if i had a dollar for every post I've written here...

...I'd have over five grand, and that would have been more than enough to keep jeneane.net going, which, since I haven't received said five grand, or even one grand, recently went offline due to a case of the dreaded-but-familiar "blog host nonpayment syndrome"...

...And all of that, my patient friends, is a round-about way of saying that jeneane.net is now back up and nearly operational. You may notice, she's also sporting a new and improved look thanks to the sleuthing and savvy design chops of Mr. RageBoy who has been known to do WordPress magic in exchange for almost any treat from the A Taste of Thai product line, but only occasionally, and only if you ask nice.

Now, to all of the angry neo-cons who bring goodly traffic my jeneane.net site accidentally while searching for Janeane Garafalo to harass (she's jAn, not jEn), I say this:

Keep those blogads comin'. Mama's got RXs to fill.

So When Google DOES Buy Twitter, Will Anyone Say "Jeneane predicted that in 2006"?

Probably not. But I did.

With Twitter, I think Ev may become the first person to get bought twice by Google. The way I see it, Twitter is the reason Ev bought back Odeo, Inc.

Ev even thanked me kindly for the positive nod. In fact, I think it will take a powerhou$e like Google to put some of the other stuff I predicted 3 years ago into the twit-mix:

The Recipe (variations based on taste): Buy Odeo, Inc. back for $2 million; rebrand; take your least-understood product and take it to market hard; aggregate the curious and their friends from across web-based social networks; get them co-communicating on a realtime platform via the web, IM, and cell phone/SMS; acquire a couple of companies or organically build in powerful local/regional/commerce capabilities; and let users make rev off of ads too 'cause that makes for more users; create the power of completely engaged smart mobs; improve offering; get amazing press; add a pinch of cumin and get acquired by Google.

Good to hear good things are in the works for twitter, however it turns out.

You heard it here first. NO REALLY, YOU FRICKIN' HEARD IT HERE FIRST.

The Only Real Twitter Book You Really Ever Need, Pretty Much.

it's like he knows me, like he sees into my very soul.

"You need to calm down. Strategy guides can arouse you and make your head go a buzz with excitement and all the possibilities that suddenly flood into your mind. So we need to calm you down."
--marcus brown
Power Force Twitter Black Belt
pre-download, pre-order and pre-read yours today!

dammit. everything is different now.

Worked Very Hard Not to Transfer Own Fear to Kid OMGZ Way Up High

I've never ridden a ferris wheel. I used to become quite literally paralyzed on the tilt-a-whirl, unable to grip the bar, completely frozen by the speed of spin.

One time I rode those swings on chains that fly you around in a suicide circle, and as soon as I got off, I threw up. In front of everyone. Mortified.

Since then I haven't ridden many amusement park rides.

Yesterday I worked Very.Hard. Not to transfer my own fears and nausea to my daughter as she experimented with rides she'd never ridden before at the local mall carnival.

Look about 2 seats from the top. That's Jenna & her friend.
Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!

stereotype this.

Japanese Enka singer from Philly, Jero.

v. nice interview with chris locke by marcus brown

Gets better n better as you go. Good take on the swarm of locusts. And you learn: It's all Doc's Fault! ;-)

good stuff on cluetrain 1 and 2.

Shelley Powers on Ada Lovelace Day

In celebrating two uber-known bloggers, david armano recently said, "You can tell who the pioneers are from the arrows sticking out of their backs."

I thought a lot about this saying tonight. Wrinkled my brow over the connotations of words like pioneers and arrows. I've come to the conclusion that pioneers are not always -- nor often -- heroes. Often, pioneers come looking for fame and fortune, put conquest over content, rob native people of their land, their crops, their livelihood, their dignity, and sometimes their lives. Smallpox infected blankets might ring a bell. And arrows in the back might be a proper thank you.

So, pioneers have their own history book pages. I'm here to celebrate the contribution of an ancestor from the original blogosphere, the pre-historic times of online publishing, an indigenous person, one of those who came before the others, who after-settlers have tried to contain and oppress on their way up the twitter scale without success.

One woman in tech comes to mind above all for me, and that's Shelley Powers, Burning Bird, the native, not the pioneer.

Shelley is an indigenous netizen, an original woman technologist and author, photographer and activist, online and off - the earliest female tech blogger to stand up for women's issues online when there weren't many women being heard, when debates got hot and heavy and personal, the brilliant writer who talked until the men went nearly mad from her unwillingness to submit.

What Shelley has done for tech is a matter of public record and Internet lore.

What makes Shelley special is not just what she has done with and for technology, not only her many books, but the richness of her writing and photography beyond the topic of tech. She is proof that the most interesting of us in any discipline are those who have multiple dimensions.

We shout we whisper we cut we bleed we code we paint.

Visit the many dimensions of Shelley, and tell her thank you.

technorati tags: ada lovelace day, Shelley Powers, Women, Technology, Photography, Natives, Pioneers, Guts

Tragic Decline of a Brilliant Mind - Marc Brown Reads Scoble

Official Tweet Reading V: Reading Robert Scoble from Marcus Brown on Vimeo.

Internship -- The New Not-Job

Have you SEEN the number of internships available now that so many companies have laid off employees and are looking for warm bodies with some kind - any kind? - of ability to fill their place, fo' cheap? Wooo! Now is TEH time to be an intern.

There isn't a hotter career on the job boards or in the breakroom, and not a better way to worm your way into an organization ensuring that you maybe, one day, if you're lucky, after you do a lot of grunt work, actually get paid a few bucks.

As jobs disappear, the competition for highly visible internships is likely to heat up. Many are holding out, hoping for a CEO internship. When CEO interns head the boardroom the truth will be exposed: MBAs really aren't a prereq to running things.

If you lack the money to go back to school to learn a brand new skill set, and since Obama's jobs building bridges and electric cars haven't materialized quite yet, now is the time to check out internships in your area. Might be the only gigs out there.

Hey it could be worse.... uh... ?

disintermediating the paparazzi

So Demi Moore (@mrskutcher) and Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) are on Twitter, and they are being real people, which I guess is what you are if you're used to doing all the cool things that celebrities do.



I have to say, it's interesting to see someone as high profile as Demi Moore (I think she's even more famous than Mike Arrington!) post a photo she took of the paparazzi outside her house on twitpic.



Now THAT's a paradigm shift.

Demi took some other pix of their trip to the Superbowl and tweeted the game as well.

who needs TMZ when celebrities tweet?

---

Next Up on the Chopping Block: Your School Nurse

In the ever growing wave of budget cuts, some school districts are considering cutting the school nurse job from all public schools.

What a stupid idea.

Of course, Georgia is right up there classing it up -- let's give the kids salmonella-tainted peanut butter and then take away the nurse who cleans up their puke.

Go Sonny Go. (No, really, go.)

the PTA says No Way--Nurses should stay.

Atlanta moms are up in arms too:

Eighty-five percent of students who see a school nurse return to class. One Georgia nurse I know was the first ever in her district. When she visited one school, the secretary pulled open her desk drawer and said, “Here is our medical cabinet.” My friend left with a two-quart pitcher full of medication, much of which was expired and the rest mismatched pills in the wrong bottles. School nurses around the state can share similar stories.

Asthma, juvenile diabetes, food allergies, seizure disorder and a host of other illnesses were virtually unheard of in children when Perdue was a child, but now affect a large percentage of children. The reasons are complex. These students need regular monitoring and, oftentimes, medical intervention to stay in the classroom. Our state test scores are already disgraceful. They will only be worse with tons of kids being sent home from school midday.

Is it even LEGAL for schools to cut school nurses? Will it take a well publicized asthma death to make sure schools can fit a nurse into their budgets?

I mean there MUST be another place to cut. One nurse, hundreds of kids. Seems like an easy math problem to me. But then, I'm not Sonny Perdue.

---

Just when i think it's all bad...

...the net picks me up and makes me lol -- and I mean LthefuckOL!


Reading David Armano from Marcus Brown on Vimeo.

bad landing page tip 9943320

Please don't welcome me to your site with noise. You ought to know better by now.

Landing page music went out in the 90s. And fake talking people are annoying. 

Case in point: The Tori spelling chick on fax.com - the one who never shuts up - she's GOT to go.

---

The Little (Ad) Engine That Could

This past week, blogads reminded me why Henry and the gang remain the coolest and most reputable ad engine in town for web publishers. Reward my sponsors; reward Blogads. Because the blogads folks have been treating bloggers fairly since blogtime began.

Today Henry discusses the falloff of online ad sales, and its effect on his industry. Like everything else, it's not a rosy picture:

Back in November, I suggested that online ad sales might fall 40% in 2010 as a deep recession carved into online ad budgets. Looks like the market is headed that… or worse, at least according to this Ad Age article:

Cost-per-thousand ad impressions for online publishers are generally off about 20%, according to several people on both the buying and selling side, and sell-through rates are dropping. And where publishers used to unload 60% of their inventory, some are now able to sell only 30%.

But perhaps indicating more trouble ahead is just how cheap the low end of the market has gotten. An August study from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and Bain & Co.* found the average CPMs on ad networks ranged from 60 cents to $1.10, only 6% to 11% of the prices publishers could command when they sold inventory directly. And the pricing for networks appears to be getting worse not better. CPMs for ad-network-sold ads are dropping, some by 50% year-over-year, according to a recent study of pricing by Pubmatic, which tracks pricing among many Long Tail ad networks.

Put those percentages together and you’ll discover that some publishers have seen revenues collapse 60% or more.

Compounding the recession-driven collapse in revenues is the fact that the volume of online content is still doubling yearly, thanks to all the blog posts, comments, photos, videos, ratings, interactions and e-phemera that we all create singly and socially.

With supply doubling and demand stagnant or down, advertising prices are headed to zero for any property that doesn’t deliver VERY compelling value to advertisers.

What a lot of publishers don’t get is that “selling” is only a tiny portion of the formula for survival in the short run, and success longer term. The real keys are innovating, keeping overheads low, improving processes and talking relentlessly to your customers about what they want.

Note what Henry says and compare it to my observations about the value of content in my previous post:

Compounding the recession-driven collapse in revenues is the fact that the volume of online content is still doubling yearly, thanks to all the blog posts, comments, photos, videos, ratings, interactions and e-phemera that we all create singly and socially.

With supply doubling and demand stagnant or down, advertising prices are headed to zero for any property that doesn’t deliver VERY compelling value to advertisers.

It's the same thing I said below. And Henry, I'm not sure WHAT the criteria is for "compelling" anymore. It used to be gripping, good quality content. Naked pictures? A good social media boxing match?

Seriously: The value of Value itself is in question today.

wtf. where do we go from here.

--

The Value of Words

I have made my living using words for a quarter of a century. It hasn't been a bad living. At times it's been a very lucrative living. And it's not like I ever had any other choice. I was published at 11, and after that my trajectory was set.

I remember not quite believing the first time I hit a six-figure salary at a big agency willing to pay me that much money to write. They paid it to me because I was a special kind of writer -- the kind of writer that can jump from client to client, project to project, technology to technology, instantly, and be up to speed within hours, honing in on the key key key KEEEEYY pieces of a client's story that my ear tells me will resonate with the market.

Being able to write well is something you learn because you spend all day, every day, for years and years, doing it, not because you were born with some special gift. Sure, some people are gifted, but most writers work hard to become good. They read; they write. Every day.

That's where new media comes in. Suddenly, everyone is a writer. No, really. Everyone IS a writer. People are writing all the time. All day. Every day. Posting and thinking and posting.

Because I started writing websites in 1996 and blogging in 2001, this plethora of great online writing thrills me. It's incredible to read so many people with so much to say saying it so well. Who's been a louder cheerleader for blogging than me?

But, like the indie recording revolution before us, this swarm of great amateur writers, combined with a new means of distribution (the Internet), leaves us pros in a lurch.

Now, mix this evolution of great writers into our current dismal economy, and those of us who once made a living 'writing' are hurting the same way we would have if we had been building carburetors for GM for the last 30 years.

This is not a story you'll hear on twitter. The tweets of the social media elite get faster and more furious -- a kind of machine-gun denial stream of who's meeting where attending which conference lunching with whom waiting for what meeting to start with which big name company or influencer.

Please.

These. People. Are. Lying. To. You. And. Themselves.

Let's talk numbers for a minute.

Of course, writing isn't a product that you can always package in a precise word-for-dollar way--especially when strategic thinking is involved. But, I've played around with the numbers during my career to see if there is a formula of effort expended to pay, and there usually is.

The old OLD pay for writers when I started out 25 years ago was $1 a word. During the dot-com era, I was averaging $3 a word. At other times, the average compensation has fallen in the middle. For web content, I've made anywhere from $250 a page to $2,000 a page.

These last two weeks I've been checking out a few sources for writing work, and what I found was more depressing than I even imagined.

Responding to a dozen craigslist postings and 5 elance.com postings yielded four relevant replies.

The first, a woman who uses elance to outsource writing work to folks in India. I was, she explained, overqualified for the kind of work (and pay) she was offering. I did the math. It was pennies a word. She said I was overqualified. I have to think she's right.

The next was a social media blogging gig, two posts per day minimum, with pay of $200/month, preceded by a testing period where hundreds of interested applicants would compete to get this primo gig. To the company's credit, they offered $100 for the testing period.

Next I tried another online micro-job site that posts small jobs requiring a tiny bit (and nothing more) of human intelligence. Sample writing work there? 1000+ word product guides. Pay: $5.00. In 1986 I would have made about $1,000 for that job. In 1999 I would have made $3,000 for that job. Today, some one will do it -- maybe not well, but they'll do it and search optimize it -- for five bucks.

The third was a company owned by a major social media player looking for people to post articles using certain tags. A phone call revealed some interesting things: 1) Hundreds of people applied. 2.) many of them were high level pros 3.) the gig doesn't pay, at least at first. My contact for the job was surprised that so many name folks and pros responded to the job posting. Now, some people would have used that opportunity to say, YES, but I'm the BEST. I said: "That's because NOBODY'S WORKING--ok?"

Eight years ago I started my own business. I've had slow patches here and there. This is not a slow patch. This is a collision of the worst economy of our lifetime and the de-professionalization of my craft.

And it's heartbreaking.

The rise of the commons isn't always easy on the common man. How to balance the beauty and benefits of an open, free culture with food on the table? It's not an unfamiliar dilemma in our family - my husband spent 40 years in the music business.

Of course, those of us who have been around the block and bring MORE than writing to the content table have an advantage. And quality (maybe) still counts. I've branded and messaged and helped build some of the largest and strongest brands in the world. I also have a decade in PR under my belt, and am a pretty well known marketer.

But at the core of it all, I have always made my living with words. And today words are a commodity that can be outsourced and automated. As a commodity, I'm not sure how low the value of words will go.

But if the old adage a penny for your thoughts still holds true, and a thought is probably at least 10 words, then I think we've pretty much hit bottom.

(cross-posted to jeneane.net)

long live the funk, indeed...

A must read, because funk ALWAYS gets it right.

Way back B.O. (Before the New Pres, you know who), the Real Clinton sang about foregoing the 40 acres and mule and going straight for the Chocolate City. It was no dream. Banishment for the establishment, you know what I am saying?

You don't need the bullet when you got the ballot / Are you up for the downstroke, CC?

The Real Clinton spoke of a day when the Greatest of All Time, Cassius Clay Muhammad Ali, would be in the White House and Miss Aretha Franklin would be the First Lady. Thirty-three years later (the lifetime of Christ, by the way), Ali was at the Capitol and Miss Aretha sang for the First Lady. It all makes sense. This is the way it was destined to be. Too bad Richard Pryor left for brighter pastures. You know he was smiling down on us.

Amen.

Not Atlanta - WNY Vacation Christmas 09

Let It Snow.

back to basics with some good and crazy interspersed, and a few words on how twitter did good

Really, I've been trying to keep jeneane.net as my "all things social media" blog, but as always, when I start wandering away from THIS old house, I end up as scattered, smothered, and covered as Waffle House hash browns. Fo' Real.

So I'll probably keep doing some stuff on each blog. Although I'm wondering - wordpress comments, that spam receptacle, astounds me. How do you people keep up with the comment spam on your wordpress blogs? Sure Blogger gets some too, but not nearly as much. I don't know; that's a conundrum for another day.

Yes, I'm on steroids. Could you tell?

It takes a lot to get me motivated to put on my glasses these days. And in order to write comfortably staring at the screen, my 46-year-old eyes have decided that glasses are mandatory.

Tonight a cool thing happened on twitter that brought my glasses onto my nose.

David Armano used his blog and twitter for a worthy cause - to raise money to get an appartment for an immigrant and her three children who found themselves in domestic turmoil and had been living with Armano and his family. In fact, everything the woman owns is in Armano's garage.

How'd it end? Well it is still unfolding, but the twittosphere delivered 10K in a few hours. I expect to see the story on CNN and the Today Show. Seriously.

As someone familiar with things that become Internet Lore, I think Tori Tuncan raises some important issues regarding the details. Another risk for Armano is becoming a virtual (or literal) halfway house for those in need. Could be a call for a new and fitting career? Could be a real nightmare? Time and circumstance will determine if one woman got the help she needed, or if perhaps a longterm miracle happened tonight.

The legalities and details will no doubt sort themselves out. But for tnight Twitter, was full of people Tweeting and Retweeting, trying to do some good for a woman and her three kids based on a trusted member of the community vouching for the cause he was personally involved in. And as someone who benefited from a blog-a-thon that got me my new Macbook when my old Acer gave out, I'm glad to see someone in #Daniela's situation get a year of free rent. And more if she can.

did you do it?

i didn't do it (yet), but i'm going to diddit soon. you'll see.

--

baby daddy mama six counts and counting

From the how'd I miss this one department: Bristol's baby-daddy's mama got snagged on drug charges today. Meanwhile, Sarah Palin is due to become a grandma this weekend if Bristol cooperates. Alaska--it seems so.... fun, juneau?