Very very very regretably canceling my trip to Chicago for BlogHer this week. I have been a fan of BlogHer for years, and was thrilled last year when I finally got to attend. I had been asked to join some amazing women in tech on a great panel I’ve looked forward to it for months.

Unfortunately, I’ve just gotten back home from roughly 3 months in San Francisco working on my startup oneforty. I am emotionally and physically tapped out and not bouncing back from the redeye I took with my 2 and (newly) 4 year olds Saturday. Meanwhile the long days of being a startup founder (oh and, um, single mom) and stuff around the recent launch of Twitter for Dummies, is taking all my energy. I’m overblessed with very exciting but high-pressure opportunities. I also need to catch up with my daughters who got the short end of the stick during all the time I spent in SF raising oneforty’s angel round and working with Pivotal Labs to build oneforty.com.

So this weekend I am laying low, dropping off the grid and quietly/sadly missing a PHENOMENAL gathering of women in Chicago. I very much regret letting the organizers down and missing time with so many of my heroes among women online. Speaking of which, THANK YOU Cathy Brooks (@cathybrooks) for agreeing to cover my absence on the Advanced Social Media, Syndication and Stats panel at 10:45 on Saturday.

(By the way, I do have a room booked for Thursday-Sunday at the conference hotel, and would love to be able to turn that over to another attendee or attendees looking for lodgings last minute.)

I was truly looking forward to seeing SO many great people in the Windy City, and I’m sorry to miss it. Elisa, Jory and Lisa, I am a HUGE fan of BlogHer, know this year’s 5th anniversary sold-out program will be amazing, and wish I could live up to my commitment to be part of it. I very much appreciate your generous-hearted understanding of the situation.

Warmly,

Laura

This is a guest post written by Wilfried Schobeiri.

Anyone watching Twitter trends over the last few days would have noticed the hashtag #CNNFail up there toward the top. Why? Because CNN and other major news media failed to pick up and report on the severity of the turmoil surrounding the Iranian elections. In the mean time, Twitter’s #IranElection, Tehran, Mousavi, Ahmadinejad trends were fire hoses of real-time information, videos, and pictures.

I should disclose this immediately: I was skeptical about Twitter. I had many doubts about its viability as a social/news medium. Too simple. Too small. Too saturated with banalities. Status updates? “What’s the point when you have Facebook?” I asked. But over time, the value of the connections and content streams Twitter facilitated was made clear to me. So I shrugged it off. And then of course there’s the ridiculous valuation. $500 million? $1.7 billion? “They’re not even profitable!” I said. But that’s what the 21st century is all about, isn’t it? Putting price tags on things that are traditionally priceless (cue Master Card commercial). So I shrugged it off too.

But now there’s something else going on, something more substantial and mind blowing than anything else I’ve witnessed here: Twitter is actually facilitating what may soon be labeled a revolutionary movement in Iran. Let that sink in. The revolution will be Twittered.

An enormous community has emerged, spanning the globe. Through the turmoil, students and the IT crowd across Iran have been able to spread news of events. Images and video have proliferated, giving us glimpses of the very real tension currently walking the streets of Tehran. What was likely intended to be a quiet, strictly controlled suppression of events by the present rulers ended up turning into what history will likely judge as a PR nightmare for Ahmadinejad and Khamenei, despite disrupted communications. What’s more is that insiders across Iran have used Twitter to coordinate protests and warn of danger, all while cell and SMS services have been shut down. Meanwhile, major news media was focused on reporting about BET and other infotainment. Thanks to Twitter, the mismatch in facts and positioning in the official responses vs. this breed of citizen reporting has become extremely clear. Thanks to Twitter, the post-election events have flourished with attention. Thanks to Twitter, those of us sitting at our computers half a world away feel closer to the Iranian people and their world.

Of course, the old guard deserves some credit here as well. The slow bleed of traditional media, shuttering of foreign bureaus, and rise of citizen journalism and social media have enabled Twitter to fill the void left by investigative journalism. The average person can now report news across the world, in real time, without sponsorship, time and costs of plane tickets, media visas, and years of familiarization required to accurately cover a region.

Because of the role technology has played, it’s hard for me to liken these events as similar to the elections past. And that’s why I’m now 100% sold on the real value of Twitter.

(In the meantime, CNN has adjusted their coverage. They are now engaging the viewer by reading directly off a Twitter feed displayed on television.)

Wilfried Schobeiri is an Iranian-American software architect and entrepreneur. He has been following the Iranian Elections out of concern for family and welfare of the region. He is passionate about working with startups to create compelling software. He blogs at http://nphase.org.

Just a brief salute to mark Ada Lovelace Day. I know hundreds of admirable, inspiring women in technology. Frankly I’m amazed when conference organizers and others complain about a “lack” of women in technology to serve as executives, authors, speakers and entrepreneurs. That’s just a pretty lazy cop-out. There are plenty of women who inspire me every day and set amazing examples for the world through their intelligence, integrity and leadership.

Selecting one is almost impossible, so I’ll fall back on the woman whose tech leadership in the web’s early days first caught my attention: Esther Dyson. Reading about her in the pages of Wired in the late 90′s, her name and intelligence and leadership stuck with me like nobody else’s. I was gushy (and as a result, tongue-tied) when I got to shake her hand at TechSet NYC last year (thanks Stephanie and Brian!). I continue to look up to her, and am grateful for her example. Thanks Esther.

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It’s World Water Day. Leaving 1 in 6 humans without safe drinking water is a time bomb. Letting thousands of children under 5 die every day is a time bomb. Share this video, get involved with Charity: Water, and make a difference.

With love,
Pistachio

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So you’re home (or you got to stay for SXSW music in which case I hate you. you’re not really reading blogs anyhow) from SXSWi, missing your friends and recovering from 5 days of (pick all that apply) hangovers, sleep deprivation, inbox neglect, slipped deadlines. What’s a geek to do? Don’t drown yourself in the Twitterstream. Try these creative (hastily scribbled, I’m busy working on my own #1, below) cures…

10. Grab a 6-pack, jump into your neighbor’s RV, sing loudly and off-key and add #RVIP to your next tweet

9. Put a chainlink fence in front of the office bathrooms and tell co-workers “sorry, VIP only.”

8. Find a rooftop bar, serve Caipirinhas, invite friends and call it #GeeksLove[activity name here]

7. BBQ and Shiner Bock. ‘Nuff said

6. Blog the 5 most valuable things you got out of SXSWi and dig deeper with links to more information, then compare with what your friends learned, and keep the energy going

5. Continue trying to figure out where the people you’d hoped to meet are hanging out by stalking following their Tweets and FourSquare streams.

4. Watch online videos of TED Talks, past SXSWi and best-of videos from SXSWi presenters like Kathy Sierra, Merlin Mann, Gary Vaynerchuk, Tony Hsieh…

3. …and “live-tweet” them

2. Move to SF

But what’s the single BEST way to cure your SXSWi homesickness?

1. Rock out your new project so you can bring the Thunder at SXSWi 2010!!

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UPDATE: The campaign kicks off at the Mashable party tonight, 10 PM central

Twice I’ve spent a week at Children’s Hospital in Boston, once each with my daughters “S” and “Z.” Both times I had the healthiest kid in the joint, and both times I was truly humbled and inspired by the heroic children and families who spend much too much time there.

I was humbled to see guys my age on the elevator discussing their kids’ blood counts as “normally” as sports scores. How do you normalize life when your kid lives in a hospital? Where do you find strength to battle their serious and chronic illness? How can you give your baby joy and respite from their battle?

So I’m on Team Petty in the in the SXSW Charity Smackdown. Please join me! Please tweet, blog, donate and tell your friends that we’re fighting to give seriously sick kids a chance to go to Victory Junction (modeled on Paul Newman’s Hole-in-the-Wall-gang camps.)

NASCAR fans need no introduction to Kyle Petty, a popular 3rd-generation race car driver. In 2000, Kyle had to bury his son Adam after a tragic accident at the New Hampshire Motor Speedway.

Adam’s dream had been to build a camp for seriously ill children in North Carolina. So just five months after his untimely death his family met with Paul Newman to establish Victory Junction in Adam’s memory. The first camp opened in Randleman, NC in 2004, and a second camp in Wyandotte County, Kansas is coming.

At Victory Junction, children 6-16 battling serious disease get a small break in their fight. They get to go to camp for free and just be a kid for a little while. Kids that would otherwise never be able to have a normal fun summer experience. Kids who bear some pretty heavy burdens.

Join me in battle alongside Kyle and Rutledge Wood of the SPEED Channel. Help us give courageous kids and their families a few moments away from their own fights. Grab a badge, make a donation, tweet, blog, just please, spread the word.

Please tweet:

Charity Smackdown! Kyle Petty and @pistachio are fighting for sick kids and Victory Junction. http://bit.ly/Jthqi Please RT? http://bit.ly/VictJ (or just click here to tweet it)

Social media pals Pete Cashmore, Chris Brogan and many others, I DO love you guys… but THIS is a SmackDown.

Thanks!

Warmly, Pistachio

I’m long overdue announcing some of this, so I’ll roll it all out at once…

(and then jam over to @bostontwestival, organized by @justinmwhitaker and part of @Amanda Rose’s PHENOMENAL global Twestival movement. (Check it out NOW!) 20,000 Twitterers are gathering over a 24 hour period around the globe. The aim? raise $1 MILLION for Charity: Water, my absolute favorite charity)

Todd Defren and I are excited to officially announce* that SHIFT Communications is hosting Pistachio Consulting as a “specialist in residence.” In return for sharing space (and inspiration) in their beautiful offices in the New Balance building in Brighton, I’m working with their executives and teams on what Twitter can do for SHIFT’s clients. Since a majority of SHIFT-ers already Twitter, it’s awesome to dive right into sophisticated and strategic ideas that can rock out what they do for their clients.

We’ll do a few structured sessions that dig deep into Twitter’s utility for PR (yes, we’ll offer these to the public later on in our upcoming webinar series), as well as informal brainstorming sessions and lunch-and-learns.

(*Todd is very silly to use the “Q” word in his post. I blame Brian, Tara and a dollar store sash she gave me. Plus the fact I’m not nearly funny enough to score “Court Jester.”)

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, lots going on:

• Welcome, new Pistachio client Johnson & Johnson

Image via Wikipedia

• I’ll guest lecture at Harvard Business School this spring on Twitter for business. Prof. Andrew McAfee‘s students will work with Twitter and enterprise microsharing tools throughout the semester, then lob tomatoes at me give me a rigorous grilling about the business applications and cases we’re seeing. I’m also speaking at the ICA April 4th in a special AIGA program around the Shepard Fairey exhibit.

• Monitor Talent signed me to their roster in December. Contact Mel Blake for high-energy, high-level briefings on Twitter’s business significance. It was completely humbling to meet folks like Dan Ariely, Dan Gillmor, Ethan Zuckerman and dozens more at their Access to Minds event.
  

• Mainstream media attention to the business use of Twitter is at an all-time high. Just my own personal recent clips alone include CIO Magazine, MassHighTech, Entrepreneur Magazine, US News & World Report, NECN, NPR, and CNET.com. Look for Forbes, WSJ and the GQ (UK) soon, too.

• TipJoy We had such a great time collaborating on the @WellWishes campaign (thanks all — YOU raised $25,000 and a whole lot of awareness for Charity: Water!) that Ivan and Abby Kirgin invited me to become an official advisor to TipJoy alongside Chris Sacca. I’d been looking for Twitter to get its own payments system for a long time, and have very high expectations for TipJoy.

• Society for New Communications Research included me in their 2009 Fellows lineup, along with Pistachio collaborator and Fast Company blogger Marcia Conner. Congrats to all the new Fellows, it’s amazing company to be in.

• TouchBase Blog and LinkBlog — Articles, ideas, case studies and links to what businesses need to know about Twitter and microsharing. Don’t have time to scour the social web for that latest information or sort through piles of Twitter news to discern what businesses need to know? We’re your one-stop-shop. Follow @touchbase to find out when we post or add valuable bookmarks to our TouchBase Link Blog (Delicious account). Tamar Weinberg holds house and home together on all of the above as our Editor in Chief alongside more than 25 AWESOME contributors and guest bloggers.

• Twitter for Dummies (old news, but never formally announced) We are writing Twitter for Dummies. I’m thrilled to be working with Michael Gruen (who is also on Pistachio’s advisory board) and Leslie Poston. The book is due out in July, and there’s a even a brainstorming community where you can add your ideas. Also follow @dummies on Twitter for updates when we have them.

We have some great stuff coming up – things that will add business value really cost-effectively, including webinars, hands-on trainings and seminars (starting in NYC) and a new series of white papers and eBooks on the business use of Twitter, enterprise microsharing and more. Also, look for us to (finally) post a team page soon to let you meet the people working hard behind the scenes over here. Speaking of “behind the scenes,” I hope to have even bigger news soon…

Please stay tuned!

Warmly, Pistachio

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My “media economy” Twitter rant before patchy SMS delivery:

Though advertising’s effectiveness and “ROI” was always massively less measurable than social media’s it enjoys incumbent advantage/inertia

The whole economic basis of media has been advertising and television. Entities that alternately make us insecure and pacify/numb us.

Can media now find a new engine that is, just as our society needs right now, driven by individuals becoming confident and engaged?

How sustainable could an economy driven by passiveness/insecurity be? Really? What end was it ever driving 2 other than debt overextension?

Just sayin.

I’ll add more commentary, context & links later on, but for now, just setting the sequence straight.

Responding to various comments I added these tweets later on…

Fascinating to look at replies to my (totally desequenced and garbled) media economy rant and see what else you penciled in

Replies reference “government handouts” and “organized media” and other concepts my rant didn’t include.

I’ll blog it later on. I *am* calling out that we need new economic models for new decentralized media and its ties to the broader economy.
@MProfsCEO I believe the new models are still commercially/free market based, but FACILITATIVE. “Helping people buy” not helping co’s sell

@mprofsceo forerunners of them = amazon’s ratings + recommendations, @garyvee’s entire business, social shopping + some affiliate programs

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Is it cheating to play “meme tag” by recycling an old post? I’m responding to my friend JP’s tag with a re-run of an “8 things about me” post I did last spring. At the end, I tag YOU to continue the meme. The instructions, then…

(a) republish these rules

• Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged.

(b) share seven (preferably less well-known) facts about myself:

So here’re some weird things about me that you might not know. Whether you actually care is a different story altogether, but it can’t hurt to have a little fun.

1. Favorite adventure: hitchhiking around Scotland, Ireland and Northern Ireland in the summer of 1995. No offense, England, but I was having too much fun in Ireland and skipped visiting you altogether.

2. Most flawed climate research: living (the wrong) 7 months of one year (Sept. 94 – March 95) in Moscow. Hint: want to be an expat in Russia? Try summertime.

3. Weirdest honor: nominated for President of a Sinn Fein group in County Clare. No, really.

4. File under “oops:” I’ve slept on the streets of Paris. “Air Hitch” stranded a raft of passengers in Luxembourg. I rented a car and got 6 of us to Paris to await a confirmed flight days later. We were to sleep at the airport our last night, but the Metro closed en route, discharging us randomly onto the streets. Fortunately my Czech national team rugby player pal found an elevated, fenced corner for me while he slept so as to block access via the open side (he was a human hypotenuse to the corner’s triangle).

5. Jack-of-these-trades: Jobs I’ve held for pay for at least one week: first-grade teacher, waitress, prep cook, chef, caterer, purchasing agent, project manager, PR wonk, marketing exec., interactive television strategist, developing show ideas for cable TV, freelance journalist, and in retail selling specialty foods, equestrian gear and plants.

6. Best use of a state park: living in Hueco Tanks State Park, Hueco Tanks, TX for 2 1/2 months in 1993 in order to rockclimb full time. (Rachel Strate is there RIGHT now and I am SO JEALOUS reliving it vicariously.)

7. Most unusual home: I’ve logged 12+ months of sea time living in teensy bunks aboard the SSVs Westward, Corwith Cramer, and Robert C. Seamans with the Sea Education Association. I’m madly in love with the islands of Bequia and Saba as a result.

8. What’s my major? I studied Environmental Science and Public Policy, wrote my undergrad thesis on Social Analysis of Soil Erosion and published on soil erosion (in Science) and environmental racism. So naturally, I’m now in communications.

(c) Tag seven people:
I tag YOU, YOU, YOU, YOU, YOU, YOU and YOU.

(that’s just how i play memetag – it’s “self serve” if you’d like to play or not)

What’s my birthday wish? That you’ll tell your friends how EASILY they can be part of @Wellwishes. Read how this started: “What can $2 do?” We’re saving children’s lives by bringing clean, safe drinking water to villages in need through Charity: Water.

Hundreds got involved and we’re building wells for 3 villages. But just $2800 more by midnight tonight – Wednesday January 21 – earns a $5,000 match and serves 5 entire villages.

YOU speaking up and telling others will get us there. What else can you do (in just seconds) today that will cost so little, help so many, and actually save children’s lives? 1.1 billion people on earth – 1 in 6 – lack sufficient safe drinking water, and 5,000 children die every day as a result. I just can’t accept that in silence.

Enter your Twitter login (read why this is safe) to register for TipJoy and donate to WellWishes: 
Or set up an account at www.tipjoy.com and donate to @wellwishes that way. It’s a tiny amount. I hope you will.   (Fund your @tipjoy account with $5 min. Tip anyone on the web, including The Salvation Army or Americares with the other $3.)

Can we make it by 1/21? Watch our progress:

Read the @wellwishes story here. 100% of donations (@tipjoy waived its fees) support www.charitywater.org efforts to build wells via local groups around the world.

Check out Nicole Nicolay‘s awesome Birthday Dance-O-Gram:

Thanks Nicole, and thank you EVERYONE who is taking part to make @wellwishes come true!

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