We’re having a discussion right now at outside.in about whether our language in a message about to go out to our users should address bloggers or publishers. If we say “bloggers” the publishers don’t recognize it as being addressed to them. If we say “publishers” on the other hand, the bloggers don’t recognize it as being theirs.

Meanwhile, Jay Rosen is tweeting “can we just drop the quotes from “citizen journalist” now?” I say that’s fine, but what does that really get you?

What we really need is a new word, one that means “writer, online or off, working for a publication, or on their own as a blogger, paid or unpaid, writing about current topics and driving the public debate”.

That’s where we are today, that’s the state of things. Journalist and blogger are two ends of the same spectrum of people who write about things every day and drive public conversations forward. Are they so different that they should have totally different titles?

I say one word for both of them, and then you can create sub-categories of this word to mean “gets paid and does it full-time” or “doesn’t get paid, does it on the side”.

Why hasn’t that word been created yet?

What would that word be?

Don’t have time to start a placeblog? Neither do I. But now, thanks to outside.in Radar, Twitter and Summize, we can placetweet. Placetweeting? I’ve got time for that.

How does it work?

You just twitter like you normally do, but include the neighborhood you’re twittering about, and if you want to take it a step further, the name of the venue you’re twittering about.

Then, via the magic of the summize api and outside.in’s place detection algorithms, your tweet will be detected, matched to those locations, and will show up in people’s Radar in those areas.

So for example, this recent tweet:

ericgardenfork tweets: even people in the Tea Lounge Park Slope Brooklyn are talking about Tiger woods

just popped onto the Radar of everyone in Park Slope, and it got attached to the cafe Tea Lounge in that neighborhood. It’s being read right now by everyone in that part of Brooklyn, informing them about their local area.

That’s a pretty low bar for getting involved in the hyperlocal scene. I may not ever really be a placeblogger, but I’ve already become a placetweeter.

Everyone at outside.in is working hard right now on getting all of the final pieces together for our beta launch of Radar, scheduled for next monday. It’ll be great to finally get it launched and open to the world for everyone to play with.

In my two years of working on outside.in, I think Radar has been the most interesting feature we’ve produced yet. The first time I looked at a working version of it, it actually kind of gave me the chills. It was giving me news about things happening right around the corner from my apartment, and they were really interesting. One item was about someone who had been shot and killed in an elevator two blocks away from me the day before (hey, this is New York after all). The other was a critical review of a restaurant in my neighborhood, one of my faves. Both stories transcended normal news-dom and felt like things that were about my life, my personal sphere. You don’t get that feeling very often from normal news sources.

Until Radar came along, I’ve felt like we were building an enormous platform at outside.in. Now, with Radar, I feel like we’re finally starting to build on top of that platform, with some very interesting results. And we already have a lot of conversations going on in the office about cool things we could put into later releases of Radar, so I feel pretty safe in saying that it’s going to continue to get more interesting and more useful for people.

So check outside.in on Monday, and give Radar a try if you haven’t yet. And look for a blog post on the outside.in blog, where you can read about all of the interesting things we’ve packed into Radar.

I need some sort of proxy these days to get everything done that I want to do. I’m working full time on outside.in, and I certainly don’t want to stop that - it’s getting more interesting by the day. But I also have two other ideas currently that I would love to get off the ground as well. And I can’t quite accept that I’m going to have to sit on these ideas, and any other ideas that pop up, for as long as I continue to work on outside.in.

And if you figure that a traditional full startup cycle is five years, that means I’ve got four more startups in me, max, before I’m too old to be anything other than a board member. I want to contribute way more than that.

And yet, my current position takes up all of my time. So what’s the solution? Simple, I need a proxy, someone I can authorize to act on my behalf on projects in my absence, with proper guidelines.

Will I get it? And will I make that work? I believe I will. Amanda once told me I should have business cards made up that said “John Geraci: cake-haver, cake-eater” because I always manage to have my cake and eat it too. And indeed I do.

So - let the hunt for the Proxy Me begin!

In lieu of a real blog post, here’s a link for you to a talk I had with Piers Fawkes at PSFK the other day about outside.in and the way in which the news media is evolving. If you’re into that kind of thing.

Fred Wilson wrote some kind words in a post yesterday about seeing my thesis project Foundcity at the ITP Spring Show back in 2005. Reading it, and clicking on the link to the site was like stepping through a time warp that took me immediately back to the days when I was just graduating from ITP. Suddenly I was having vivid memories of events I hadn’t bothered to recall since they originally took place.

I remembered cobbling the site together hurriedly at the last minute before my thesis presentation - Google Maps had just become hackable a few weeks before the end of the semester, and I was scrambling to incorporate that into my project (don’t ask me what it was going to be before Gmaps was hackable…). I was actually scraping lat/long values off the html of the page - there was no API yet to get those things directly. I was going to call the project “Delicious City” - the idea being del.icio.us applied to real space - and Clay told me in his office, “never base your name on someone else’s project - if you do, it will never stand on its own, it will just be seen as a subset of the larger project.” So it became Foundcity instead. I never was happy with that name, btw, but sometimes you just run out of time trying to find a good name.

I remembered Fred introducing himself at the show and trying out the site, and thinking “oh my god, a real VC is demo’ing my thesis - how cool is that!” I had never even met a VC before. Up until that exact moment I had figured I was going to try to get a job in research at Intel or Yahoo or some such place after graduation. But suddenly the idea of being an entrepreneur started to seem appealing. Several other investors gave me their cards along with positive feedback over the course of the show, and I was hooked - I had forgotten all about research, and had decided to be an entrepreneur (much to my wife’s chagrin at the time).

I remembered going later to Union Square Ventures and pitching Fred and Brad on the project, how they started off with hardball questions, grilling me for about thirty minutes on all sorts of strategic and tactical questions, and then the questions slowly started to become more like helpful suggestions, then finally Fred said, “well, lets see how this works from my phone” and… it didn’t work. Nothing, no error message, just silence. No big deal, Fred said, just figure it out later and get back to me. He had a Treo 760, so I went home and contacted all of my friends immediately - “who has a Treo 760?” Found three with that model, tested it on their phones, and the site worked perfectly fine for them. Still, it didn’t work on Fred’s phone. His was literally the only phone the site didn’t work for. You can’t imagine my anguish. He was very helpful and tried to debug with me, but I never found the source of the problem despite hours of tweaking, googling and debugging.

We kept talking to USV and to other investors, but by the end of the summer it was clear to me that Foundcity wasn’t really a business, it was a thesis project. By that time though I was totally hooked on doing startups, and was thinking about my next move, reading books by Guy Kawasaki and starting to do the hard work of shifting from an ITP school project mentality to startup/business mentality.

And that was how I fell into the world of startups. That was three whole YEARS ago! It feels more like twenty, with everything I’ve been through in the intervening years.

Nice to step back in time occasionally and revisit those intense life shifts.

I got to the ITP show last night about half an hour before closing, so I didn’t get to see the whole show, but here were some projects I saw that I found interesting.

Epimetheus: networked fire detection “To add your node, contact your local team leader today” (are you listening, Anthony Townsend?)

Penultimater “The greatest mobile novel ever attempted, and you can help write it”.

KAAMKAJ “A tool to optimize micro-business activities”

World Mappings “A growing collection of maps detailing personal geographic histories”

This year’s show was more interesting than previous ones to me, in that the projects seemed to have more substance behind them - they were less glossy, but based on better ideas.

It’s on again tonight, from 5 to 9 if you want to check it out.

The most innovative member of a system is very often perceived as a deviant from the social system, and he or she is accorded a somewhat dubious status of low credibility by the average members of the system. This individual’s role in diffusion (especially in persuading others about the innovation) is therefore likely to be limited.

From Diffusion of Innovations by Everett M. Rogers.

I held off on writing about the Sarah Lacy / Mark Zuckerberg keynote “trainwreck” at SXSW when it originally happened, and was glad I did - it was pretty fascinating, but it got covered so thoroughly in the moment that there was no need to add more to the mix. But I keep thinking about it, and I keep seeing other indicators that something is going on much broader than just a single bad interview at a tech conference. So I jotted some notes down about this, and here they are:

The Lacy/Zuckerman interview was emblematic of a shift going on in on-stage events and performances right now. Audiences now have back channels during events thanks to group messaging apps, and that’s not going away. In fact, just the opposite - this will become more and more common to live events. In a short while these back channels will even become a normal, expected part of the audience experience at any stage event.

This totally changes the way information flows at these events. Communication in a performance environment historically has been one to many - the person on the stage communicated, and the people in the audience received that communication. There was some feedback from the audience, in the form of laughter, applause, nonverbal cues, etc., (Steven has a good post about tricks he uses to elicit this feedback while speaking), but for the most part the communication went in one direction.

Now though, with the arrival of applications like Twitter, you’ve got two types of communication happening in any performance simultaneously: you’ve still got the one-to-many communication from performer to audience, but you’ve also got a second, many-to-many conversation, between everyone in the audience. And here’s the critical thing about it: the ONLY person not involved in that many-to-many conversation is the person on stage. There is suddenly a second channel of information in the room, potentially as informative and interesting as the traditional one that goes from the performer to the audience, and the person up on the stage is left out of it completely. All of the information from the audience, which should be feedback to the performer, is now being channelled into group chat apps, and the one person who needs to get that feedback, so as to adjust their performance based on it, is totally oblivious to it.

When Sarah Lacy and Mark Zuckerberg had their talk at SXSW, there were 2,000 people in the room. 2 of them, Lacy and Zuckerberg, were having one conversation, while the other 1,998 were having a totally different conversation. If Lacy had had access to that second conversation, the interview would have gone very differently. The introduction of group messaging into public performance has created a big imbalance in the flow of information between performer and audience, and it puts the performer at a potentially big disadvantage.

Stage events have suddenly become many-to-many events in addition to being one-to-many. That’s a fundamental shift from what they have been historically. And since the person on stage herself is not included in that second, many-to-many conversation, it sets up an informational imbalance that is bound to lead to things like what happened at SXSW.

This imbalance will get dealt with in one way or another eventually, and performances will adapt. How this happens is a completely open question, of course, and we could see some interesting new practices spring up in the near future. Whatever the case, a new era of stage events is at hand.

I just got motivated by Dan Phiffer to sign up with tumblr, and now I have a tumblog.

You can see it at geraci.tumblr.com.

It’ll be interesting to see how this fits into my packed schedule of life, work and web content. It could be that I never get beyond my first post. Or it could be just the thing I’ve been waiting for all my life.