Tsk Tsk Tsk

I've gotten into that very bad habit again, that cheating on my blog habit: reading books.

You know, those sqare things with pages that you turn? No typing required?

Freaky, I know.

Recent Reads: My sister's keeper; Ruby Fruit Jungle; Not Tonight Honey, Wait Until I'm a Size 6; and just beginning: Broken for You.

A million good reasons...

there are a million good reasons for me not to be out in the sun all day, from practical reasons to health reasons, but when night time falls and I'm home with jenna tucked in and the ceiling fan is blowing just so, and I'm cool from the pool and baked hot from the sun, I am so relaxed, just smoked and toasted relaxed, just warmed and smoothed with lotion relaxed. No drug in the world, no drink in the world, makes me feel as warm, as free, as bone hot tired.

My favorite thing is my little floatable raft, and lying face up as it carries me across the water, with my extra good sunglasses that let me watch the clouds paint the sky, overlap and touch, brush by, and swirl brighter white.

Information at the Speed of Syndication

I can't keep up.

Even with bloglines I can't keep up. Reading blogs is now like whiplash for me: gnomedex over here--no! look over here, Yahoo's got some social network beta, NO! look over here, technorati's got new features but they don't work, no! look over here, Yahoo's mindset is in beta! NO! Look over here, Weinberger's in Amsterdam with Edleman! NO! Look over here, gmail! HEY look here--Ketchum's still not blogging! NO! Wait! Over here! Scoble says a whole new way to comment is coming! NO! Look over here, blogads wants you, HEY, over here lady, what about grokster?

If you're like me, you're tired of trying to shove as many blog sandwiches down your cake hole as possible at any given sitting.

That's why I'd like to introduce the NEWEST beta--designed to change the way you consume blogs!

It's called Blog(between-the)Lines(SM), a new aggregator/reader that serves up the three most important words from across all of the blogs you subscribe to each day! You can get your Blog(between-the)Lines WordPack 2005 delivered to you via email, via text message, or stamped on your head with a branding iron underneath the Free Download Code Number, 666.

That's EVERY day. And TWICE on Tuesday!

We make you more efficient--so you can subscribe to tens of thousands of blogs and read the naughty bits in no time flat. YOU'RE on the golf course before 10 because we've done the heavy lifting for you, aggregating the most important text nuggets from the blogosphere and tossing them back at you the way you want them.

Here's a sample of a Blog(between-the)Lines Email Message summarizing Wednesday's Activity:

Weinberger Amsterdam Halley Tailbone Doc Google Scoble Scoble Scoble Web 2.0 Technorati Yahoo Google Technorati beta beta beta Winer thanks RSS gnomedex canter beta beta beta.

SEE! You're up to date in 10 seconds flat.

Why waste time with all of those useless articles of speech and prepositions. MEANINGLESS! And flowery adjectives, or hyperactive adverbs? FORGET THEM.

With the new Blog(between-the)Lines reader, Bloggers CAN be Choosers(TM).

You get the choicest morsels in the blogworld: NOUNS NOUNS NOUNS. Direct Objects. Subjects. That's it.

(Disclaimer: An occasional gerund or two may slip in--we're working on that.)

And all of this is yours for only $29.95. (per minute)

Paypal me today and I'll get started on it.

Technorotty

Susan Kitchens has a new term to describe the new Technorati feature that keeps you from looking yourself up: Bruised Ego Surfing.

It has a certain ring to it, non?

HELLO TECHNORATI--Is anyone home?
I NEED YOU TODAY!!!
REAL ENTERPRISES ARE INTERESTED.

T-shirts:

"I beta tested technorati and all I got was this damn squid."

Give Me My Name Back.

Halley's got an interesting post at misbehaving on maiden names and who gets what name in a divorce, and who can call herself what, and what an ex-husband should and shouldn't be able to ask his ex-wife to do in terms of his last name.

As evidence of the complicated times in which we live, check out the comments, and see if you can follow the bouncing ball on marriages, remarriages, taking names, not taking names, and oh yes, kids.

I added my two cents in comments about being both a wife with her husband's domain name, and a kid growing up with a mom whose last name was different from mine.

But the issue Halley presented was really about a guy friend who had gotten divorced and was thinking about asking his ex to take her maiden name back rather than keeping his.

I actually know a couple where the husband asked for this in the divorce decree. Guys, it's something to think about. If you don't have kids, and you want your name back, put it in writing because some folks will tell you it's a control issue for you to want your divorce to be complete, in name and all.

I don't think so. I think you're right to want your name back. I think most women who take their husband's names, who have no children with the man and end up in divorce court, ought to not fight the guy if he asks for his name back. It's like a family hierloom from his side of the family. If it was his when he entered into the marriage, and there are no children who could beneft from his great-great grandpa's pocket watch, YOU GIVE THE THING BACK.

I think if you have kids, you do your children a disservice by asking their mom to become the person in name she was before she had them. No no don't do that. It fucks with kids' minds.

But if you don't have kids, tell her you want your name back. Or better yet, put it in the divorce agreement because her girlfriends are going to tell her to hang on to it, along with that pocket watch from your great-great-grandfather.

;-)

Dear Technorati

When I sent my beta review mail to you, Technorati, I asked for a way to have the main screen just a tiny bit customizable so that I can at least CLOSE the boxes (and keep it that way if I'm signed in) that I dont give a flying crap about. In other words, if you're going to now clutter the homepage with things that most of us don't care about, the least you can do is give us a way to get rid of that crap.

HERE are just some of the things I don't care about that you are sticking in my face when all I'm trying to do is a vanity search:

Top Searches This Hour
1. Itunes
2. Google Earth
3. Itunes 4.9
4. Tom Cruise
5. Google
6. Grokster
7. Bush
8. Iraq
9. Podcast
10. Necc

Special Event
There are 9,303 posts from 2,525 people about Live 8 right now.

Join the conversation

I just wanted to tell you, I don't want to join the conversation, not about Live 8, Tom Cruise, or Iraq. I want to use your tool to do what it used to do best: SEARCH BLOGS.

Why, oh why, when I search on my blog's URL do you keep giving me error message after error message. I just got it again.

Technorati, my most valued tool, has been useless to me for searching on information for my clients and myself for two days.


ERROR
The requested URL could not be retrieved

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

While trying to retrieve the URL: http://technorati.com/search/allied.blogspot.com

The following error was encountered:

Zero Sized Reply
Squid did not receive any data for this request.

Your cache administrator is noc@technorati.com.

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

Generated Wed, 29 Jun 2005 03:46:41 GMT by www.technorati.com (squid/2.5.STABLE7)


Noc, my cache administrator, consider this your notification.

I would appreciate it if you would turn your tool back into a search tool first, and give me some options on HOW I WANT to experience the world live web--which is really cute by the way. I do like that.

However, my idea of fun and work might be different from yours.

For example, you might enjoy the nice layout and images on the first page of search results you return for me.

I, on the other hand, WANT TO SEE MORE THAN FOUR SEARCH RESULTS WITHOUT HAVING TO CLICK AND WAIT MINUTES ONLY TO GET ANOTHER ERROR MESSAGE.

You say you will show all of my most recent posts if I click: Show all 437 links from 333 sources » but you lie.

You just throw another error message in my face when I click it.

Technorati, I have always loved you. I know I have used you in the past, but I'm trying to tell you something here that will make both of our lives better...

...Don't forget what you are, Technorati. Lesser companies have failed to survive that single mistake.

-------------------
BONUS FEATURE

THINGS I DON'T CARE ABOUT ON MY TECHNORATI RESULTS PAGE NUMBER 1:

Most Popular
News: New Ideas in Global Health Get a $437 Million Assist - New York Times »
Movies: Batman Begins (2005) »
Books: The Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection »
More in Popular »

MORE THINGS I DON'T CARE ABOUT:

Sponsored Link Matches
Google Ads

And EVEN MORE THINGS I DON'T CARE ABOUT:

There are9,303blog posts about Live 8 right now.

So, in case I haven't made myself clear.....

THE THING I CARE MOST ABOUT ON YOUR SITE:

Love,
jeneane

Still looking for that hybrid acronym...

That explains what I do working full time from home, business owner from home, and mom from home, by myself when george is on the road mom. The SAHM (stay at home moms) and the WM (working moms) have endless debates on forums and in chats on who's making the tougher sacrifice. Well I do what both sets do, and not only do I want the world to know that the kid part is hardest, but I also want my own stinking acronym.

SAHWAHM - stay at home, work at home mom.
SAHWFHM - stay at home, work from home mom.

The above two choices suck because you can't make words out of them.

WMSAM - (william sam?) working mom stay at home mom.
VCKTWM - vomit cleaning keyboard typing working mom. [Yidish I think]

PBJLHOCCM - peanut butter jelly lunchtime home mom on conference call. [Also resembles the sound made when a child vomits.]

NSWOSAHM - never stop working or staying at home mom

TWS - trick work sally

c'mon bunky--give me an acronym!

You Go, Guy.

I'm always up for a good rant--and Tom Murphy delivers on PR Opinions.

Blogs will not perform a slash-and-burn on the PR toolkit. Instead blogs are an important additional element. Do we think that blogs will turn an unnewsworthy press release into something that's newsworthy? No. Will blogs turn badly written content into well written content? No

.
Forget press releases; I'm just waiting for blogs to replace the throw-up can we've been using the last few days.

Meta Meta Redundancy and SAHWMs

I haven't been blogging because I've been writing about blogging offline, which leaves me more than a little spent and feeling as though I've already blogged, forgetting of course that a post is not a post unless it lands in a blog.

Mr. O'Connor Clarke, I hope, will not mind me singing his praises as THE GUY you want to pay to put on his strategy thinking cap and edit your most important 20 pages or so. What a pleasure having his expertise and assistance on this recent white paper, coming soon to a blog near you. Michael's got one of those brains that can shoehorn just the right concept in between two strings of thought to pull together a completely new (and oh-so-much-more meaningful) idea.

Yowsa!

In other news, I have decided that I am of the new breed. I am a Stay At Home Mom (SAHM) and a Working Mom (WM) which makes me a Stay At Home Working Mom: SAHWM.

Let's hear it for the SAHWMs! (pronounced saw-ems, which is what we fantisize doing to both clients and children on our worst days).

We aren't large in numbers, but we have the distinction of being the worst dressed women at the grocery store, at odd hours, if we leave the house at all.

I haven't left the house since Saturday--I mean not even out to the mailbox, because jenna started throwing up in the middle of the night Saturday and got blindsided by strep over the weekend. She appears to be on the mend on the meds.

While I was working on a TON of work this weekend, I had to write about 13 pages cold out of my brain, and I did this lying flat on my bed with Jenna off to the right, the small garbage can in between for me to heft under her chin while I patted her head and said nice things as she hurled and gagged and puked. Rinse out can. Time for suppository. Yes I'm sorry too. Has to be. Insert. Wash hands. Tuck in kid. Turn to Disney. Sound down. Back to the keyboard. Time for meds. Bribe and coax. Yell and threaten. Give meds. Tuck kid in. Grab can. Pat and coo. Wipe vomit. Rinse can. Wash hands. Back to keyboard.

I did this for 12 hours straight, though the throwing up subsided after the second suppository. Thank heaven for little girls and small favors.

This is what I do for a living. This is what I live doing.

I only wish I could double bill for nursing.

I love my kid so much.

Dear Feature Creepers

Two of my favorite blogging tools, Technorati and Blogger, have done me some favors I didn't ask for this week. Again. Blogger is infamous for this. It's like this: You don't like donuts but that's really neither here nor there because you usually don't run across donuts in your morning travels. Then one day you wake up to find that someone's put a donut on your face while you were asleep.

That's what using Blogger is like when they decide to improve things.

I don't like the "I'm to lame to live" new image upload feature. Yes, it allows even the most helpless blogger upload an image, as long as they pay for blogger pro, and at the same time, forces the bloggers who had been happy uploading them into their long-standing subdirectory and layng them out as they wish, into yet another pat process.

On to Technorati. I was part of the beta review bunch and sent a rather thoughtful email on my various likes and dislikes. I never got a response, so I don't know if anyone read it. But it was nice to be invited to participate and I love checking out betas.

I thought I made the point in my feedback that the most important thing technorati does--it's a search engine after all--is to provide search results, not all these fluffy 'current books' and 'what watchlists do I have today' everywhere I look.

So, when I do a search on my own URL as a blogger, you know, it would seem logical to give me those results -- not JUST FOUR of them, but maybe 10-20 at a time (or however many at a time we want to see on a page--let me decide) WITHOUT HAVING TO CLICK A LINK TO GET ALL FOUR MILLION LINKS -- A LINK THAT TIMES OUT BEFORE IT EVER GIVES ME THE REST OF THE RESULTS I'M LOOKING FOR.



By the way, who's Squid?

In Praise of BlogHer and Why I Can't Be There

I let Lisa know a few days ago that I can't make it to California on the 30th for BlogHer. Time to let you all know too. I'm sorry sorry sorry because not only did I Really Want to Go to this one (as opposed to the many I have NOT wanted to attend), and I Really Want to be on the Naked identity panel, and I Really Want to meet everyone of these women I've never gotten a chance to meet, and I Really Want to try my hand at being on a panel. I think I'd do good. I think I'd learn so much.

But then real life comes in to intercept this other life I live. And the fact is that our once-a-year family reunion, we learned a couple of weeks ago, will take place in Buffalo the day after the conference. And the fact is that George is performing in Ain't Misbehavin'? in NY (think Long Island, not Broadway) and hopefully coming home before then, but that is never for sure in his business. And that I'd have to take Jenna with me, in a 48 hour span from Atlanta to California to Buffalo, then back to Atlanta two days after that. And that I don't want to tell you how many client deadlines I have between now and then. And that I'd have to be clear headed and keeping tabs on my seven-year-old every minute while trying to contribute and enjoy myself and all of you. And that it costs money. And also the fact that I have a trip up north scheduled mid July as it is.

I didn't make a pros and cons list. It wasn't that easy of a decision, and it wasn't that hard either. I just thought a lot about it over a week's time. And I thought about how tenuous my remaining family relationships are. (There aren't many left.) How important it is for Jenna and who she is to understand and know the Sessum part of her family in Buffalo that she has met precisely one time (last year at the reunion), and that it meant a lot to George to begin only now to know that side of his family, and what a toll that has taken on so many of us, and all of the other "thats" I've babbled about above.

The decision kind of made itself.

Lisa and the BlogHer gang were gracious in accepting my apology, my withdrawal, and my request to use my registration so someone else doesn't have to pay. I also pledged to sponsor another participant between now and the conference. It's the least I can do. They're not even kicking me off the Board. Least I don't think so. ;-)

Why do I believe that you should go to BlogHer even if I can't? For a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that the conference was a bottom-up response to a situation that many in blogland -- many women especially -- have been bitching about for years now. It was a brave response to the undeniable fact that mainstream Technology, Internet, Blogging, Podding, RSSing, and PISSing conferences look past women. They look past women when they pick speakers and panelists. They look past women when they schedule the events. They look past women when they decide what to talk about. They look past women when they begin talking and linking to other non-women. They look past people of color. They look past ideas that challenge their own. They look past out-of-the-circle-jerk conversations. They look past anyone who doesn't look like them.

Rather than continue to solely write about that fact, the BlogHer founders came up with another layer to their response. In additon to writing and talking, they got their plans together, their funds together, their team together, and their shit together in record fast time to hold a conference that doesn't look past women. And they went zero to 60 with the top down, baby. Got the venue; got the people; got the sponsors (keep em coming); got scholarships and assitance for attendees.

And the women who will be there are smart and strong and willing to listen and willing to talk and willing to shut up and learn as much as they are to slap you silly. That's the difference. I guarantee that unlike conference-as-usual events, this one will engage folks in a real exchange. Not just an exchange that claims to be an exchange because the bloggers having it are Technorati Top 100 list makers.

So go if you can. All of you. Men and women. Together. Engage. Talk if you can. Write if you can. Listen if you can. Clap if you can. Laugh if you can. Cry if you can. Say AMEN if you can. Blog if you can. Lunch and Dinner and Drink if you can. Shero Chalk on a brick wall for me if you can.

I will be watching.

Love you guys,
Jeneane

Ketchum meets Ex-Ketchum in Constantin's Comments

If you would have told me I'd be commenting on a Ketchum-related comment by Adam Brown on blogging one day, I would have told you you're crazy. (Adam and I started the same week at Ketchum. He's still there. I'm not). I wouldn't have believed, first, that Ketchum would make it to the blogosphere. And that if they did, I would have expected that they wouldn't get it right. Nothing against Ketchum. It's just hard for BigPR to play with the little guy and maintain the BigPR mindset and model.

Maybe there's hope. Adam (for Ketchum) has responded to the recent flack (hee) toward Ketchum for their sloppy, bouncy entry into the blogworld with the Ketchum Personalized Media service.

I have a lot more to say but not much time. I added some quick comments on Adam's response. We'll see where it goes.

Pool time.

Networking Is Something I Suck At

...which is why I found this post on the Cheater's Guide to Linked In fascinating. It's not really cheating--it's best practices for networking in a social network. It's almost like search engine optimization for social software participants. It strikes me that folks who are good at networking in the real world are the ones who are good at networking online. The practices aren't so different, but the techniques and the technology are. Thing is, I've also identified that I do approximately 0 of the recommended practices. Which proves my theory that I suck at networking.

Ah well, we all have our gifts and talents.

PETA unfriendly*

Two years I've been going to the same pool. You know me--I like to get brown in the summer, chasing my daughter's beautiful tone, her always one step ahead of me. Last year one of the moms and I used to chuckle because every day we ended our pool fest, we looked whiter than when we came.

"What is up with the flakes and sloughing?" She asked. Yes, she talks like that. Isn't she cool?

"I can't handle it," I say. "Hour after Hour I spend here trying to get the least bit non-anemic looking, and I'm actually going backwards! I'll be a frgging Sweede by the time the summer's over."

"What do you suppose it is--I mean, we shouldn't be getting whiter. I don't think chemically it's possible."

"I think it's the pool. I think they keep the water pH on whitey."

"I think so too; it's like a sloughing thing."

SO this year, we decided to experiment. And we found the key. Oil. The thicker the better. It doesn't matter if it has 299 sunscreen or 0 sunscreen, as long as it's oil, it manages to create a barrier against the sloughing detergents.

She and I have begun our tanning contest.

She's going the slow approach--from 50 down to 14 down to 8 SPF. BUT she gets to add in a trip to florid in July (no fair!)

Me? I've found THE tanning oil. On an old shelf at Big Lots, behind all of the safe 60 SPF cream, was a bottle of $2.49 no-sunscreen-added oil with the initial ingredient of Mink Oil.

The same mom friend, a vegetitarian, asked: "What's the new oil? You're getting darker."

I tell her. She wants to see the bottle.

"My God it has mink oil in it--you're coating yourself with dead animal."

"You think? They probably just milk them."

"No, dear. I don't think that's how it's done."

"Well, It's working, I know that."

"What's it feel like?"

"Makes me fell kind of like road kill."

While she's in Florida using her slo-tan, animal friendly tanning techniqiue, I'll be splashing on my road-kill special.

We'll see whose tan rocks by the end of the summer.

[[*No minks were harmed in the making of this post, at least.]]

Knowledge is Power

Our KM Hero, Euan Semple, rides again, ridding the world of dis-collaboration, disunion, and the unsightly un-networked.

To describe talk.gateway, Semple uses an analogy of trying to build a collection of Cotswold villages with lots of footpaths between them. “You know where the pub and church are, you’re comfortable in the environment and you can locate yourself,” he says. “Corporate systems tend to be more like Milton Keynes. On the surface they’re efficient with lots of straight lines and signposting, but you get lost because everything looks the same.” He supports Dave Snowden’s assertion that you can’t manage knowledge, but you can manage a knowledge ecology.

He's just that smart.

Dear Ketchum 2

Constantin Basturea's Dear Ketchum post is extraordinary. Whether or not someone inside the borg hears him or not, it is worth reading if you're the NEXT BigPR company to decide to do new media while it's hot.

That means, dear Ketchum, that if you want to advise clients about blogging, RSS, and podcasting, you should show that you know what you're talking about. You can do that by having senior executives blogging for some time before trumpeting your blogging consultancy; that's what Edelman's Richard Edelman and Christopher Hannegan are doing. The same goes for Hill & Knowlton's Joël Céré and Niall Cook. Or you could launch a blogging community first. You can let the results of your expertise speak for you before formally launching a blogging practice and a corporate blog; that's what Hass MS&L did. But you can't just issue a press release about it, and hope for a cheerful "Welcome to the blogosphere!!!"

You mean, this press release won't get picked up by Business Week?

Don't forget, Ketchum did try blogging back in 2003, quite bumpily, and then gave up. They caught some heat because they tried to use the blog as a promotional celebration of their Kudos winners--and now that they've had two years to snoop around, you might think they would have learned a thing or two.

I am going to say again that the few employees who were blogging with me unobserved back in 2001 and 2002 are the people who should be running the program. Screw the hierarchy and let those with a blogging foothold and something to say MAKE THE RULES.

But it won't happen that way. Because the big agency model hangs the balance, and its organizational, pay, and pricing structure teeter like Humpty Dumpty when people start messing with who's in charge.

Personally, I'd like to blame that JOHO guy. He's been showing Edleman how to find a clue, and now all of them want in. ;-)

[Disclaimer: If you haven't been following the bouncing ball, you don't deserve one.]

Memory Maker

Cluetrain, Gluetrain, and Doc as a kid, not as Marilyn Monroe, below.

Okay, it's really not cool that my sidebar has slid down after x number of years w/ this template

No, I didn't add any wide graphics. No, I haven't been in the template.

I've just been here minding my own blogness.

Why my sidebar's slipped d o w n. ?

Apparently...

Doc is stacked.

and my sidebar is down at the bottom of the page because???

?