Conceptually, encouraging dominant cultures to divesify is fabulous –I subscribe to the DNA model of ecosystems and social spaces, so I support it wholeheartedly. As I’ve said in my book and recent talks:

This is a big one: you need to find people who don’t look like you, don’t necessarily think like you, and don’t come from the same places that you do. Creating a thrivable ecosystem–whether that’s an organization or a whole society–is like the evolution of a species. If you have a bunch of the same DNA mixing together, the species mutates poorly and eventually dies off. But bring in variety–new strains of DNA–and you create a stronger species. It’s no different in idea generation. You get a bunch of the same people talking to each other and making the rules for a few millennia, and eventually you’re going to end up with a lack of meaningful advancement.

We need you to be aware of the privilege you bring to the table – whether that’s your race, gender or your tech privilege – and make sure you’re using it responsibly and thoughtfully. Diversity is a strategic imperative for achieving collective goals. As diversity scholar Roosevelt Thomas notes, we all make better decisions–as individuals and as a society–when we account for differences and tensions.

But Johnson sort of, well, pretty much derails from the outset in his attempt. First, and I’m not going to focus on this too much, but “stalking?” Really? C’mon, we know that the world is loaded, painful and supports a culture of dominant violence. Not okay. But, moving along…

Where the argument really goes awry for me is in Johnson’s othering of the woman he follows. He’s turned her into an exotic creature on display, and taken away a little bit of her humanity. For more on exocitization, check out Racialicious’ extensive archive of awesome. There are plenty of ways to talk about race without placing people into positions that feel more like targets than participants.

This is largely about power relationships. Pretending that they don’t exist or don’t influence our decisions on how we interact with one another — especially when we’re different genders, races, sexualities, etc.– just mires us in he-said-she-said. It also perpetuates our bias, prejudices and social systems into the wild, open frontier of the Internet, and that’s a crying shame.

We’re living like fish in water on the Internet right now: We don’t know, or we’re not willing to recognize, that we’re soaking in the same social structures we’ve been living with for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years. We’re porting our understanding of the offline world–with all our prejudices, biases, and hierarchies–onto the blank canvas of the Internet. But all we can see is the blank canvas; we remain convinced that the Internet is a pure meritocracy and that if you just work hard enough, you’ll succeed at whatever it is that you’re trying to do. We’ve got to interrupt this pattern now, with conscious effort and action.

Lest I be a big ol’ bully and just rant about what’s wrong, allow me to offer some excerpts from my book that illustrate what I think is a healthier, more productive way to go about things. I’ll start with an example of where I was called out on my own voyeurism–shortly after the Philadelphia pool incident in 2009, and after listening on Twitter to lots of people of color share stories of childhood discrimination.

To share that kind of intimacy requires some sort of explicit or assumed “safe space”–a forum of sorts, where one can express views without threat of abuse or harassment. Safe space requires a tremendous amount of trust, and that trust allowed the people sharing the stories with each other to extend the conversation past the sound bite moments that get played out in media and other traditional public forums. “Usually when people of color talk publicly, it’s about our feelings, our mistakes, and being frank about our shortcomings,” says Ludovic Blain, director of the Progressive Era Project and a longtime social justice activist. “Often when white folks speak in the same setting, it’s about their initiatives and how they’ll make it right. That’s perverted. In the case of the racist pool, the scene was the same: people of color discussing heart-wrenching issues in front of whites. But those people were also doing a rare thing–publicly discussing what whites had done wrong.” The empathy based on shared experience, combined with trust that the conversation would be productive, brought this moment to a more necessarily intense place.

Additionally, people decided to share their stories for many reasons: to release a painful memory and get it off their chests, to connect with others who had experienced similar racism as children, to potentially educate those who needed to hear their memories, and more. Thus, the voyeuristic aspect of the experience was strong. My whiteness was hidden for a moment (via my silence, not sharing a common past experience), and social networks allowed me to enter a conversation that otherwise might have been altered by my presence. I was able to benefit regardless of whether the sharers intended for me to, and that cultural voyeurism needs to be clear when discussing issues that deal with bias around race, gender, class, and other kinds of privilege.

Later in the book, I discuss the kind of cross-pollination of culture that I believe Johnson originally intended to challenge his readers with.

To be clear, we won’t ever eliminate our biases. But we can begin to be explicit about what we learn about ourselves and our social spheres when bias rears its ugly head. Social technology researcher danah boyd suggests a series of questions for that explicit discovery process: “None of us is going to be unbiased. There is no way to be unbiased. The question is: Can you account for your biases? Can you recognize when they get in the way? Can you open up a dialogue, even if it makes you uncomfortable, with people who aren’t like you?” Opening ourselves up to that process and beginning to break out of the way we’ve been thinking about how we assume the world operates (simply because it’s operated like that for a long time) is crucial. We need to listen as selflessly as possible to what others are sharing and make sure that we’re not perpetuating restrictive social structures. … It makes me realize that often those moments are not about me at all–they are about larger injustices that I have a role in changing or stopping altogether, and it’s my job to figure out how to do that.

…

It’s important for people of all stripes and places to engage with those who are different from themselves, but to be blunt, it’s extra important for those who are a couple of notches up on the hierarchy to go through this exercise. Remember, you’re not there as part of some sociology experiment, but because you get that progress is possible only when we participate.

A crucial part of cross-pollination exercises is realizing that your role as ambassador is not to defend your position in the food chain. That’s where a lot of us get into trouble–I know I have. Your job is to recognize what privilege you bring–whether it’s your gender, your class, your race, your sexuality, etc.–and figure out how best you can use it to enable justice for people who don’t share your privilege. Jessica Hoffman, editor of make/shift magazine, pithily captured our collective responsibility to engage in self-reflection in an article she wrote about a white feminist’s role in other social justice movements: “Inexperienced because of privilege, we hadn’t thought well on our feet, and we’d been in a certain denial about how bad things might get; we’d been pissed and well meaning, but not useful [emphasis mine].” It’s the job of all of us to be useful.

Johnson’s utter failure to be useful is instructive of the larger systemic issues we face, not the least of which is the truism, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” A tweet from last year comes to mind on why this is true.

For background, here are the series of posts that sum up the first discussions on Twitter, and subsequent responses:

• An argument about crowdfunding, Quiet Babylonian
• Crowdfunding & Micropatronage Part 2, Quiet Babylonian
• Crowdfunding books, PD Smith at Kafka’s mouse
• Is ‘crowdfunding’ really the way ahead for author advances?, Michelle Pauli at The Guardian UK’s Books blog

There seem to be two sets of argument made against crowdfunding in much of the discussion I’ve seen: one, it reveals the funding seeker as a shameless self-promoter and snake-oil salesperson; two, it destroys the ethos of publishing either by allowing publishers to never have to produce advances again, or by allowing just any ol’ work to be produced without blood/sweat/tears.

What this revealed to me were first some fundamental misunderstandings of my own project, and later, some fundamental misunderstandings–or even outright denial–of the massive upheaval all of media is experiencing. To clarify some points about my own project, for those who are new to the discussion or new to my corner of the world, my professional life as a technologist has largely been spent in industries that accept the ethos of community-supported work: arts organizations, independent media, non-profit advocacy, etc. In these spheres, we’re used to receiving regular appeals for ongoing organizational support, or emergencies, or proposals for new projects. So, it certainly wasn’t a stretch for me to reach out in a similar way to the people who make up that community and believe in that tradition.

Also, some people seemed to think I was “charging” $100 for my book up front, before actually writing it. Mais non! I was using the PBS model of fundraising, where you donate $100 and feel good about yourself, and then you also get the bonus tote bag. (Tell me if you find someone that believes they purchased a totebag from PBS for a hundred bucks. Heh.) Because my community is familiar with the work I’ve done over the years, they understand that the project I was proposing (writing about a fundamental, progressive cultural shift) was ultimately beneficial to our community for their ability to thrive in the new tech era. Many decided to support that, shockingly, without needing me to hold guns to their heads. (Also worth noting is that every person I received a donation from, save one, has a personal relationship with me.)

The focus on who-gave-what-why revealed just how deeply entrenched an exclusively market-based mindset is in our culture. People in the discussion are so focused on the transactional moment–who gave to the project? how much did they give? what did they get in return?–that they are unable (or unwilling) to see both how market forces have long tainted the media process. It’s hard for many to imagine a scenario where someone cooks up an idea, a bunch of others support it, the work gets produced, and everyone lives happily ever after. There simply must be quid-pro-quo or sleight-of-hand somewhere in this process, because that’s how markets work.

As my friend Steve pointed out in his comments, there is a different economy at work–the gift economy. Using that model, people do things because they think they’re generally a good idea. (I wrote about this in my book, since the gift economy is so fundamental to how healthy social networks operate.) To some, I get the sense that they think I’ve stolen my donors’ money–what happens if my book becomes successful enough to make some money? Then I’ve doubly won! My evil plan will have worked. World domination next. No, seriously… I’ve thought about that, and I have made plans to account for it and will reach out to my awesome people if that happens. Which of course, you can say, of course you say that now, but it’s up to you to believe me or not.

Which is the whole point of the gift economy: do you trust me? Do you believe me? What kind of track record have I built up in this economy? Do I donate time and money to other projects? Do I reach out to my connections when someone else is in need? Am I known to have influence in a particular crowd, and use that influence justly? Do people consider me talented at what I do, and I able to get access to more talent from others when needed? All of those things make up my social capital, and I chose to spend my social capital on the crowdfunding of my book. It could have flopped miserably if I hadn’t been a pretty alright person in the world. People made their assessments on their belief in the value of my project and my reputation, and either gave me money, or didn’t. It’s as simple as that.

Each of us being able to make our own decisions about what we value and what we don’t, and then seeing work produced based on our values, seems to be one of the underlying themes that threatens many in the publishing and journalism industries. Book publishing in particular is seen as this time-honored tradition of creating works that go into that Big Canon in the Sky. I know I felt this when I first considered the prospect of writing a book — something else that’s different about my situation is that I was approached by a friend and colleague at the publisher, Johanna Vondeling, who had been asking for some time if I’d ever considered writing a book. Part of the reason I rejected her for at least a couple years was because I was plainly terrified of that idea of producing something to a state of perfection that it would need to be in, in my opinion, to be part of aforementioned canon.

The way this process has traditionally worked is that publishers and others with power/influence deem someone worthy enough to be part of that. Someone (actually, a group of people at the publisher) did that for me, too, but instead of taking their money, I decided to take their process instead, and work out the money on my own. One of the reasons I wanted Berrett-Koehler’s process, over being tossed a pittance–if anything at all–is their committment to producing the author’s vision of the work. So, if I were to go to a publisher who offered me an advance, how much would I have had to change the work I produced based on what the publisher wanted me to do? Too often I’ve heard from friends and colleagues who’ve written books that they were forced to make changes to make it more commercially viable… so that the publisher was guaranteed making up the advance.

That’s another big sticking point right there: one side of this debate feels that allowing “just anyone” to donate their money to my project will give them undue influence over the work that’s produced. First of all, that assumes I’d let that happen. Which, as anyone in my community knows, I sure as hell wouldn’t. Outside of that, it also assumes that works produced in the traditional model have the purest intentions and zero monetary influence. I find that hard to swallow, and there’s certainly enough evidence out there that says otherwise. A multinational company throwing money at little old me isn’t going to have a say over what I’m able to do under their umbrella? Working with Berrett-Koehler, the only restraint I experienced is that Johanna wouldn’t let me even come close to swearing, and my mom thanks her for that. (I wanted to use “BS” at one point.)

So now, it’s not just up to institutions to bless or dismiss projects outright–it can be any conglomeration of people pooling together to fund someone or something they believe in. In many circles, we consider this a part of community building, and are happy to participate when all of our values align. Others don’t see fundraising as community-building, they clearly only see money in the transactional terms I spoke of earlier. That’s a shame. But what’s an even bigger shame is that most of those disagreeing with my tactics don’t seem to believe in community-building at all–they are largely stuck in an old model of broadcast and response, of pedestals and ivory towers… ultimately, of cliques and isolation. Those people will be left behind as the rest of us work on connecting, creating, and conversing.

I’m reminded of when the Publisher’s Weekly story about my crowdfunding was first published, and a stranger on Twitter called the whole thing “tacky.” Curious as to how she ended up there, I asked her. In the following discussion, she came around to the fact that it wasn’t me or my tactic that she was frustrated with, it was the fact that authors are expected more and more to do everything for a book–write it, market it, sell it… and now fundraise for it? This is a painful part of the change process, for sure. Everyone’s roles are changing. Editor’s don’t just edit, for example; this I can tell you for sure from my experience with Johanna the Wondereditor. Anyone working in just about any aspect of media today is expected to have a far wider skill set then ever before: writing, some knowledge of HTML, bonus if you can do online video, etc., for less money than ever before. And many are suffering because of that.

Which brings me back to an earlier point: maybe market models are failing information and media altogether. I had this conversation about possible similarities of journalism and art paradigms with Andrew Golis, who works for Yahoo! News building a blog network… a key point I want to bring into this discussion:

For eons, there have been many avenues the artist can follow: commercial (Hallmark cards, pop music, etc), government-funded (NEA grants, NYSCA grants, etc), foundation funded (Yaddo retreats, what have you), family funded, collective supported, street selling (a form of commercial, for sure)… and any blend of those above is becoming more and more prominent.

Art, despite the instability that Andrew rightly calls out, hasn't disappeared, tho. Art hasn't even gotten worse, just more available. There is always cynicism about popular culture, but that's too easy of a target. There's just more of everything available to us. If you're a musician, for example, it's easier than ever to get your work heard by more people than just your friends. But not paid for by a whole bunch, probably. That's the sticker, eh? A few years ago, as Napster started ticking off the recording industry, someone said that it was clearer than ever what the musician's job is: not to sell records, but to travel around and play for people. That's what they've always done, and that's what they're returning to.

Journalism is grasping at straws for a new model to pay everyone's salaries. The old model, though, was in many ways distorted, and probably distended. Maybe it's not, however, that journalistic endeavors are going to be the new starving artists… maybe it's that news producers and art makers need to get their heads together and figure out how we're going to create not a model, but a whole new system that creates thrivable conditions for creators to get their jobs done.

I created the conditions to have a thrivable summer for producing my book. Nothing extraordinary: I paid my rent, I ate sufficiently, and I visited my parents, all while writing the first 30,000 words of a book. This makes people angry. I’m not entirely sure why; some have pointed to jealousy but I’m not sure that’s quite right. Other people do this all the time; people’s spouses work while they finish their dissertations, trust funds allow for children of rich people to have a good time, etc. It’s something about asking your friends that bothers people. Reaching out to those who already support you most is culturally problematic. Why? What is it going to take to overhaul the way we’re doing business now, in the media industries, to create cultural situations where artists, journalists and authors can thrive? Crying endlessly about the demise and shunning potential for innovation is definitely not a good place to start.

That’s what I want to leave this discussion with: more of these ideas to throw something on the wall and see what sticks. Already, hundreds (thousands?) of people are doing it on Kickstarter for their books, films, records and more. How many other ways can we think of to open up the process of creation to more people? I’m tired of the same ol’, same ol’, and I know I’m not the only one.

Watch the prez live, courtesy of The Uptake:

And let the silliness ensue:

So! An early New Year’s resolution: I’m gonna try to get on the ball for next year. Already thinking of SXSW, Allied Media Conference, US Social Forum, Personal Democracy Forum, Women Who Tech, America’s Future Now, NonProfit 2.0, NTEN and more; what do you recommend in the social tech, media, politics, activism, and social justice fields? Conferences & unconferences, big ‘n’ small. Leave ‘em in the comments (links to conferences would be helpful), and I’ll publish a big list in the next few days.

1. On foreign correspondents: John MacArthur (publisher of Harper’s) made reference to the fact that they have a reporter on the ground in Iran doing some pretty intense work for Harper’s, and that it costs money to keep him sustained. I’m sure that it does. However, it made me wonder a couple of things–using this case as a jumping off point, not as a target itself necessarily–namely, is the best journalism in a situation like what we’re seeing in Iran produced by an American (presumably white) man? (Even if the person in question “speaks Farsi and has an Iranian wife.”) Not that this would save the magazine any money, but couldn’t we be thinking less about foreign correspondents and more about using local journalists/citizens to aid with not just reporting, but contextualizing the events?

2. On authority — who has it, who gives it: Mario Murillo made the point that a lot of news or information isn’t valid until it appears on CNN or any of the other cable news networks. This is at least partially true for a lot of people, but I firmly believe that’s shifting. We’re moving into an age of shifting authority. Think about how we recommend movies to one another– we have an idea of who our friend is doing the recommending, what movies they’ve liked in the past, and how much we have in common, amongst a myriad of other factors. Based on those, we figure out if the awesome movie review is really going to be all that awesome for us.

There’s a similar process happening for news: in an older model of news gathering and dissemination, it did require a large organization with tons of resources to say, “This is what’s happening.” But because of elimination of need for lots of resources when it comes to telling stories, we can know judge what’s valid or true with an entirely different set of criteria. Do I trust this person or organization? Why? What kind of track record do they have?

That’s not to say that social media hasn’t been problematic when it comes to live reporting. Just last weekend, there was a building collapse in Brooklyn, and two false addresses were posted to Twitter before the correct one was. (and I admittedly re-tweeted false addresses, too!) We have to refrain, however, from demonizing the tools as faulty, and instead create solutions using the same or other tools. Check out what Amanda Michel says about volume as verification– when a number of people post, say, similar videos from a protest, we might then assume that the protest is happening as depicted.

3. On future models of media: At the roundtable, I suggested that trying squeeze an open framework (the Internet) into a capitalist, market-based system is misguided (much to the chagrin of MacArthur next to me, who praised Harper’s use of a paywall, but spoke nothing about their overall funding model). I’m no business-side expert of publishing, and most of my media beliefs come out of an activist mindset. What I do know, though, is that it’s not just silly and dismissive, but also dangerous to suggest that social media are the cause of the desperate state that many news organizations find themselves in.

Again, I ask: what are the tools we need to solve our problems here? When I’m doing work with my clients, it’s easy for them to get caught up in the buzziest, shiniest new things. “We need a blog! We’ve got to get on Facebook! Let’s start Twittering!” Of course I’ve totally drunk the Kool-Aid on all those services, but I don’t always advocate their use for everyone. Instead, I ask folks to take a step back and look at what mission they’re trying to achieve. From there, we’ll find or develop tech to fit that mission.

A couple of folks are taking this approach to investigative journalism, as I mentioned in the show– David Cohn’s Spot.Us always comes to mind first. Steve Katz of Mother Jones has wondered how to turn this into a larger model of sustainable journalism, and I recommend his blog for excellent musings on the subject. But please, media folk: I swear, we come in peace. Don’t throw the tech out with the bathwater.

4. Decrying the end of Good Journalism: In which I let the idealist in me speak, more than I already normally do… I don’t know anyone, honestly, that gets a huge kick out of watching cable news regurgitate infotainment like they do. So, using that as a model of what we think Americans want when it comes to news reporting is not the right model. I firmly believe that good journalism–whether it’s “professional” or “amateur”–will rise above the mediocre and less-than-savvy.

I think about the format change that New York Magazine made earlier this year; it now includes a more schizoid-designed front section that I presume is supposed to replicate my experience with websites. Thing is, I don’t subscribe to NY Magazine for it to be like a website; I actually like the long-form articles (and the Strategist section). I also recently started subscribing to the New Yorker because I wanted more in-depth stuff around the house, trees be damned. Me, the darling of all-things-140-characters! I don’t think I’m an anamoly, either. I don’t have the solution (yet! muwahaha), but I know it’s coming.

5. This is why media literacy education is critical. That was Simin’s final point at the roundtable, and I couldn’t agree more. We don’t teach our kids and young adults to understand the processes of media, that they might develop a more fundamental sense of the ever-increasingly complicated landscape that they face. But there are some good projects out there; I know up in Canada, my friend Dr. Mark Lipton is running the Media Education Project. (What are the American counterparts? Maybe Bernie over at PopPolitics can tell us, poke poke.)

Lots more to explore here, for sure. I’m hoping to go more in depth into each of these areas in future posts; what would you like see addressed and discussed?

I’ve got more thoughts on the subject (if ya couldn’t tell by the look on my face at different points in the clip) that I hope to round up later this morning I wrote up here…

First, from an American media perspective, here was another great moment for folks to demand what they wanted to see covered on national news media. What a moment of media dissonance: As protests erupted — and in some cases, turned violent –  in the streets of Tehran and elsewhere in Iran, major broadcast media in the US had little to no news on the events at all. By using the hashtag¹ #CNNfail to collect all of the dissatisfaction on Twitter, Americans were able to shift the focus of the conversation and eventually influence CNN’s decision makers to start covering stories by Sunday.

It’s reminiscent of #AmazonFAIL (when Amazon accidentally delisted 58,000 books, fueling a social media revolt), in the sense that within a pretty short timeframe (less than 24 hours), major news organizations simply could not ignore the story unfolding — via reportage and commentary — on social media. I remind folks to think about how this sort of situation would have unfolded even five years ago: Bloggers would blog, perhaps media watchdog organizations would get a grassroots campaign together, and maybe within a week, if we were lucky, we’d see some influence. Now, with so many people participating in the conversation, we have immense power to quickly shift both focus and perception.

This is why, when it comes to politics and advocacy work, it’s important to look at a bigger picture beyond just who’s using Facebook to get votes, or which representatives of governments tweet with pizazz. It’s less about celebrity and more about connection, humanity and the ability to inject our values into the wider culture in a fundamentally populist way.

Another fascinating angle of this story is the bootstrapping of access to technology after the Iranian government began blocking access. Facebook was blocked in late May, when reformist candidate Moussavi had around 5,200 supporters. Not long into the protests this weekend, access to major portions of the Internet (including Twitter), as well as SMS texting, were blocked. Not to be stopped, protesters within Iran are receiving information about accessing proxy servers from folks setting them up outside of the country, and stories continue to flood out.

Honestly, there is just no blocking The Internet, y’all. What the Iranian government is trying to do is, in effect, akin to trying to stop water or electricity from flowing. There is so much infrastructure in place at this point, they’d basically have to blow up most of it to stop people from accessing the outside world. Of course, I wouldn’t put it past Ahmadinejad, now that I think about it…

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¹ What’s a hashtag? It’s a keyword that people add to their tweets, so that conversations around a particular topic can be easily tracked.

We try to keep it light, informal, and funny — providing helpful resources and interesting links, and being responsive to our followers, while also using it as a way to crowdsource and get buy-in and guidance on new projects.  We want to have a mix of self-promotional content and links to things happening in the progressive movement that our audience should know about, but might not necessarily read about from any traditional or even new media sources.

Read the full interview here!

In short, every woman I know should apply for this program. The deadline for applications to get into the next round of classes is coming soon: March 10. Women from all disciplines, backgrounds and identities are strongly encouraged to apply! Don’t let geography or other constraints prevent you from applying — the staff is more than willing to work with candidates that get accepted. This is one of the most brilliant programs for empowering women with real skills that I’ve ever seen– get your application in today.

We are "changing the conversation" by making sure that there are plenty of qualified, authoritative, progressive women experts available to editors, reporters, producers, and bookers. For the women chosen to participate in our 2009 Progressive Women's Voices program, we provide intense media training sessions in New York, with weekly follow-up briefings and continued training, as well as support and resources for media bookings.

Not only am I thrilled to be participating myself, but I’m especially excited to work with amazing classmates — Rinku Sen, Jehmu Greene, hello! — and almuni of the program (Carmen, Courtney, I’m lookin’ at you…). Thanks to the Women’s Media Center for giving us all this fabulous program.

Then on Saturday evening, I was headed into the city to see Hamell on Trial (excellent show, highly recommended), and I ran into one of the conspirators on the train. “Check out today’s Times,” he said gleefully. “Can you believe this?” I couldn’t. All this good news. Seriously? I took it all in, hook line and sinker. War over? Friedman resigns? Maximum wage? Huh? There was a spring in my step for sure.

Later that night, I was, shall we say, a wee tipsy, trying to explain what I’d read to my friends. “No, seriously, I read it in the friggin’ Times, you guys, Harvard is closing its business school! I swear to God!”

Slowly, pieces started floating together in my addled brain. This was the project I’d vaguely heard about, come to fruition. Brilliant. I was on the distribution crew this morning, and I can’t say I’ve had a better time early in the morning at Rockefeller Center. The looks on folks’ faces were just priceless.

no no, thank YOU, Adele!

WAM!‘s gotten to be huge, and it’s hard to say how I feel about that. It’s like when your favorite restaurant gets discovered, and the atmosphere changes because the throngs are rushing in to discover the yummy treats. Yep, I’m thrilled for my favorite conference, and it was still like camp-for-grownups, but I did lose some intimacy with my fellow attendees. There’s a group of “old-timers” who are already saying things like, “Wow, remember when it was 10 of us hanging out afterwards?” during the afterparty, in which around 50 women crammed into the very generous Amanda Marcotte’s room. (Who is the quintessential afterparty-hotel-room-hostess with the mostest, by the way. I was amazed at her mad skillz, and learned much from her party kungfu.)

Pictures galore from the conference are on Flickr.

Continuing the theme of “women who work together, rock together” when I got home, I attended the first-ever Women Who Tech Telesummit on Monday. That’s right, it was the first conference I was ever able to attend in my yoga pants and t-shirt. We dialed in to listen to the panelists and watched the presentations via ReadyTalk. (Hint for future participants: use a separate computer to log in to both via Skype and ReadyTalk. It was like having a TV with really good shows on all day.)

The two panels that blew me away were Tara Hunt’s “Women And Social Capital,” with panelists Arianna Huffington and Joan Blades. While Arianna and Joan are always inspiring and fun to listen to, I have to say, it was Tara’s opening remarks that really got me thinking. I’m going to write more extensively about this, but she pointed out that women tend to hide themselves online, using pseudonyms and private profiles on services, which often can mean we are not shaping the discourse. I’d never thought of it that way, and it was inspiration for me to set my profiles free. Go free, little ones! I’ll be implementing a redesign of dz.com to reflect my newfound carefree abandon. Wish me luck.

Equally compelling was the panel “Web 2.0: Hot Or Not?” I can’t wait for the podcast of this session to come out, there were so many interesting tools and concepts for measuring the success of social energy. I’ll post links when I get them, but all the panelists here were just completely dynamic and amazing.

What else can I tell you? On a personal note, I’m heading off this weekend to Cheryl and Mike’s wedding, and then commencing on the mad prep for my month-long trip to Berlin. Oh, let me leave off with a cute postcard from Jim Hightower: he married John Weiss of the Colorado Independent this week. Tee hee.