"The most enjoyable panel, by far, was the teenager consumption panel moderated by Safa Rashtchy, of Piper Jaffray. In watching these kids talk, I realized how infrequently we come in contact with teenagers -- at least this breed of social, functional teenager."I have the impression that she is unaware that half of LJ's users are in that age group. And she owns (but obviously does not Pwn!) the place! Part of the problem may be that her LJ has only 44 entries, all of them apparently private or fiends-locked. She does not love us,you know. But then she doesn't enable comments in her TypePad weblog, so maybe she doesn't like her own kids all that much, either. If she wants to know what the kids think, all she needs to do is add a bunch of them (or communities that have a bunch of them) to her LJ friends list, and read them. Enabling comments wouldn't hurt, either. Is it really that difficult to stay in touch with a big part of your company's user base, that you have to depend on a non-representative sample of their type who get put on a panel at an annual conference? Nope.
A few weeks ago, I created LJ feeds for two weblogs of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance;
ilsrnewrules for its New Rules Project (Designing Rules as if Community Matters), and ilsrenergy, which is about decentralized energy systems. There was an interesting article in the New Rules weblog today about the costs of Big Box Retailers for local governments. It turns out that, for many places, the cost of the extra burden placed on local police departments alone by the presence of some retail establishments is greater than the tax revenues those retailers provide. Once again, the free lunch is paid for through hidden costs.Little puffy clouds all afternoon, and an oddly lemony scent in the air tonight. Is the moon half full, or half empty? Actually, it's a bit more than half full, and waxing. It'll be half empty when it's waning. That's the way I see it, anyway.