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Somehow This Is Just Cool...

I cringe so badly reading anything about myself that I don't have a Google alert for my name and scream when Mr. Lacy tries to show me things from his "Sarah Lacy" Google alert. But this made me smile, mostly because it really had nothing to do with me. Just Microsoft, Yahoo, Time Warner and my footwear. I especially like that my footwear empowers my loving, part-time employers in this scenario.

From "The Guru of New" blog:

"Then there’s on-again, off-again Time Warner, who Yahoo turned to after Microsoft got a touch too possessive last spring. 'Just because you have $47.5 billion doesn’t mean you can act like you own me!' snapped Yahoo, stomping out of Starbucks in awesome Sarah Lacy-style boots."

Yeah.

"Ommmmm..."

That kept getting chanted around TechTicker headquarters yesterday morning. No, we weren't particularly into meditation, although you'd think looking at Yahoo's stock lately, Mr. Yang would offer some new zen program for all those stock-laden employees. (Bonus Prize: One-thousand of you may be also getting pink slips soon!)

Rather, Om Malik was our guest. Remember when the early GigaOm tagline had something to do with "...just close your eyes and say 'Ommmmm'"? That was, of course, back in the day when blogging was Om's sideline job, not his empire in the making.

He's so busy that yesterday was Om's TechTicker debut, and even though he was late to the nice SF studio we booked him so he could avoid a 50 minute drive to Sunnyvale, he was a lovely guest. I look forward to having him back soon! One reason I like Om? He has strong opinions and doesn't mince words. He gets slightly more rabid as these clips go on too. Enjoy!

Om and I on Gartner's strangely rosy IT spending projections:

Om and I on why newspapers are now losing money ONLINE too:

Om and I on Jeff Bezos, aka the new Steve Jobs/Bill Gates (I gotta say, Om is right here and WTF Seattle gets ANOTHER one? Step it up, Valley!)

Om and I on, well, GigaOm and all that funding amid an ad crisis [UPDATE: THERE'S AN EMBED CODE PROBLEM HERE THAT'S PULLING THE WRONG CLIP. WILL POST THE RIGHT ONE ONCE IT'S SORTED. SHAME BECAUSE IT WAS MY FAVORITE OF THE FOUR!]:

Blog Catch Up Day

This is the first day in recent memory that:

1. I'm in San Francisco
2. I have only one meeting
3. I'm not at Yahoo
4. No book events or press interviews
and
5. I'm not late on a BusinessWeek column.

You know what that means? It's blog catch up day. Expect a flood of half worked posts, Yahoo videos I meant to post here a while back and-- of course-- there's still UGBT flipcam magic to be had. (Decision will be made on whether to release horrifying Toronto karaoke footage...)

In this spirit here's my favorite photo of late. We took it last Saturday at Garrett Camp's party on a Navy Tanker. It's Olivia and I firing on, um, Berkeley? I've decided it's the general SarahLacy.com "Kicking A** and Taking Names" shot, which we'll be doing today. Watch out!!!

BitchBuzz v. Jezebel

How Can Print Not Get It?

This is pretty alarming. Jeff Jarvis said most of it here. Basically the Philadelphia Inquirer has now issued an executive order for all staffers to jump in their Deloreans and go back a few decades. If there's a sudden run on Deloreans, staffers are ordered to stick their heads in the sand. From the memo:

"Colleagues – Beginning today, we are adopting an Inquirer first policy for our signature investigative reporting, enterprise, trend stories, news features, and reviews of all sorts. What that means is that we won't post those stories online until they're in print. We'll cooperate with philly.com, as we do now, in preparing extensive online packages to accompany our enterprising work. But we'll make the decision to press the button on the online packages only when readers are able to pick up The Inquirer on their doorstep or on the newsstand.

For our bloggers, especially, this may require a bit of an adjustment. Some of you like to try out ideas that end up as subjects of stories or columns in print first. If in doubt, consult your editor. Or me or Chris Krewson."

Memo to the Inquirer: Those aren't blogs. Blogs are vehicles for emerging stories and a direct line from a reporter to an audience-- no editors in between. The best bloggers are efficient at breaking news because they throw things out there and use the responses they get to dig further. Many of my best stories evolve from a blog post or the comments I get on one. Blogs aren't dumping grounds for news that's not important enough for the paper, nor are they your vehicle to simply promote stories from the paper. As Ted Stevens says: "The Internet is NOT a dump truck."

Jarvis advised that Inquirer staffers "get out now." Yeah, cause it's that easy?

BitchBuzz (Calm Down! It's the Name of the Site!)

I've long thought a cloned-me could only make the world a worse place, and I know there are a good many Twitterers who agree with that statement. However, I couldn't help but wish there was a little more of my time to go around when the ladies behind a new women's blog, BitchBuzz, asked if I wanted to be a contributor earlier this week. Happily I'm more than gainfully employed with my assortment of jobs, so I  sadly have no time to take on any new projects. Still, I plan to make time to read the site regularly when it launches in about an hour.

Poor Kim. Lucky Me.

Ever have those days where you just can't connect the dots? Where you get really excited about something, before realizing what someone actually said? Or--like me in the last few weeks--where you terminally over book your schedule and promise people things only to forget them moments later?

It happens to all of us. Particularly, when you're stressed out of just have too many things to juggle. That's why I'm very happy to announce that Olivia Hine has joined the Sarahlacy.com family as of today. She's more than my personal girl Friday; she'll be blogging too and helping to organize my book tour stops and hopefully more fun events beyond that.

She'll be writing a post that more fully introduces herself to you later today, but for now, I just wanted to share the good news that I'll hopefully have a lot fewer days like this one:

Really: Is it Cuil or Us?

Pretty harsh post on TechCrunch this morning about how Cuil "blew" it's launch in 20 seconds. It talks about the absurdly short hype-cycle of less than a minute on today's Web.

I'll be the first to say I was disappointed in the early results of a company that a lot of people I respect think very highly of. And I, too, was a bit stunned after raising that much cash and working so hard, they would launch now. And they should have kept their messaging to indexing more cheaply, the UI and privacy-- not touting greater relevancy, obviously. (We didn't even mention that one in our TT piece, because I hadn't gotten enough time to play with it.)

So yeah, they screwed some things up. But doesn't part of the blame go to the blogosphere? I'm counting me in that too. I was probably too effusive. Like everyone else in the Valley, I find technology and new companies exciting and Cuil has a great story. But you don't make up for that by then eviscerating a company. It doesn't somehow balance out in the greater cosmic order. TechCrunch says the whole thing was Cuil's fault because they didn't let pre-briefed bloggers use the service. Ok, that was dumb, but take some responsibility! No one forced you to write a glowing piece before you'd used the site. If I erred in being too excited about Cuil, that was my bad as a reporter, not the company's. (For the record, I seem to be the only blogger in the land who didn't get a pre-brief, I had just heard a lot about the company from sources for more than a year so I'd been anxious to check it out for some time.)

At some point, the tech blogosphere has to break itself from the junky-like addiction of having to get a story two seconds before the competitor. Can it really drive that much traffic when every other blogger got the same pre-brief? Isn't it better to wait a bit, use the service and write something smarter?

If we've got a 20-second hype cycle in the Valley, that's not Cuil's fault. And I don't think it's serving readers well either. If we write something is amazing in the morning and then total junk in the afternoon, does anyone looking to tech blogs for analysis keep coming back?

I, for one, am not writing the company off after one day. Launches are hard. How many of the products we use and rely on today were perfect the day they launched? I've invited the founders to come on TechTicker and hope they accept. I'd love to hear their thoughts on why the launch day went the way it did and whether they're worried about the backlash or just chalk it up to the increasingly schizophrenic blogosphere.

Maybe Blogging Is Just a Loss-Leader?

I keep thinking about this blogging crossroads and the beauty of small. Then today came Robert Scoble's post about how tech blogging has let you down. It's not hugely applicable to me since I am a business reporter, and he takes pains to separate business blogging from tech blogging. But I think a lot of his comments have to do with the general blogging angst that seems to be sweeping the Web. Or, put another way: How money and the mainstream are killing what a lot of people used to love about blogging.

To me it goes back to the idea of rethinking the monetization element. After all, that’s the practical reason why people link bait, tailor content to huge audiences, play the PR game Scoble aptly describes, or in the case of Gawker give bonuses based on traffic. It’s near impossible to build a huge ad business off blogs with small audiences, even with a portfolio approach. So where does that leave us?

Subscriptions are always an option, but typically a very bad one. There is so much solid free content online, it’s hard to get people to pay for a blog—hell, it’s hard to even get people to pay for the Wall Street Journal. In the print world, subscription fees frequently just pay the cost of getting the paper to you. They’re not a profit center. And since there’s little distribution cost to the Web, it makes sense people would balk at paying.

So does the gulf just widen between the amateur bloggers and the larger, professional blogs that lose their sense of community, conversation, and--frequently—satisfaction? Is there a continual churn as A-list bloggers sell to larger companies or just burn out and fade away, only to have a newer hungrier, more rested crop take their place?

Maybe not.

Blogging's Crossroads

I just finished reading the Jason Calacanis blogging resignation letter and can't help but be struck by the about face of one of the guys who-- love him or hate him-- did a lot to put professional blogging on the map. (I know, Paul Carr, don't hate me...) Jason always openly talked about how he loved that the Internet gave him such a big megaphone that he didn't have to play by anyone else's rules-- including reporters like me!

It hearkened back to this post I wrote a few weeks ago.

An excerpt in case you don't want to click:

"On the days I blog heavily, traffic goes way up. Especially if I weigh in on the Valley obsession of the day. It's seductive to just do that everyday. But is that really adding value and building something different? Maybe not. I recently read something from Michael Arrington addressing how TechCrunch's "community" had changed. (Sorry....can't find the link this second.) He essentially said as an audience grows it inevitably gets diluted and the trolls, spammers etc come in. I really love my blog audience. I get great comments from people I know and don't know. Occasional shocking comment from Fake Steve Jobs aside, my comments tend to be interesting, relevant conversations. I already write for two mass properties in BusinessWeek and TechTicker...suddenly I'm seeing the beauty in staying small. I'm not at a point where I'm trying to monetize this blog, but I wonder if a smaller community ever has an endemic value over sheer size of a mass community? I'm not talking about a niche-- because niches can still be mass when there are more than 1 billion people online."

I've been thinking about this a lot since with the confluence between my blog, my Yahoo show, and my book tour. My blog traffic was doubling month-over-month from a far higher base than I expected when I launched it earlier this year. But when life got complex and I started posting less for a while, it fell. If you're a goal oriented person, it's hard to be OK with that. Metrics equal validation to me more than money ever will. But I was Ok with it, for the same reason I wrote above and the same reason Jason says in his self-consciously melodramatic, but -- at its core-- heartfelt post.