were sick, or at the end of their lifespans. Now the remaining healthy palms are at risk only because PG&E placed power lines directly in their line of growth, and the severe trimming required would kill them. Concerned citizens and Kids 4 Change are now joining with a local non-profit, the Vallemar Conservators, which has been working for decades to save and replace the lost grandeur, has been working hard to raise awareness of this situation in hopes of finding a solution other than removal of the trees.

Anyone who is interested in tree conservation is invited to join Kids 4 Change and the Conservators on Palm Sunday, March 28, for the kick-off event, from 12-2pm at the corner of Reina del Mar and Nataqua in Pacifica, where kids and adults will gather, collecting donations of books and money for the cause. The book sale will take place on April 17th, in the same neighborhood, and all proceeds will go towards saving the trees.

To learn more about the palm crisis go to www.vallemarpalms.com. And to donate or learn more about Kids 4 Change please visit their website www.kids4change.org. All monies raised between now and April 17th will go to saving the palm trees.

-----------------------------

Images|Wikipedia|David & Goliath, Caravaggio
Images|Flickr|achesonblog

Ada Lovelace Day Bringing Women in Technology to the Forefront

2010-03-24T13:11:00.000-07:00

One year ago Ada Lovelace day meant a lot to me, but i wasn't even pregnant (by a couple days only to be exact) so i didn't even know that within a year i would have a daughter. This year celebrating one of the world's first woman computer programmers has even more special meaning to me.

I made the pledge to blog about Ada Lovelace today, but won't have the time to do much more then highlight her accomplishments and republish what i wrote last year:

So "Who was Ada Lovelance"?
Ada Lovelace was one of the world's first computer programmers, and one of the first people to see computers as more than just a machine for doing sums. She wrote programmes for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, a general-purpose computing machine, despite the fact that it was never built. She also wrote the very first description of a computer and of software.

So why does it matter to me that Ada Lovelace was a woman? If the same work had been done by a man would i be just as interested to celebrate his success?
Probably not- they are hundreds and thousands of men who we celebrate for their historical and modern 'accomplishments'- but not a lot of women. Ada Lovelace, is one of the few whose name has become well known, but there are many others who i respect and admire, many who have had a direct impact on me either throughout the years or more recently through the various organizations i work with.

Ada- i thank you and will tell your story to my daughter today and everyday she needs a reminder of all the brilliant women that came before her and were at the forefront of their industry!

See other post coming in from bloggers who made the pledge. (via google blogs)

Ada Lovelace|Flickr|Nefi
Ada Lovelace|Lego|Flickr|Dunechaser

Read a lot of News Online? Well You Probably are a Early Tech Adopter as Well

2010-03-22T19:28:00.001-07:00

Reflections of a Newsosaur just posted some results from a recent poll that found that newspaper website visitors appear to be early and passionate technology adopters. I am not surprised. Being in the online news business for the last ten years, i can tell you that the users who push us to deliver the most innovations in how they consume content through their enterprise applications are the same ones that favor consumer online news sites.

"In a survey of visitors to the websites of three newspapers in mid-sized communities far from the tech hubs on either coast, Harmon found that 30% of site visitors already have smart phones and that 25% of them are thinking about acquiring one. By contrast, the Nielsen Co. last summer said national smart-phone penetration was barely 17% while Harmon found it to be 25% among news-site visitors.

With about two weeks to go before the iPad ships on April 3, researcher Harmon said a “stunning” 30% of visitors to newspaper sites are considering the purchase of the latest Apple confection in addition to the 6% of respondents who already bought Kindles or another early e-reader."

He ends the post with:

"If newspapers fail to produce appealing cross-media content for the emerging tablet and smart-phone platforms, they will lose what’s left of their readers and advertisers to the competitors who do."

So a couple weeks back i was glad to see that The Wall Street Journal like the New York Times is working on an iPad application and have an " iPad hidden from public view, chained to tables in windowless rooms"so they can test it out (would love to come across that room as i roam the hallways!). But of course Rupert loves the iPad, so maybe we will all get an end of fiscal year "iGift". [wishful thinking ~]

Image|Flickr|Rinkel80