Every time I say I'll never mention SXSW on my blog again...

So last night TechnoSailor had the testicular fortitude to be the only person after Robert Scoble to actually come up and apologize for the SXSW heckling event. Apparently while I was sweating around NYC all day semi-off the grid everyone discussed and called it the apology of the century! I don't know about all that. But I thought it was an incredibly gracious and classy thing to do.

It seems T.S. didn't know if I took his apology so I wanted to do a quick post to say YES. Life is too short for grudges. Besides the whole incident sold way more books and got me way more speaking gigs. Not that I want such things to happen all the time. But just saying.

Here's are photos to mark (haha!) the occasion. First, "ehh...I'm not letting you off the hook..."

then, "Well, ok."

...And I am officially exhausted!! more photos and blogging about my time in DC to come. For now, breakfast with my husband in New York. I think I remember him...

Meantime check out my latest Valley Girl column!

So, looks like I'll be stopping in Seattle and Portland in late August because I'm speaking at Gnomedex which I'm very very excited about!

That's all I have planned. Ideas for fun events in either city? People who can help plan? People who want stickers and posters? Leave it all in the comments! :)

So I had an amazing time last night at dinner with a dozen or so Web folks and Michael Tolosa is such a rock star he even made the waiter buy a copy! The AOL chat I did with Michael and Frank Gruber was also a lot of fun with some really great questions. They recorded it, so video to be embedded here soon. Frank is about to drive me into DC so he's going to do a SomewhatFrank.tv video cast on the drive I think. Now, THAT sounds safe!

Next up: Event #3. I boldly inserted myself into an existing event so I'm well aware the 700 people or so attending aren't coming just to see little ol' me. Still, it says a lot about Web enthusiasm in DC which means I'm in the right place. I am saying a few words then hopefully answering some questions and signing some books so if you are coming please bring your book or $20 to buy one. I only have about 30 copies left so buy early and often!!

Well, ladies and gentlemen, Sophie Askew has done it again. The same illustrator who designed the killer illustrations on this site has designed the Official UGBT T-shirt and stickers. We're trying to convince my husband to silk screen some posters.

Here's the plan:

Anyone who requests it will get a stack of stickers in the mail personalized with their city in advance of the tour stop to slap around town. If Geoff does the posters, you'll get those too. Anyone who goes above and beyond in organizing events and/or hosting us will get a free T-shirt. Otherwise, T-shirts are for sale for however much it costs to print them. (More for fun than profit! Believe me--I'm not getting rich off this tour!) If you buy three copies of the book, you will get a free T-shirt.

CAVEAT: I will not have the materials in time for my DC event this week. That's the downside of being first in a disorganized-by-design tour. But because I have 40 to sell, if you buy three books, I'll mail you a shirt when I get them. (Books make great gifts for that parent or out-of-touch boss who keeps going, "What's Web 2.0?" or "Why should I be on Facebook?" or "The Internet is just a trolling ground for pedophiles!")

I can't put the design on here for some annoying reason. But you can see it here and here on Sophie's site. (The back is slightly different, and yes Washington and Portland are spelled correctly in the actual version...)

Just finished reading Wired's cover on Julia Allison. Julia is a good friend of mine and I'm incredibly proud of her-- a fact people I know envy and abhor, sometimes at the same time. It's no secret one thing that's bonded us is our similar experience as Internet whipping girls, although I have never gotten it nearly as badly as Julia, but I also have a very different life and career. But having gotten to know her, I really  like Julia and I think this article captures her brilliantly. Her charm and her savvy. The mixture of poking her haters with a stick and begging them to stop. And this is what makes her more successful at the Internet fame game than I ever will be. I know in my head that controversy only makes me more well-known-- and to be crass-- makes me more money. But I hate it and I never court it.

And yet somehow, it seems to come out of nowhere to find me. Take today. Someone on Twitter blasted that I was bashing the New York "tech scene." I quickly thought through the latest interviews I'd been on either side of, blog posts, columns and couldn't come up with a time I'd bashed the New York tech scene. It turned out he was talking about this video, where I say-- as I have a zillion times explaining the title of my book-- that there's a unique cultural phenomenon in the Valley where true entrepreneurs are sucked into the game of starting another company because just doing it once isn't enough. I said New York reporters were frequently stunned asking "Why don't you go sit on an island?" Yeah. And? It's really more a cultural observation than "bashing." And it says nothing about the tech scene in New York. It's a minor example, but welcome to my life. (Update: I asked the guy about it via Twitter and he was actually pretty nice.)

It's weird to live on that fine line between love and hate, and even weirder to increasingly make your living on that line. The people who write the cruelest things are the ones who come back to my column, blog or yahoo show every single day. (Less so with the blog than the others.) They are probably my most loyal viewers/readers. Oh, and they frequently talk up why I should be fired or that they'll never -- ever-- buy my book or support anything I do. See that click? You just did. (Again.)

For months now, I've been trying to wrap my head around Internet fame and why it seems more powerful than real fame-- but at the end of the day, rarely if ever translates outside a niche. Magazines always profile people just before they break out. And then they don't. (Although I hope Julia proves me wrong with her Bravo show. She's certainly got a more traditional star quality than, say, the "Leave Britney Alone!" guy...) For instance, my husband pointed out to me that according to this, I rank number 90 on the list of 100 most famous people on the Internet. Sort of like my reaction to the Playboy thing, I felt a mix of how-can-that-be-possible head-scratching and flattery. That said, I don't kid myself: If you randomly asked ten people in San Francisco-- let alone the rest of the world-- who I was they'd have no clue.

I wonder if the discrepancy between Internet fame and real fame has something to do with being so hate-based? It's no secret the SXSW debacle and before that the Digg Cover caused much of this notoriety-- not my ten years of solid, and to some, boring business reporting-- and both were times I was slammed, even if then subsequently praised. (Both times I was also just trying to do my job.) But can you profit off hate offline? Would you, for instance, go see a movie starring someone you hated the way you will read a Gawker post and take the time to leave a nasty comment? I'm not so sure. I guess it all goes back to that ease of conversion online. Whether it's clicking on a paid search link, or tacitly endorsing a rising micro-celeb with your eyeballs.

I've just stopped blogging about it, because I stopped saying anything new. Everyone has done a bad job and everyone is angry. We get it!

But I can only hope Henry's analysis is the consensus of Yahoo's investors leading up to this shareholders' meeting. I don't say that as someone who draws a salary from Yahoo. First off, I don't think Microsoft would cancel TechTicker and it's just one of my several jobs, so it's not like my livelihood depends on this deal not happening. And I don't own stock in any tech companies, Yahoo included. (Besides, whenever I write or speak about Yahoo it's as a reporter not a contractor. I don't report anything I see or experience being on campus for work, per my contract.)

I'm just weary of all this fire-sale/break-up news that positions Yahoo as if it's, say, Novell: A troubled company that's a shadow of its former self. (Sorry friends at Novell!) Let's be clear: Yahoo is a shadow of Google when it comes to search-- which is hardly its whole business or greatest asset. But hardly a shadow of itself.

As a member of the media, let me express how remarkably unbroken Yahoo is as a property. Just see the news that the SF Chronicle is laying off another 100 newsroom jobs? Picked up an every shrinking issue of any business magazine lately? Yeah, that's our world. No other platform reaches half a billion people a month. TechTicker has become one of the biggest audiences for financial video content since its February launch mostly by being on Yahoo Finance. (As much as I think we're awesome...) And remember the much maligned Digg-copycat Yahoo Buzz? Look at its traffic, again just by being in front of that fire-hose of traffic.

Yahoo may operate like a fiefdom at times but it's a fiefdom that draws its strength from that torrent of traffic. Why you'd think you could get more value from breaking it up is beyond me. I guess that's why this story has ceased to interest me. It's become nothing more than a Wall Street game. And one that even Henry is bored by!

Paul Carr is the British Sarah Lacy, as you know if you're a regular sarahlacy.com reader. I understand he's even regarded as "sexy" over there. A recent suggestion for a joint-appearance when the UK version of my book comes out included Paul-- not me -- wearing a half shirt.

I don't know about all that. But I do know I can not wait to get my hot little American hands on his new book "Bringing Nothing to the Party: Confessions of a New Media Whore." (Apparently waaaaaay too long titles are yet another cosmic link between the two of us.)

I just noticed you can download the prologue on his blog (link above). I am slammed at Yahoo today so I've only been able to sneak away for one page. But this line is priceless, mostly because it vindicates my book-full of bad language:

"'Fuck' I half-whisper back. One habit you soon pick up, hanging out with dot com entrepreneurs, is swearing."

See Mom and Gotham! It's not me!

There was something else I was going to say about Paul Carr when I started this post. But I forgot. That's how busy I am! I'm sure it was snarky in an I-secretly-love-you sort of way.

Here's the clip of Andrew interviewing me in LA last week. Thanks a ton to Andrew and TechZulu for a great time and a great interview! DC next!

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.

Read more...