This morning I went to the Rochester Open Coffee Club meet-up, and while it was great meeting people here in my own town I've been talking to online, it's also horrifyingly depressing how much of the conversation still centered on Silicon Valley.

When I first set out on the Web nearly 14 years ago, we were told it was the future of business; that we would be able to do everything online and be part of a truly global economy. People would be freed from cube farms and able to work wherever they were and location would be completely irrelevant. And yet the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Profy is a truly global company. The writers live all over the U.S. The company headquarters are in San Francisco. The development team is in Siberia. I think we've made it work; up until Web 2.0 Expo last month, I'd never met Svetlana in person. It was amazing to have worked with someone for over a year, consider that person a friend, and yet never have met. And yet, I realized hearing about the companies here in Rochester, that we need to cultivate the area as a tech community much more.

The reason that Silicon Valley is so much at the forefront of the industry has absolutely nothing to do with the concentration of people there or the environment. It has to do with the fact that people are constantly tripping over each other, moving from company to company, and making contacts that lead to other contacts. There is no reason why things HAVE to be there, only that they have fostered a culture where it's not only acceptable, but also recommended to jump companies every couple of years. It's the incidental meet-ups that lead you to that next contact that facilitate development and foster the interconnected atmosphere that tech thrives on.

But for all its "tech hub" reputation, Silicon Valley is no different than anyplace else on earth. The reliance is still on meeting those people face-to-face in order to keep the industry alive there. And if more areas fostered that sort of community, I think we would see little mushrooms of activity springing up all over the U.S. and other parts of the world, and help everyone out in the end. Rochester has one of the fastest-growing housing markets in the country. We are moving out of the far-too-extended era where we relied almost exclusively on manufacturing to support the local economy. And we are ripe to foster a start-up culture of our own, only different. The mindset here isn't the constant migration to the newest, shiniest thing. Rochester is known for stressing company loyalty and quality products, and I wonder what companies could do here with a workforce unaccustomed to waiting for options to vest before moving on to the next possibility, and committing to building something and sticking with it.  

I spent my afternoon playing outside with my kids, only to come back inside, check my feeds, and see that HP is almost certainly buying EDS. HP. Buying. EDS.

I can't even wrap my head around that.

I've already wondered what's going through HP's collective head when it comes to marketing themselves in the Web 2.0 space, but this one is boggling.

I did five years at EDS. Five. Years. With a company that seemed lost in a post-Perot world with vestiges of the quasi-military Perot culture. And now HP wants to gain their own ready-made family to compete with IBM services. I'd like to know how those meetings went. Xerox just resigned their contract with EDS for $263 million LAST MONTH. Does HP really think Xerox will happily allow the newly minted HP employees on the premise to continue providing services?

The tendency to acquire instead of build is fast becoming the new way of the world. You have to wonder, however, if these companies think through how well merging companies will work in the end. My guess is Xerox is already on the phone with Perot Systems or IBM to replace EDS.   

I haven't forgotten my blog. I'm just trying to fix all the damage that I did at Web 2.0 Expo demonstrating the Profy platform. Maybe I should have thought about that beforehand and created a dummy account before I went all FUBAR with my own blog.

It was great getting to meet people, putting faces with names, talking without trying to interpret the intent behind the words on the screen. And Expo had such a wide range of people there, from people there to learn about Web 2.0 to see how their business fit into the space to industry leaders. Great swag, fun time, and best of all, no Norovirus.

But boy, is it taking me forever to catch back up!

I will admit that I have a daily struggle with being online. I've been online for longer than I care to think about at this point as it shows my age, but I realize it is very easy to get me down when it comes to online interactions. I started out on IRC and Usenet and those of you old enough to actually remember the Time Before Web know how nasty it could get, and most likely still does.

When I first saw Gary Vaynerchuk's entreaty to participate in Good People Day, I really didn't think I could participate. My world has gotten very small writing primarily about Web 2.0, a community which is at risk of exploding like the sun and turning into a huge black hole if the infighting continues. And while Gary insists that the people out there who have attracted a lot of haters have a good side too, I'm not seeing their Frosted MiniWheats sweet side at all.

I've been reading others' contributions to the day and had to do a lot of soul searching to think about my time online and the people I have met along the way who have made my experiences online a better one. In no particular order:

my husband, Jason Carreira. While he no longer blogs and generally scoffs at anything with the terms "social" or "2.0" in them, he is generally able to tamp down his impatience when I quiz him on a development issue or architecture question. He's forgotten more about web development than I ever knew, and I'm grateful to have him as a sounding board when I think I'm getting in over my head when I'm writing.

Sundry. I think most of her readers know her real name by now, but in the realm of the "mommy blogger" she's a stand-out. While her reader base has grown over the years that I've been reading her blog, I have NEVER seen her tire of replying to comments, engaging her community, or replying to individual emails, unlike many other bloggers I've seen who have gotten too big for their britches. Every time I feel like I can't reply to people, especially detractors, I'm reminded of her example of how to truly build an online community.

Drama 2.0. I know it probably seems like an odd choice, but this industry needs a healthy injection of humor. The timing is probably coincidental, but every time I'm seriously ready to pack it all in and toss my laptop out the closest window, there is a new post about Kool Aid drinkers that reminds me that in the overall scheme of life as we know it, the bitchmemes really aren't very important.

Svetlana, who took a chance on someone shifting career gears for about the eleventy-hundredth time. She's encouraging, trusting, and allows me to log in every single day to rant away, even when it's a controversial topic and it may end up biting the hand that feeds us.

Every single person who has commented or linked back to me, or emailed me about a post. I have a terrible time with email debt, where I see a trackback or a comment or an email and want to sit on it for a little while before responding with whatever blather comes out of my mouth, and lose it in the sea of communications. I have appreciated each and every one, whether it was a compliment or a put-down. The compliments are what keep me going, and the put-downs always make me think.

Lastly, my eight-year-old daughter, who begs me regularly to let her spend more time online, and who already wants to learn Java and Ruby. I watch her and I remember myself and the first time I ever wrote a BASIC program  on a TRS-80. It's girls like her who will be the future of women in tech, and I hope each and every day that she has a brighter future in tech than I did.

So today is what I like to call Give Gifts Day. Technically, I quit having birthdays when I was 21, because I no longer had a use for them after I could vote and drink.

In the gifts received so far (which are, admittedly, less than usual since I'm quarantined in the house with whatever plague the children brought home from school) are Amazon gift certificates. The need for instant gratification has me hovering over the "download now" button next to the newest Mike Doughty album, but the other part of me wants to horde them.

You see, I'm one of those crazy people who wants a Kindle.

I know. They are expensive, and the content only adds more. And there's the whole DRM/tied to Kindle issue. And I can't pass the books on when I'm done. And, and, and.

But I love books. I'm the person who reads favorite books over and over and over again. I also burn through books fairly quickly, meaning that any time I'm going away, odds are I'll have to pack several books if I'm actually going to have some time to read.

The Kindle can hold 200 books. In my bag. At any time. I could conceivably have 200 of my most favorite books to keep me company. It's like carrying a library. Sure, it's pretty and appears to have a cool design, but it's the main idea that I could have all my favorite books with me at all times that just makes me want one so badly. It would take me a while to be able to replace my 200 favorites as eBooks, but oh, it would be so worth it.

Okay, well, he is. But in Valleywag's Top 10 Ballmer-goes-nuts Videos post is a hidden gem.

In the very last video, Steve Ballmer is asked about bloggers and Microsoft's policy about blogging. His response was the sanest thing I've ever heard from an employer:

"We trust our people to represent our company. That's what they're paid to do. And if they don't want to be here, they wouldn't be here. So in a sense you don't run any more risk letting somebody express themselves in a blog than you do letting them go out and meet a customer by themselves anyway. It just reaches more people."

And yet we still see people getting fired for blogging.

I was originally intending to ignore the now infamous Jason Calcanis post. It was so sweatshop-ish, so completely over-the-top, I honestly figured it would just largely be ignored.

Of course, whenever TechCrunch picks up a story, people's ears prick up and take notice, and now everyone is a-Twittering and blogging and overall freaking out.

Duncan Riley's single quote from his reponse to Calcanis' post that keeps being repeated is "Expect to check your family at the door if you want to go work for JCal." Reading it over and over again just makes me sad. The attitude conveyed in Calcanis' post is one that's all too prevalent in the Valley, and the main reason I've fought ever moving there tooth and nail. I've lived the life of a start-up wife, clinging to a single-digit employee number and stock options that, if the company went IPO, would mean we'd never have to think about money. I was a single mother over half the time while my husband put in 80 hour weeks and traveled. We sweated weeks that payroll would be late, funding that never seemed to close when you wanted it to.

Riley was right about checking family at the door. When my third child was hospitalized, my husband wasn't here. I can't count the number of things that he missed in the hopes of making it big. The mantra is that the Valley is where the only people who survive are the ones who are willing to risk everything, but what percentage ever make those millions? And how many just go from one start-up to the next, hoping that the next one is the big one?

There are things in this world worth more than egoboo, conference panels, and millions of dollars. And as nice as it would be to not have to think about money, I think we both like it better this way.

Blogging tends to be a very serendipitous profession; often two seemingly unrelated items drop in your lap and you wonder how the rest of the world doesn't align properly as well.

Every so often a piece I'm writing kicks my butt. In blogging, there isn't the time to edit and polish as you would with a regular article, especially when you are covering a breaking story rather than reviewing something. But I'd been working on an online advertising piece that I couldn't get right. It was long, so I tried to split it up. Shorter articles made no sense without the other piece so I put them together. I mulled over my ideas with my husband until I felt I had it right. I was pretty pleased with the article when I finally finished it.

Today, reading Techmeme, I see a story featuring the same WSJ piece that originally set me off. And the story isn't so much of a story as a huge quote and a three-line response. I'd be lying if I said that wasn't frustrating. Not so much because I write any piece EVER expecting to make Techmeme (since I don't), but because I spent so much more time on it and did so much more analysis and a three-line response to a quote nets a mention.

Not to long after, I found a piece on a "mommy blog" that I read about politics in the blog world. And yesterday Allen Stern wrote about the popular people on Digg. So why is the Internet still such an extension of high school, even among the adults? Obviously, Allen and Stefanie are much more popular bloggers than I'll ever be. And yet even they can feel disenfranchised by the social hierarchy that exists every place online. Bloggers obviously wants some type of attention or they would keep their lights under their bushels and type only on their desktop. But why is it so hard for the big folks to spread even a little love among the little-knowns and let it trickle down.

My friend Kevin and I have been engaging in a  little debate on Facebook about  the future of gaming, based on a C|NET article from the Gamer's Development Conference that includes a comment from PlayFirst CEO John Welch that casual gaming will "soon eclipse hardcore gaming."

My response was that Welch is looking at the short term. Sure, there has been a big surge in some casual gaming, with the emergence of gaming platforms on Facebook and the popularity of sites like EA's Pogo. And in the short term, as baby boomers continue in their somewhat-web-savvy explorations, there will probably be a huge upswing in the number of people purchasing and playing casual games.

But where Welch misses the point is that there is a generation coming up who weaned directly from baby food to PSPs, and these aren't the children of gamers.

Among the other parents of my children's friends, there is only one other set of parents who could even be remotely described as gamers. And, like my husband and me, they have severely limited the gaming of their children, with no handheld units until middle school (or close), and very limited time allowed on any other system. In our house, I'm the PC gamer, while my husband is the console gamer. Up until the past few months, we've had only an Xbox in the house, with exactly three games that the children could play, and they did so on rare occasions. They got a Wii for Christmas, but game play is still limited, and it's the first thing they lose when tasks aren't completed or they disobey. The only handheld games they are allowed are their Leapsters, with time limited even with these educational games.

The other parents? The amount of gaming that my children's peers engage in is mindboggling. For parents with the means (and even some without), it's not unusual to find 8- or 9-year olds with their own television in a bedroom, Wii and PS2 alongside and changed out on a whim. My children whine that they are the only ones without a PSP and/or a Nintendo DS, and I see their friends walking to the bus stop, or in the grocery store with a parent, head down, thumbs in motion. There are kids my children know who refuse to leave their houses without their handheld game unit, playing it everywhere from family parties to shopping trips. I was recently at one birthday party held at Chuck E. Cheese where a child HAD A DS IN THE ARCADE. It was positively stupefying.

We have a fairly decent selection of games for the Wii, from the Wii Sports that came with the console to Game Party (which includes darts and skee ball) to Big Brain Academy. Without fail, the kids gravitate toward the traditional "gamer" types of games, like LEGO Star Wars and Mario Galaxy. Their friends, most of whom have parents who wouldn't know a FPS from an MMOG, do the same. I don't think these kids are going to be enamored with the novelty of playing a Scrabble-lookalike on a social network. They are going to want their brain-powered controller to play their VR games. And if game companies don't see that in their long-range plans, I think they are going to have problems.

I usually read blogs in a feedreader. And I'll admit it freely; I loathe blogs that supply only partial posts in their feed. The rationale behind it is to drive people to the ad-ridden site, but I'm already working on a piece for Profy about why that's generally the wrong way to go about it. The folks who are actually clicking on the myriad of ads on your blog probably aren't using a feedreader anyway. And you are just annoying the ones who do.

At any rate, I read blogs in the reader, then click over to an article if I want to join in the discussion. It's been an interesting exercise lately, however, since I installed NoScript, which blocks all but allowed Java and Javascript code from running in the browser, adding an additional wall between your computer and any malicious web sites out there. I clicked through on the feed link to the blog to leave a comment and found (and I wish I were kidding) 29 scripts attempting to run. TWENTY-NINE SCRIPTS. On a BLOG.

I didn't leave a comment. I'll probably never leave a comment again, because I can't even figure out which of the 29 scripts is required to run in order to leave a comment. And I'm not about to go through and figure it out. It's almost like Facebook is becoming a disease spreading to blogs; you must have every single possible widget installed no matter how useless it is, or how much additional time is needed to load the page.

I'm not usually a fan of the Google less-is-more theory of UI design, but when it comes to blogs, people really need to pare the garbage down and just leave the relevant things. People who are looking for quality content need to find a non-intrusive way of getting it. And we need to figure out a better way of monetizing content and marketing it without inundating readers with widgets.