Gina's posted a photo of the Kinja development team, minus me and Matt, as Kinja prepares to go live. You can see the fear in their eyes, and yet everything went smoothly. It's nice when some much planning and testing actually pays off.

After 15 months in the making, I'm pleased to announce that Kinja, a new weblog reading tool, has launched today. We worked really hard on it and hope you'll check it out. On a personal note, I'm spending another month at Kinja and will be leaving at the end of April. I'm sure I'll have more to say about that in the future, but for now, check out Kinja and some assorted media coverage:

Nick Denton: Kinja is live

New York Times: Blog-Bleary? Try (What Else?) a Blog

My Kinja public digest (so you can read what I'm reading!): www.kinja.com/user/megnut

Clay Shirky's got a new essay up on Situated Software, a term he's using to describe software, "designed in and for a particular social situation or context." I find his essay really interesting, and I wish I had time right now for a more thorough response, but my own application commitments prevent me.

One reason the situated software approach works so well is the clear definition of the end users of the system. It enables developers to build for a very specific set of users and features, which is a wonderful foundation for success. When you don't have business people requesting new features for some hypothetical user or situation, your software tends to do what it's designed to do better. In software development, the use of personas — each persona represents a target user of the system — is one way to address application focus and scope. But for some time now, especially with regards to social software development, I've wondered if that's sufficient. Later in his essay, Clay writes:

We constantly rely on the cognitive capabilities of individuals in software design…[w]e rarely rely on the cognitive capabilities of groups, however, though we rely on those capabilities in the real world all the time.

This gets to something I've been thinking about for sometime now, the possibility of using personas to represent groups rather than individuals. In fact, I even proposed it as a talk for the last O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference but it wasn't accepted. I'm still tickled by this idea of modeling the groups, because as Clay writes, there's a power in groups that you don't find when the same individuals operate in isolation. By creating group personas (groupas? grouponas?), perhaps we could better design and hone our software to utilize the group's power. Then we could create software that's honestly social and situated, and it wouldn't necessarily be at odds with the breadth and reach of a Web School application.

So you may have heard about Future Me, the website that lets you write emails to your future self, and set a delivery date years from now. The possible conversations are fascinating, and yet email is so clunky and leads to such asynchronous exchanges. I want immediacy in my future me chats! Thus it was with trepidation that I began an AIM conversation this afternoon with my future self.

megnut: you there?

megnut2012: yeah, what's up?

megnut: well, i'm just wondering, um, what's it like being 40? what's our life like now?

megnut2012: eh, pretty much the same as being 32

megnut: really? huh, no epiphanies?

megnut2012: nah, not so much.

megnut: what about wrinkles?

megnut: does all that wrinkle cream i've been buying lately actually work? or do you have a lot of sun damage?

My development on Future AIM Me begins in earnest later this week. Ready your questions for yourself now and look for a rough alpha in mid-summer.

I hadn't realized my old friend Ms. Magazine has a blog now! I'm totally adding it to my daily reading rotation and look forward to seeing what it has to offer. Also, I was so honored to see a link in the sidebar to megnut! Very cool.

I hadn't realized till just now that Blaise posted a scan of the picture of us from last week's New York Daily News article on blogging. (You can see my post here about it here.) That's me with the blondish/orange hair in the corner. Yeah, I don't know why I dyed it that color, but I did (where I = my favorite hair cutting gal pal Silvia).

There's an article about New York City women bloggers, I am woman, hear me blog in today's New York Daily News. The print edition has a big color photo of me, Liz Spiers and Blaise Kearsley but that doesn't appear to be online.

As far as story goes, it's the same old stuff, but the selection of women highlighted is great. There are several women profiled whose blogs I wasn't familiar with, so I'm looking forward to adding some more "blog-ettes" (as the article refers to women bloggers) to my reading rotation.

Jason's posted pictures of our High Line stroll last weekend.

The Economist's Backgrounder on Haiti.

The case for gay marriage (also from Economist.com)

Catholic Group Is Told to Pay for Birth Control

And those are just a few of the things I am thinking about.

Ages ago, I created a page listing all the speaking engagements I've done, putting descriptions of each event and links to any presentations I'd prepared. And then I thought I linked to it somewhere on the site. But I guess I didn't, except for a very minor link at the bottom of my resume. Now I've added a "speaking" section to the top of my navigation which sends you to my speaking resume. I'm not sure 'resume' is the right word for this, but I don't know what else to call it. Anyway, if you're looking for a speaker, take a look at it to see if I'm your gal!

During a meeting this afternoon, it occurred to me that I've been working on Kinja for so long that it would have taken me less time to have a baby!