horsepigcow

As Erica D., Erica O and Ruth have pointed out, we have been picking #themewords instead of (or in my case in addition to) setting down resolutions since LifeCamp2007.

When chosing a themeword, one needs to be incredibly careful. My first year, I chose the themeword TRANSITION, which turned out to be a doozy! When I was *thinking* transition, I was imagining transitioning into my next awesome step in life and moving forward. What I didn’t imagine was that a transition also meant that many things big in my life would come to an end. My long-term relationship ended abruptly, my son decided he wanted to move in with his father (thankfully, he moved back after 8 months), my business and clients slowly melted away (they were all connected to the relationship as we owned the business together) and life as I had previously known it kind of fell away. Of course, it all turned out positively, but not before I had a bit of an existential crisis.

So as 2009 approached, I chose THRIVE as it was safe and warm. It also happened to be the campaign themeword for Kaiser Permanente, which I didn’t connect at the time. This didn’t mean it wasn’t positive, but there was no real challenge in it. Thriving was a sort of chugging along action word. I had a great year, of course, with the book being released, the Whuffaoke karaoke roadtrip, a fabulous move to Montreal and many speaking gigs, but it wasn’t until the end of the year that forward momentum started to kick into gear.

Which is why I’m choosing a very strong, definitive word for 2010: ACHIEVE. I have laid down a good amount of groundwork for both a challenging and rewarding year. Now I have to focus (a word that was in the running, but I figure I need it to achieve nonetheless) and drive forward towards my goals. And I have many of them. I want to finish writing that second book that has a great outline and a couple of rough chapters dangling, launch and grow Shwowp, the startup I’ve announced alongside Jerome Paradis, guide a conference about putting people at the core of business in Montreal, learn French and maybe even figure out this dating thing once and for all. It’s all about big achievements and pushing myself to do more and talk less. I’m excited.

So, what is your #themeword for 2010? My friend Erica O’Grady lays out a great guideline to helping you set down and follow through on your #themeword here:

How to Pick Your #ThemeWord for 2010

1. Think of a word that reflects your hopes and dreams for 2010.
2. Share your ThemeWord with friends on Twitter, Facebook, or Your Blog.
3. Be sure and use the hashtag #ThemeWord.

What I love about boiling the entire year down into one word is that it helps focus everything else. It’s also a fun exercise. Be sure to tweet and tell me yours.

[champagne glasses photo from shutterstock]

Cartoon by @kevinspear 2009

…or so my recent experiences would demonstrate. The awful stereotypes that rotate through our culture that women are emotional, dramatic and needy while men are jerks who just want sex and space fall apart when we shift overall power dynamics.

Let me explain.

Scenario: Being that I’ve settled into a new place and am in a good place in my life, I decided that dating would probably be a good idea. However, I spend most of my ‘going out’ time with mostly men and a few women from the technology scene. This makes it difficult to find time to go out on my own and meet people outside of my field (people who I can casually date without rumors flying around). So, I turned to what most modern singles turn to in our day and age: online dating. I looked at a few sites, but they just seemed so cheesy until I came across OKCupid, a hip and fun site that is also without those awful ‘sign up for 3 months to be able to talk to anyone and give us all of your information while you are at it’ caveats.

This was in October. Then I got really busy with travel and work so I didn’t check in for a long time. While I was offline, I had a few messages that I missed and that sort of thing, but a few of them had me baffled. I logged onto find a couple of threads where I got not one, but multiple messages from the same men. They started out sweet and chatty, moved into ‘Hello? Hello?’ territory fairly quickly, then spiraled into crazy, dramatic, “Listen here you snotty beotch…you think you are better than me?” depths within a couple of days. Okay, so I could dismiss these threads as troll-like online behavior.

Then as I was checking these messages, I got pinged in the IM feature by someone who had just joined the service. I was procrastinating anyway, so I decided to give it a whirl. Now I KNOW most men out there understand this, but leading with overly sappy comments is a sure fire turn-off for most women. I had to tell him, “Dude. You don’t even know me. How could you say that I’m the woman of your dreams? Hell, I could be a guy!” We finally got into a regular conversation until he asked me to phone him. I told him I had work to do (I did) and that I didn’t phone people I just met on the internet (I don’t) and said that I had to go (I did). I woke up this morning to a similarly crazy spiraling message on how I was missing out.

There are several other instances since I’ve gotten to the point in my life that I have enough self-confidence to not need a boyfriend or the external validation of anyone else where some degree of this has happened. I find myself blocking texts, ignoring emails and sometimes having to sit down with men I barely know to let them know that their behaviour is not helping the situation. I genuinely try to give them advice for ‘the next woman’ they want to woo…advice that starts sounding a great deal like ‘He’s Just Not That Into You‘ or ‘Dating Without Drama‘. Advice that was meant for WOMEN.

But I’m still a woman…and the dozen-odd cases I’ve encountered in the past 6-8 months are, well, men as far as I can tell. Men of many ages. 20′s, 30′s and 40′s. Varying incomes and stages in life. Good looking in general. That sort of thing. So what is the difference?

Power.

The dynamic shifted for me this year more than ever. Between doing a great deal of soul searching, CBT and just getting to a point in my life where I’m not feeling like I need someone to complete me, I have started to occupy the control position in relationships. (not controlling, but ‘I make my own decisions and I will survive if the other party doesn’t reciprocate’ control position) Therefore, I have power in many situations. And when another party approaches someone with that power, the human reaction to that often comes from a place of defensiveness. A rejection manifests in hurt, anger, sadness, drama, neediness, etc.

What’s most interesting to me is the genderedness of these situations. I am aware of the odd reaction from these guys because I don’t expect it. I expect a shrug and move along. I’ve been completely flabbergasted. And I certainly don’t advocate women en masse turning the tables, but I do think this gives a good example of how gendered behavior can be unpacked. It’s not actually due to being a woman or a man at all. The reaction comes from a loss of power over a situation. A loss of control. In a world where power was balanced (not only between genders, but between cultures), drama and emotional outbursts wouldn’t be attributed to a stereotyped group of people, it would be attributed to a reaction to feeling disempowered. Which is, in the end, what it has always been.

The ‘men from mars, women from venus’ thing and all of the other self-help battle of the sexes books out there mainly reinforce the power dynamic that already exists. They teach us to game the awful system we exist in where one gender DOES hold more power than the other when we SHOULD be questioning it. It’s why we hear things like, “Men love bitches” and why women often won’t date the ‘nice guy’. Personally, I aim to question it and continue to experiment with it as long as I have the ability to, while at the same time being aware of where I’m at and how I can help balance the dynamic for future generations.

[photo from Shutterstock]

The thing that bothers me most about branding, be it personal or otherwise, is the whole consistency item. When learning about branding in the 90′s while I was at University, it was taught to me that going ‘off brand’ was a big no-no. Going ‘off-brand’ would confuse your customers, alienate the people who identified with your company and cause some major implosion to your company. Companies like GAP and Apple were upheld as being brand geniuses because we could look at a logo-less advert for 5 seconds and know instantly that this must be one of theirs.

I always questioned the value in that idea. Okay, so I recognize the ‘look and feel’ of this advert. Must be the GAP. And? I know that consistency is equivalent to comfort, but I am uncertain of the longevity of that particular strategy. GAP was awesome in the 90′s and early 2000′s. The consistency of their clothes – jeans, fitted sweaters, khakis and an array of colourful t-shirts – WAS comforting, but after a while it became so comforting that it became common, then commonplace. Now when someone is wearing an entire GAP outfit, people snicker behind their backs, implicating that person as a follower and unoriginal.

And unoriginal is no longer going to fly in the ‘I-want-it-my-way” era of the personalizable, customizable, nichified, tribe-ified net. Choice is king here and the ability to craft a style based on a person’s individual ‘brand’ is the key. Nobody wants to look like they stepped out of the window of any particular store any longer. Sure, the tee can be from the GAP, but the boots are from Fluevog, the pants are Hudsons, the sweater is vintage from a little second hand store in the neighbourhood and the scarf was a gift from my BFF who bought it in Amsterdam for me. All pieces become unrecognizable as any particular ‘brand’ and become part of a person’s style.

But what of personal branding, then? Is that where it’s headed. God, I hope not.

I’ve heard so much of the term ‘personal branding’ batted around lately in reference to people like Gary Vee and Julia Allison and Chris Brogan, etc. (they even have their names as their websites). People are lauding this exercise of creating a personal brand as the secret sauce to their success. I can’t speak for them, but I know when I told a friend the other night that I was working on a book called ‘Happiness as Your Business Model‘ and he responded to that by saying:

“Well, it’s definitely on brand for you.”

I cringed. It made me want to throw it out and write something like, “Taking Advantage of Your Customers for Big Bucks”. I recoiled at the consistency of who I’ve become. Am I a broken record? Please, God, let me be more than a personal brand!

And I am. I know that. I may be consistent in my passion and what I believe in, but I’m terribly inconsistent in my actions. I talk of empowering customers, yet I’m the biggest sucker for a sales pitch you have ever met, spending most of my time impulse buying, then regretting. I may go on and on about women getting in front of parades and dispelling myths, but I’m incredibly anti-social most of the time, embarrassed to take credit or do any pro-active self-promotion (I’ve been lucky enough to have amazing friends and supporters who do this for me). I go on and on about how important relationships are, yet I am terrible at keeping in touch with friends, spending enough time with my family and getting out from behind my computer to meet new people. Yet, I really display the opposite. Nobody who “knows” me online would agree with how I’ve characterized myself here. Funny that. It’s me. 100%. The teensy group of people I let in know this.

We talk about authenticity, but people rarely want to see the negative side of a person. When I’ve been truly honest – angry, sad, scared, belligerent, grumpy, negative, depressed or anxious (and I keep it under control, but I have terrible anxiety) – people get nervous. I lose followers. I get long emails from people asking me to stop being self-indulgent. I get messages from concerned friends saying, “Don’t you worry about damaging your brand?”

And that’s it. Do we want authenticity? Or do we want branding? One of the most memorable lines in a movie for me is from Magnolia, where Claudia says to Jim:

“I’ll tell you everything, and you tell me everything, and maybe we can get through all the piss and shit and lies that kill other people. ”

I love that line because I think it’s what we all want to do, but are afraid to do it. We love people who represent the ideal, the perfect, the imperfectly perfect, the happy, the successful, the amazing, positive, go-for-it, wa-hoo in life. And I’m not saying those people don’t exist. They just don’t exist as much as we think they exist because there are so many bloomin personal brands out there that are inspiring the crap out of us that we lose the fact that behind the scenes, they are probably falling apart now and then.

Much like not wanting to look like we stepped out of a GAP ad, I don’t believe any one of us wants to look like we stepped out of an episode of Leave it to Beaver, either. We also don’t want to look like we stepped out of an episode of Absolutely Fabulous, but real life represents all of these scenarios.

I don’t have a personal brand, I have a personality – complete with crazy moments and drunken nights, super highs and heartbreaking lows. And every single one of those moments define who I am. Now. Who are you? A personal brand or a personality?

I had a great time in Paris and at Le Web last week. Here are my top 7 highlights and 3 lowlights:

Highlights

1. The Women Stole the Show. Keynote speaker Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (quite the title!) bowled me over with her progressive use of social media tools for connecting with her citizens and leading social change. Her delivery of her talk was utterly human and warm, her stories were rich and passionate and her humor was amazingly casual for a Queen. I’ll be sure to get behind her awesome project 1GOAL. Other highlights included danah boyd, discussing what we are missing with all of the radical transparency today (i.e. the pain, bullying and bad home lives we could detect through teens posts online and help them out). Incredible message. I also loved (and always love) watching Marissa Mayer being interviewed by Michael Arrington. Her passion and enthusiasm for the experience of Google users is amazing and she has an amazing grasp on the future.

   
   

2. The Company was Divine – One of the most important things about a conference is the hallway conversations. In order to maximize the interestingness of those conversations, the ‘right’ people have to be at your conference: the smart, the cool, the innovators, the creatives, the thinkers, the sideways thinkers and the fun seekers. I can wholeheartedly say that a great mix of those people were at Le Web. The brainiacs like Kevin Marks were present to make me think, the cool kids like Cathy Brooks were present to add prestige (that woman knows EVERYONE), the innovators like Stéphane Distinguin were hanging about, the creatives like Donna Jackson brought a fashionable air to the event, I’m always happy to see Dave McClure, who always makes me think, and Paul Carr, who brings his unconventional thought to the table, and, of course, I like to think of myself as the fun seeker at every conference (especially after a few glasses of champagne – dancing until 4 am anyone? ). It was a great mix of people.

   
   

3. The Venue was Fabulous – I heard that it was a little chilly in there last year, but OMG…what a beautiful venue! Acoustics were pretty decent for something of that size, too. Only one suggestion: put a barrier up (maybe a curtain) between the audience and those chatting at the top of the ramp. Otherwise, it is a creative and interesting space that seemed perfect for the event.

   
   

4. That Wifi was Flawless! Thanks goes out to the team at BT (especially Gary Shainberg who worked with Meraki to make the mesh impeccable), whose mesh network was so solid that there wasn’t a single blip the entire conference and we used only 10% of the bandwidth. As Loic points out: ” there was a 1gb line financed and paid for by LeWeb that’s why we never exceeded 10-20% of the bandwidth available”. Impressive! In fact, I could have gotten on Bit Torrent and gone crazy without causing any ruckus. Fabulous job!

   
   

5. Streaming is the Key to Future Conferences. I think Loic told us that, though there were 2,300 people physically at Le Web (and it was sold out), there were 100x that number who tuned in at some point over the duration of the conference. Wow. This made the live tweeting from the sessions far less irritating for the Twitter followers of the delegates (most of the frustration from those watching a livetweeted conference is that they can’t tune in real-time and find out more, leaving them feeling left out) and probably attracted many of those remote observers to want to register to be there next year. Great move and fantastic idea. (p.s. it was also helpful for me as I was moving slowly one morning after dancing in Paris until the wee hours – I could still watch what was going on from my hotel room)

   
   

6. You Can’t Go Wrong with a City like Paris. More conference organizers should think about this. Picking cities where people really want to go (or haven’t been) is a good way to attract a diverse audience. I think that Le Web saw participants from 46 countries in total. Paris is a great destination for bringing people from all over. I’d love to see a conference in Istanbul or Marrakech or Tokyo or Buenos Aires…somewhere I’ve been dying to go forever. It would give me a great excuse! Having it in English is also a bonus, being the Lingua Franca (for better or for worse).

   
   

7. There Were Multiple ‘Accessible’ Ways to Attend. Yes, the conference was pricey, but there were alternative ways to attend. Students paid 1/10th the cost and there were 100 spots for official bloggers. I also heard through the grapevine that if you appealed to Loic and Geraldine and could show that you brought value to the conference with your attendance, you would get a discounted or comped ticket (but that was never confirmed). I was lucky enough to apply for and get the official blogger pass (thanks for organizing Stephanie!) and tried to keep up my duties by live-tweeting and summarizing as much as I could on my blog.

Lowlights

1. The Boys Club/Techcrunch Cartel – Although I heard from multiple people, this improved drastically over the previous year(s) (I haven’t been since Les Blogs 2, before the ‘club’ was really powerful), it was still present. I had several emails, DMs and comments (both on my blog and in-person) from people agreeing with my post on this topic. Michael Slattery commented to say,
   

   “This is their web, not mine. It’s the web of millionaires who rise above the crowd, of giant corporations, of cliques and elites who wield influence and power. Let them do their thing; it was a great show. But let’s organize another show for the other web, the web of small companies that stay small, of unsung bloggers, of the army of anonymous contributors to wikis and open software projects. We could call it “l’autre web” or some such (maybe the “alterweb”), and feature speakers like Richard Stallman, Mitch Kapor, Howard Rheingold, Kevin Kelly, Kathy Sierra and Doc Searls.”

   I like this idea very much. And I loved when Gary Vaynerchuk questioned Loic’s statement that Le Web isn’t a conference, it’s a community with:

   ” OK, if this is a f****** community, then why are we up here talking and not doing a Q&A? I refuse to come back next year unless my entire presentation is Q&A!” [link]

   Le Web is fantastic, but it isn’t a community. There is a hierarchy. Gatekeepers. A closed club. And too many politics that aren’t part of the wider web community attending.

   
   

2. The Food. Why is so little detail paid to the food at Le Web (this has been consistent since Les Blogs) even though it takes place in one of the most amazing dining cities in the world? Next year, I vote for my local genius friends from Faber Novel (Stéphane and Louis) to design the food part of the conference (these are my go-to guides to Paris dining and nightlife btw…I suggest you follow!).

   
   

3. The Panels Were Good for a Bathroom Break. Perhaps this was the point, but there were enough of them that it really detracted from the bright spots in the program. The problems with the panels were that: a. there were usually too many people on them, b. that those people were too homogenous (same type of people with similar experiences and opinions), c. they were given too much time to go on about the same things, and d. the moderators seemed to be picked to bring ‘controversy’ instead of ask smart questions. If Le Web decides to keep the panels, they should look to create better diversity on those panels, pick moderators who will spend time doing homework on their questions, only put four people tops on the panel at a time and limit the time spent discussing each question. Panels, in general, are difficult to do right, though, so instead of a panel, maybe use Gary’s suggestion of audience Q&A with a group of speakers?

Summary

Overall, I enjoyed myself very much in Paris and at Le Web. It was a great show and Loic and Geraldine should be very proud of the work they put into it. The production was impressive and I learnt a great deal.

Other Paris highlights apart from Le Web:

I had the chance to speak the evening before at the G9+ Summit organized by Luc Bretones and others, which was wonderful. I was lucky enough to have Mathieu Chereau from Yeasty Mobs (who also presented Tiger Lily at Le Web during the Startup competition) organize a fabulous Whuffie Tweetup with about 30 guests on the night I arrived in Paris. I got to meet the fantastic group who are doing the translation of The Whuffie Factor (to L’Effet Whuffie), including the generous and delightful Rodolphe Falzerana, his wife Morgane, Anthony Webster (who also helped translate live during G9+) and Habib (no Twitter account yet). I even got to visit the Social Media Clubhouse, a gorgeous pad sponsored by Paypal and others and dreamt up by Cathy Brooks, Chris Heuer and Kristie Wells. As I said earlier, I danced until 4am (thanks to my Wingman, Julian Nachtigal who reintroduced me to Bourbon – ouch), I got to stroll around Le Marais for enough time to do damage on my credit card (found the perfect hobo bag), had a date with a local hunk (nothing happened, but the attention was nice), stayed in a lovely hotel I’ve been wanting to stay in for years (it was everything I thought it would be and more), and took many lovely photos of Paris as keepsakes.

Would I go again? In a heartbeat.

[photo taken at a Women 2.0 Startup Weekend]

After voicing my opinion on the maleness of yet another tech conference, I ran into a friend of mine at the afterparty who told me, “I nearly picked a fight with you. That stuff is getting so boring.” And upon getting back to my hotel room to check the conversation on twitter, several others suggested the same.

Yes. Boring. I’m bored of it, too. I would love us to move onto another subject. 100% agreed. But the fact of the matter is that these boring complaints actually lead to action.

It was boring when people complained about an early Future of Web Apps being an entirely male lineup, but since then, the Carsonified folks have seriously focused on making sure that their conferences feature more women, which ended up attracting more women as audience members. It was boring when, many years ago, people complained about the SXSW Interactive speakers being mostly men, but since then, Hugh Forrest and his team have taken more time to make sure women appear on stage, leading to a HUGE female attendance. It’s been boring to complain to multiple conferences over the years, which led to more women on stage and in the audience. And it’s really boring that the growing exposure of women in technology has led to the attraction of more young women to the technology space.

Listen. I don’t like to continue to point out the conferences, articles, lists and such that lack the presence of women (or are weak in their research), but everytime I do (or someone else does), it gets a little better. Organizations like Women 2.0, She’s Geeky, Women Who Tech, Women in Technology, Geek Girl Dinners and articles like Fast Company’s Most Influential Women in Technology and Brian Solis’ article showing how women define the social networks have emerged because of the growing conversation around the issue. And because of these articles and organizations, more women have been encouraged to strike out and do their own startups. And, from what I hear, more young women are being drawn to technology as a career.

This is far from boring to me. This is exciting and awesome. So, we keep on bringing up the boring blah blah when we see exclusion because, well, it is leading towards a pretty awesome future where I’m hoping to see a 50/50 split of men and women on stage, in articles, talking about tech, creating startups, getting funding, participating in open source and making the future of the web inclusive. I, personally, look forward to the day where I never have to bring up the subject again.

And I know there are many additional issues of diversity in the technology space. It’s dominated by white heterosexual males, many of them young. The web user population is far more diverse than that (majority of users are female in North America and the largest population on the web is Asian), so it’s fairly logical to say that those designing the online experience should reflect that diversity. Until that day comes, I will continue to be boring and encourage everyone else to join me in being boring, too.

I’m happy to say that the afternoon of Le Web picked up and was less of a back-patting fest and more of a focus on the web…even the future of it!

It was kicked off nicely with Chris Pirillo of Lockergnome (and Gnomedex) fame, who brought humanity to the discussion with his ‘Community is…’ presentation. He highlighted that community is not a tool (saying that you are a tool for approaching it like that) and that you need to leave your ego at the door to make it happen. I also love that he stressed the importance of letting go of control and letting leadership emerge naturally. Chris should know. He’s been doing this for many years. I was heartened to hear his refreshing perspective even if some of those jokes were a little lame. (joke)

I was interested to hear that Chad Hurley (YouTube) has an additional business…in fashion! His site Hlaska has some really beautiful products, including these yummy cufflinks (added to my wishlist!). I was very impressed that such a young entrepreneur has so many complex sides to him.

I fell in love for the umpteenth time with Marissa Mayer of Google. She brims over with passion and excitement every time she talks about what is happening and really knows where the web is going. Google is a leader for a reason and I think Marissa is a big part of it. She’s passionate about Google users and being one step ahead of our needs. I drooled over Google Goggles, Chrome (now available for Mac – will be giving it a whirl tomorrow) and her general discussion of how the offline is becoming part of the “connected” world. This is a conversation I was really hoping would come up during the conference and she really delivered.

I had to run before she was finished, but I was also enjoying the bubbling do-gooderness (said in a positive way) of Toronto’s Jennifer Corriero (TakingITGlobal) who has an impressive list of ways her projects have led to amazing impact around the world. She has used the tools to create positive world change and I was bowled over by her passion and dedication. She listed 6 archetypes of people who are active in the social change sphere:

1. The Dreamer – people who think big and imagine a better world.
2. The Megaphone – those who take those dreams and act as wonderful promoters of these ideas.
3. The Spark Plug – highly enthusiastic carriers of that message.
4. The Task Master – people who take those messages and put them into executable plans.
5. The Sherpa – all of those who are happy to pitch in however they can to make the dreams come to bear.
6. The Storyteller – those that spread the word that change is happening (or has happened) far and wide.

I was very proud to see another Canadian woman entrepreneur (and a social one at that!) on the stage.

So, all in all, I’m not eating my words from this morning (yet), but I was very impressed on the quality of the talks in the afternoon and how far removed they are from towing the same old company line. Looking forward to tomorrow.

I was taught that if I can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. This applies to my official blogger position at Le Web 09 thusfar.

I can be constructive about this.

One of the reasons I left Silicon Valley area this summer and moved to Montreal is because of the growing sadness I felt for the ‘web’ industry living there. First, let me say this: I was surrounded by some fan-frickin-tastic people. People with heart and soul who were excited about the future of technology, are building the future of technology and daily take personal risks to change the world for the better. But I was also surrounded by a group made up of people who weren’t incredibly positive, who threw their power positions around to feed their own egos (and keep their power) and were more focused on being famous/recognized/etc than they were on making the web a better place.

And the group of negative people got me down. Daily. I did my best to ignore them and do good work, but the truth is that my faith was being shaken by the fact that the worse their behaviour, the more they were rewarded and, it seemed, nobody could speak up to stop it. Anyone that did would be locked out of the cartel that exists. Whether it was a woman I know who refused to go on a date with a prominent blogger and was told that because of this, she would never have her startup reviewed; or the person who questioned the bias of another blogger who was then locked out of every future event that blogger was connected to. And the power grew and people grew more afraid to speak out.

That didn’t feel like the community I fell in love with so many years ago. It felt a great deal like the world we were supposed to be changing. In essence, the worst parts of the offline world – with it’s hierarchies, gatekeepers and power mongers – were becoming firmly entrenched in the new media that was supposed to circumvent this behaviour and create a new frontier. I was losing faith. And that is the last thing I want to do. There is so much hope left in the world. I still believe the good guys/gals will finish first.

But here at Le Web 09, I feel like I’m staring that ugliness right in the eye. The program is mostly made up of the members and sycophants of the cartel mentioned above. It’s only the morning of the first day and a big part of it has been filled with egos and posturing. I was really hoping that Le Web would actually be about ‘The Web’ – where it’s going, where it should go, how do we drive it in positive directions, the diversity of issues that we are still facing that are creating challenges for web-citizens, really ground breaking technology, visionary people and how we can all get involved in this change – but it isn’t. It is about a small group of friends and how they use/benefit from the web: Le Clique.

I will continue to stick around because there ARE a few bright spots coming up: danah boyd, Kevin Marks, Violet Blue and a handful of others who are sure to talk about brave new worlds and not use their time onstage to kiss up to the cartel. And I will report on their talks as well as others that I hope will really change my mind and restore my faith.

The presentation I gave at nextMEDIA in Toronto today. Basic premise, let’s put human stuff first when using the ‘new’ media (and in every case, in fact). Stuff like personality, quality, relationships and taking the time to invest in the people you follow/follow you is really important for being able to raise that crucial social capital that helps us achieve our goals at the end of the day (job, growing our business, changing the world, raising money, etc).