Now and then, we come across posts that have an authentic literary quality. For me, one of the most remarkable and consistent authors, year after year, is Dave Winer. Last November, as he was wishing “Happy Thanksgiving everybody!”, as most every year since 1994, he gave me the very single reason why I have always liked reading what he writes, almost regardless of his subject matter: “Me,” he says, “I’m a mystic about What It All Means.”

Dave Winer’s posts are always based on a personal experience (what he sees, what he programs, what he expects, etc.); however, and contrary to the self-centered manner of a number of tech gurus, his self-centricity is that of a cameraman providing the perspective from which he is reporting what he sees or feels, thus setting up the decor and lighting as he invites you to explore. Self-centricity is by no means egotism. Dave Winer has a sizeable ego, sure, but really no more than most good writers actually have. He stands his ground. He has opinions on things or people with which one may not necessarily agree. And so what? Do we agree with everything great artists do or say? When people focus on “what it all means,” they are unlikely to build unanimity, and the demystification process that governs the investigation of things around us can come across as either paranoid or enlightening depending on where you stand. This art-of-writing from a viewpoint is the essence of literature. Literature-grade blogging is no exception.

As Matt Mullenweg said in his selection of 10 blogs that make you think, Dave Winer’s writings make you “think.” What does this really mean? The best response comes from Winer himself in a remarkable note about Julia Child, whom he views as a “natural-born blogger,” even though she wrote before the blogging era: “A blogger isn’t just someone who uses blogging software, at least not to me. A blogger is someone who takes matters into his or her own hands. Someone who sees a problem that no one is trying to solve, one that desperately needs solving, that begs to be solved, and because the tools are so inexpensive that they no longer present a barrier, they are available to the heroic individual. As far as I can tell, Julia Child was just such a person. Blogging software didn’t exist when she was pioneering, but it seems that if it did she would have used it.”  In the same piece, he also mentions that “The story of the nobility of blogging largely remains, imho, untold,” a statement with which I also agree. I see two intertwined reasons to this: It is still a new genre and identifying the intrinsic characteristics of a new genre is always difficult.

People have started to write the history of blogging recently. One of the most detailed books may be Scott Rosenberg’s Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters. The book (which I discussed in an earlier post) reads like an epic about the blogosphere’s first protagonists. However, it is possible that the premium granted to early adopters may have hindered the actual positioning of blogging into a fully-fledged literary genre – and this for two main reasons:

-   First, because of an easy confusion between the means and the content. Lots of people were early adopters of typewriters and certainly gained temporary fame because of it. Obviously, very few, if any, delivered a text comparable to Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi (the first typewritten manuscript according to historian Darryl Rehr).

-   Secondly, because of the customary association of any new genre with existing categories. Just as video initially came across of the poor relative of cinema, “blogging” has come to designate the act of writing virtually anything on the Web, and a substitute for or alternative to personal diaries, industry reporting, or news or opinion columns. If the “the story of the nobility of blogging remains largely untold,” it’s also because it’s rarely perceived as a fully-fledged genre, as an art form of its own. 

The story of the nobility of blogging will be hard to come by and may take some time. Just think how hard it is to write the story of the nobility of poetry, essay, or novel. But maybe it’s possible to start to create a blog anthology organized along two of the main characteristics, that, in my opinion, drive the intrinsic quality of a blog, regardless of the topic:

-   Authored by a real person. Blogs can be close to the diary genre, with clear differences, however. As in a diary entry, a post reflects the true feeling of a person, yet, and contrary to most diaries, the purpose of a blog may not be to simply vent one’s feelings, but rather to express a deep emotional engagement in experiences that are also of value to others. When blogs appeared in the mid-nineties, I had the distinct impression that blogging was a reincarnation of what the Beat generation had brought to the world, the pulse of a/the world through the mind of a writer. That’s why I like Dave Winer’s notion of a blogger as “heroic individual.”

-   A person in quest of his/her own authenticity and identity. Great bloggers have a recognizable style from a linguistic standpoint, some form of artistic idiosyncrasy, regardless of the topic, that is hard to isolate. It conveys the sense of uniqueness of a writer in the process of self-definition through his/her writing. Lots of people write interesting things, and write them well, but they do so as implicit or explicit spokespersons of a magazine, a company, or the brand that they represent (including their own brand). The vast majority of bloggers wants to or must be consistent with the image they project or want to project rather than with who they are as individuals, and are abstractions of themselves. Again, what they say may be remarkable, but they express themselves as expected by their public/audience. Louis L’Amour or Zane Grey may be extraordinary novelists in the Western fiction genre, but they do not necessarily incarnate the nobility of novel-writing as Steinbeck does.

Dave Winer has a unique place in the history of blogging, as both a major contributor to the most fundamental technologies for online publication and as a major writer himself (with close to a thousand contributions since 1994). The transparent interaction between the mind of the technologist and of the writer creating technology as part of his communication process (which, according to me, started as early as his days at LivingVideoText with its concept of idea processor) did shape the history of blogging, and made blogging the most pervasive literary genre in the history of the all means of expression. Dave Winer has accumulated all the possible kudos as “The father of modern-day content distribution,” blogging, podcasting and RSS. I would venture to say that he is also definitely a part of what is often called “experimental literature” in this country, i.e. when writers change given forms and invent a whole new style – think of Joyce, Borgès, Cortázar. 

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

@mddelphis

For general information about Dave Winer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Winer

Earlier this week, I had the privilege of delivering an introductory speech for a great product, ObjectiveMarketer, in front of remarkable executives and CIOs from the European Institutions hosted by Cisco Systems. It’s always a challenge to speak to an extraordinarily knowledgeable audience that is well versed in both technologies and trends, but it is also a rewarding experience. Below is a summary of my presentation.

I focused on the fact that social media are the very essence of the Internet, and in many ways, its revenge. The expression “Social Media” was coined by Chris Shipley fairly recently, in 2004 (BlogOn 2004), when she announced a conference designed to explore the rising business opportunities in blogging and social networking to be held in July at Berkeley’s Haas Business School. Blogging that had started in the mid-1990’s was blooming left and right, and social networks were becoming the talk of the town. Friendster and Meetup had been created in 2002, MySpace, Linkedin, Rize, and many others in 2003, and Facebook (albeit still unknown) was to receive its first investment of US$500,000 from Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Paypal (June 2004). As we all know, since that time, the number of social networks has increased considerably. There are hundreds of them. The short list of the major ones provided by Wikipedia includes about 160 sites. When you add up the number of members of the seven biggest social networks, you easily pass the one billion users. The number of social networks users is way higher than the number of Internet users (approximately 1.67 billion people worldwide), which is not surprising as each individual can have several social network personas.

While such massive emergence of social networks comes right after the dotcom bust, it’s by no means a comparable phenomenon. It’s the expression of what Internet was from day one, a place where people wanted to express themselves whose voices were somewhat hijacked by the dotcom hysteria — and only waiting to break loose. In short, social media as we know them today are the revenge of the Internet.

Social networking was the raison d’être of the Internet – and actually predated it. In the early eighties, multiple efforts to optimize the interconnection of computer networks (initially started by RAND Corporation in the fifties to facilitate cooperation between its research teams in Pennsylvania and California) came to fruition, and the need to unify communication protocols led to the adoption of TCP/IP in 1982 — along with the definition of the word “Internet.” However, Internet or not, technology-enabled interconnections of geographically dispersed people had already started to expand beyond research organizations, reaching sundry university groups. The first real structured social networks appeared with the first NewsGroups: Usenet was conceived in 1979 by two students from Duke University. Discussion groups multiplied: in 1981, Ira Fuchs created BITNET (acronym of “Because It’s Time Network”) for liberal arts professors, and by 1984, it was connecting over 150 campuses. In 1986, Eric Thomas, then a student at l’Ecole centrale de Paris, invented LISTSERV, an automated mailing list manager that enabled users to join a list without the need for human administration; this introduced the concept of a list owner.

Throughout the eighties, services proliferated. User forums sprang left and right on CompuServe, and in the course of the nineties, everybody progressively adopted the Word Wide Web, a system of interlinked documents using TCP/IP, that Tim Berners-Lee and Roger Cailliau had set up in 1989/1990 to enable researchers at the CERN to share information. The increase of Internet users expanded and modernized the concept of NewsGroups. That’s the key to the success of companies such as eGroups, started in 1997: eGroups had 18 millions users when they were acquired by Yahoo! in August 2000 and integrated within Yahoo! Groups — itself launched in 1998. The eGroups phenomenon prefaced the explosion of social networks that we know today. The Internet is “the human voice rediscovered,” as The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual summarized ten years ago. The renewed interest in Social Media is the opportunity to re-read another important book, The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary where Eric Raymond expanded on his remarks at the Linux Kongress in Würzburg in 1997. These two books are echoed and updated in multiple interesting recent books, such as Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters, Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods, and Socialnomics: How social media transforms the way we live and do business (1).

Social media are not a fad. Nobody will ever stop billions of voices. The July 2009 Ruder Finn Intent Index (1) provides interesting statistics: 76% of Internet users go online to discuss. When, on the other hand, you see that 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations and that only 14% trust advertisements, it’s clear that we have entered an era that will mandate a radical transformation of the way companies do business. While the majority of companies still cling to a top-down communication model with their potential customers, consumers trust the opinion of their extended families, their networks. Therefore companies now have to start learning how to reach the heart and mind of an increasingly hard-to-categorize “consumer,” an individual whose identity is spread across multiple personas. The rules are changing. We are quickly moving away from a world where access to companies by people is filtered by marketing departments and PR, to a world where this access is filtered by social networks. As a result, companies face serious challenges.

Twelve years ago IT departments didn’t want to hear about transactional websites. Therefore, e-commerce ended up in the lap of marketing departments. Today, social networks challenge marketers. They have to find qualified social media professionals to help out, which may not be easy when departments are stuck with antiquated criteria. They may hire consultants, but even the best consultants on the planet will have limited impact if corporate habits don’t change at the same time: the reality is that social media mandates that it becomes part of the company’s culture to empower and trust employees (how could unhappy employees safely converse with customers?). Marketing must start inside; every employee must turn into a potential evangelist. This may give a few headaches to traditional marketers, but the example of a few forward-thinking companies shows that the current trend is irreversible.

To scale their efforts, these companies need novel supportive technologies. Currently, numerous personal productivity tools are available. We are starting to see a few enterprise products capable of “listening to” customers. Yet, what is also critically needed is the ability to structure the way to talk to customers, as well as to measure the relevancy and the impact of the way you address them. This is precisely what ObjectiveMarketer, founded by Amita Paul, was designed to do. I am happy to work with her as an advisor — along with a friend of mine, Guy Kawasaki, co-founder of the most extraordinary online magazine rack, Alltop. Amita presented ObjectiveMarketer and I can only encourage you to try this remarkable product! (3)

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

(1) Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Mattersby Scott Rosenberg, Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods,by Shel Israel and Socialnomics: How social media transforms the way we live and do busines by Erik Qualman are three books that I discussed in earlier posts. 

(2) http://www.ruderfinn.com/rfrelate/intent/intent-index.html

(3) More about ObjectiveMarketer. The product will be presented at BlogWorld on the Alltop booth (October 15-17, http://www.blogworldexpo.com)

Over the last 25 years, digital technologies have empowered people a little bit more each time, but blogging has brought a new type empowerment, not simply the ability to do more things better and faster, but to say and share things differently. The three main sections of the book describe the progressive expansion of the art of blogging from pioneering individuals to the build-up of the massive blogosphere that has reshaped our connection to what’s happening around us and to the news media altogether. As noted by Rosenberg in his introduction, September 9/11 was a turning point in both the history and the meaning of blogs: “at that moment of crisis, many of us looked to the Web for a sense of connection an a dose of truth. The surrogate lamentations of the broadcast media’s talking heads sounded manufactured and inadequate. [...] Now for the first time, the nation and the world could talk with itself, doing what humans do when the innocent suffer, cry, comfort, inform, and most important, tell the story together.”

Pioneers: The book starts with the portraits of pioneers between 1994 and 1999: Justin Hall, Dave Winer, and many others such as Jorn Barger, Matt Drudge, Jesse Garrett, Rebecca Blood, to name a few. Although all very different people with very different agendas, they all speak their mind. Until 1994, the Web was primarily an information repository — a system of interlinked hypertext documents. Even though Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Caillau were changing the communication process between engineers at the CERN, the focus was on the documents exchanged, not on the actual messenger, the human voice behind the message (Berners-Lee started a blog only in 2005). Blogs brought that voice to the forefront.

Rosenberg’s first three chapters read like short stories: the Dada-style diary of Justin Hall in a Puritan world; the technology journey of Dave Winer (http://dave.scripting.com), who sent out a DaveNet essay titled “Billions of Websites” in 1995 and became the tribune defending the rights of all individuals by letting anyone start a weblog in Userland; the eccentric trip of Jorn Barger who published his first post using Winer’s Frontier NewsPage, ended up coining the term weblog for his Robot Wisdom Weblog that focused on links to articles that he found interesting, thus establishing “the idea,” Rosenberg says, “of the blogger as a human filter of the Web’s overwhelming bounty.” Incidentally, it’s by clicking on a link that Rebecca Blood (who wrote the first history of weblogs in 2000) met her husband, Jesse Garrett. The early days of blogging are complex, and identifying who was “first” is sometimes tricky, except for the technology side, but by 1998, it was already clear that traditional news media had lost their monopoly on the newness of news and their ability to control how long any event would stay in the spotlight: in 1998 the Matt Drudge site launched the Monica Lewinsky story.

Scaling up: The process started around 2000. The word “weblog” progressively became obsolete and the word “blog” picked up: “I’ve decided to pronounce the word ‘weblog’ as wee’–blog. Or ‘blog’ for short,” Peter Merholz posted on Peterme.com. As the word shortens, the numbers of blogs and the “blogosphere” (William Quick) increased dramatically. Numbers may vary, but here is a sample scale: “in 2003, Technorati reported tracking 100,000 blogs and by October 2006, the figure had leaped to 67 million.” New platforms and technologies had made it easier to blog. Here are a few reminders: Blogger (read the stormy life of Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan) was created in 2000, Typepad in 2002 (by Six Apart, founded in 2001), WordPress in 2003; in 2001 Movable Type (from Six Apart) made it easy to leave comments; in 2002, RSS 2.0 became a widely adopted standard supported by most blogging tools — and Rosenberg reminds us that while building out the infrastructure, Dave Winer also created what came to be known as a ping server at Weblogs.com. As the technologies for mass adoption got fine-tuned, the blogosphere turned into a vast jungle with a huge number of new actors and a lot at stake — so ideological debates and rivalries escalated: liberal and republican blogs tore each other to pieces, but both did shoot at the traditional news media. Monetization of the new “media” was now on the agenda. VCs got involved and “blogging for bucks” put in practice the 1999 The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual stating that “market are conversations:” Robert Scoble who had once worked for Dave Winer’s Userland and was famous for his own blog (http://scobleizer.com) gave Microsoft a humanized face between 2003 and 2006. Jason Calacanis and Nick Denton were to enter into their colorful business duel. Meanwhile, in addition to getting a Whuffie score (Cory Doctorow’s reputation-based currency), a new measure in the popularity contest had appeared: the anti-media medium now had the Technorati Top 100 (2002), a Nielsen rating of sorts. Controversies raged around the meaning of “unpublish” at Boing Boing, and Heather Armstrong experienced the torments to being “dooced,” which contributed to her success (http://www.dooce.com). This section of the book is as epic as the first one — and incidentally, you will find out that there may be lots of commonalities between the blogosphere and the micro-blogosphere.

What have blogs wrought: This last section is a three-part conclusion. Rosenberg summarizes the interminable debate “Journalists vs. Bloggers,” which unfolds throughout the book, and boils down to a desperate attempt by traditional media to rescue itself from the wreckage of print, as well as from the shortcomings of its self-professed objectivity and self-declared professionalism. The Ancient scribes, faithful servants of the pharaonic bureaucracy didn’t want anybody else to write. Guess what? They disappeared or jumped ship. The reality is that skepticism and righteousness have never stopped the course of history and blogging under one form or another will stay and prevail. “The anarchic, energetic Web I fell in love with fifteen years ago had indeed lasted,” Rosenberg concludes. “It continues to provide people of meager credentials and little means with a home for their idiosyncratic ideas and unlikely innovations. Their ideas will continue to flow in a profusion of unpredictable courses.” After all, the idealist, “Utopian fervor” of the pioneers may still be around — just kind of spruced up.

As I said in the beginning, this book is fantastic. It reads like a novel, and contrary to most “business” books, it is very well written. The only thing that’s missing may be a summary map of the technologies from which products and enabling platforms were derived and subsequently leveraged by bloggers. Yes, Dave Winer may very well illustrate ‘the unedited voice of a person,” in the end, though, his unique technology insight, influence and persistence also made him one of the most prominent crystallizers of just anybody’s voice.  

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

One of the email addresses that intrigued me the most a while ago was the one I received from Whoisylvia@aol.com. I immediately thought of Schubert’s song based on Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona (”Who is Silvia”) and this is the only reason why I opened the message. Good that my love for music saved me from discarding an email from somebody I only knew by her real name, Sylvia Paull. She is a “Silicon Valley Public Relations Icon,” as Alan Deutschman puts it in an article for Fast Company: “One of the most effective behind-the-scenes connectors in the Valley, Sylvia Paull, started out throwing some of the hottest parties at computer-industry conventions in the ’80s. Now she links the hard-core geeks, entrepreneurs, media insiders, and the political activists, too (http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/115/open_features-innovation-scouts-who-is-sylvia.html). She landed “accidentally,” as she says, in the high-tech industry in 1986 at Software Ventures, the provider of MicroPhone, a best-selling telecom software for Macintosh, became their Marketing Director of Software, co-produced Science Editor, a CBS radio show about science, freelanced for Wired — until she started Berkeley Ventures in 1994, an umbrella company hosting the amazingly varied PR, party-organizing and connecting activities for which she had already become famous. She is, just by herself, a huge organization. She knows everybody in the high-tech industry and while, for most, PR is about skillful schmoozing and opportunistic networking, Sylvia genuinely loves people, remembers them with a stunning precision — and is equally excited whether she speaks of a still unknown entrepreneur (even Halsey Minor used to be one of them), a celebrity or a cause. Granted. She doesn’t like everybody — in fact, she dislikes impostors (and successfully avoids them).

Be honest with me, or I can’t be your representative to the media and the public… I had a ” catch up” lunch with Sylvia at Eccolo in Berkeley a few days ago. I hadn’t seen her for almost a year — suffice to say that it’s an eternity in her life. She quickly took a sip of sparkling water and started full speed on the Meridian International Sports Cafe’s next event, a big gathering on the 4th of July: “They have a great place with seven big screens. We’ll look at the 15km trial race of the Tour de France. Lance Amstrong is back in the Tour. He supports Levi Leipheimer, a Santa Rosa resident… The Tour starts from Monaco, goes through gorgeous places such as La Turbie or Roquebrune-Cap Martin to come back to Monaco. I have invited every single East Bay bicycle club to come, and then the Berkeley Fireworks starts at 9:30 P.M. It’s on the same street. So I am going to lead all the cyclists on a promenade down University to the Berkeley Marina where we are going to all watch the Fireworks. We want to make it an annual event.” Yes, Sylvia is “crazy about bicycling.” She even used to race competitively. “This year I did the PR for Bike to Work Day. Got big story about it in the East Bay Express. Any bicycling advocacy, I do for free.” And her son, Evan, currently working towards his Ph.D, in Bioinformatics is an experienced cyclist amateur bicycle racer for the Palo Alto/Webcor team too!

Fifteen years ago, she decided that she would have one major pro bono client. The reality is that, fortuitous serendipity, she often has more than one at a time — for they overlap. One day, Richard Stallman who had launched the GNU Project in 1983 and set up the Free Software Foundation two years later (http://www.fsf.org), walked in the Cybersalon that she started in 1994 and has since welcomed dozens of industry pioneers (Marc Pincus, Philip Rosedale, Garrett Gruener, Ray Ozzie, Rick Falkvinge, Esther Dyson to name a few). “I asked him: ‘Who are you?’ ‘How come you haven’t heard of me,’ he responded. I told him: ‘You need more publicity!” He hired me, but he didn’t pay me anything and I have been doing his PR on and off for over 10 years.”

Sylvia is as entrepreneurial as the entrepreneurs she represents and as dedicated and devoted to their mission as the entrepreneurs themselves. But if your company doesn’t know what it stands for, don’t expect her to act as an ersatz. Great PRs and communicators help companies stage their story, but won’t make it up — unless they have no credibility as PRs in the first place. “I often ask entrepreneurs why they think they need more money than they have right now. And most of the time, they don’t know. They just say ‘Oh well we need a few millions just in case, because, you know, if the product doesn’t work or doesn’t sell, we need a backup, we need a cushion.’ A cushion to do what? No one else thinks that way. It’s a strange mentality. So, I sort of have of preview of what VCs are going to see before agreeing to represent them. I challenge them. I ask ‘Why would any one care about your product, who would want it, who’s the competition. Why is it any different than what’s out there on the market’. Some people resent that. That’s good. My whole premise is that you have to be honest with me, or I can’t be your representative to the media and the public.”  You only get the PR you deserve and if you want Sylvia, get your act together: “I recently spoke to a freshman class at UC Berkeley entitled Entrepreneurship 101,” she wrote on her blog last April. “They all asked me questions in an attempt to figure out why some of my high-tech clients were successful, as if there were a magic formula they could follow. I told them basically what the Austrian author Robert Musil told all of us: check out what you really want to do and what you’re good at. That’s all you need to know, and the rest will follow. (http://whoisylvia.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/04/the-human-condition-parallax.html).

Navigate inside and through this zoomorama (you can zoom-in/out the pictures as well as see them in full screen). 

Sylvia’s Magic… There may not be a magic formula for success per se, yet, there is some magic somewhere, Sylvia’s magic. The unusual breath and depth of her culture enables her to understand an amazing range of domains, get into and to the mind of the most diverse set of people — and identify the real innovators, those who do not reinvent the wheel. Her personal style, a uncommon cocktail of baroque and minimalism, laid-back sophistication and go-getter DIY, as well as her down to Mars and down to earth traits, makes her feel comfortable anywhere she wants to be — and makes people around her feel comfortable. Plus, no matter how serious she has to be, her ability to laugh and her witty commonsense brighten up the most high-strung faces.

She is the ultimate Berkeleyan in two ways. She is hyperlocal; the Hillside Club (http://www.hillsideclub.org), founded by a group of Berkeley women at the end of the 19th century is where she hosts her Cybersalon; deeply involved in her community, she is a typical representative of the InBerkeley life (http://www.inberkeley.com), a site that that Lance Knobel and Dave Winer started a few weeks ago. Look at the title of her own blog: “Berkeley Blog, a sane place within an insane society.” She is hyperglobal too, as Berkeley has always been, thus attracting people whose heart can be anywhere in the world. Sylvia was the first US citizen born in a US Army hospital in Germany after WW II. Her father, Oliver Margolin, a Jew from Long Island who had graduated from Oberlin in viola and become a conductor, had joined the Army to make a living and was then Eisenhower’s band conductor (he met her mother, a German Jew born in Poland and a Holocaust survivor in Frankfurt). She fondly recounts the family’s trip with the band throughout Northern Europe when she was a child, before settling in Los Angeles and San Francisco, while the t-shirt she thought up, A Woman’s Place Is on Top, to help finance the first American all-women’s climb to Annapurna I, led by Arlene Blum, her roommate at Reed College, dangles in her memory — which leads her to tell me of another Berkeley event. She is still thrilled by the success of the first Multicultural Women’s Leadership Conference she helped publicize for EngageHer (http://engageher.org) last March, and for which they had legends of feminism such as Gloria Steinem and Dolores Huerta. Yes, no matter how ubiquitous the Web, Berkeley remains a place of choice for people with causes — and Sylvia, as she tells their story, becomes part of the story. She supported Move on (http://www.moveon.org), co-founded by Joan Blades, who also created MomsRising (http://www.momsrising.org ) in 2006; she founded Gracenet, a networking group for women in tech that launched the successful “disgraceful award in advertising” campaign to eliminate sexist advertising; she helped the Electronic Frontier Foundation (http://www.eff.org), co-founded by John Perry Barlow, John Gilmore and Mitch Kapor in the 90’s and living unabatedly with our time, she is hosting a Cybersalon on July 29th for Scott Rosenberg’s book, Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters, to be released on July 7.

Time goes so fast when you chat with Sylvia! Her reserve of enthusiasm seems infinite. As we were finishing our beignets with a chocolate sauce, she told me about the Big Ideas Fest that she helps organize for the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (http://www.iskme.org) in Half Moon Bay on December 6-8… and a few minutes later, I found out that her father, who after 20 years in the Army and after working toward a Ph.D. in musical education became a music therapist, and had one of the most remarkable violinists of the 20^th century as his client, Jascha Heifetz (1901-1987). I asked Sylvia if she had ever met him: “Of course!” she responded cheerfully. 

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

For more information on Sylvia: http://www.sylviapaull.com