(Signed, Been There, Done That)

And let me say that part of the amusement (fromm here, in retrospect) at how well some of this was sussed out, is that something like this, with someone like her is something we've thought would be a good idea.

So, Woot!

I can't help wondering: How would Charles Stross explain your new job to someone in 1977?

FM seems to be about 35 people, most of whom are in Sausalito and about (my guesstimate) 7 of whom are in NYC. Mostly because someone's got to sell to the NY ad agencies.

I hope you're having fun.

Good luck, enjoy, and do good things.

I was expecting TNH to be announced as Information Minister of the post-Cheney provisional government.

Seriously, congrats!

This job, and this company, seem to be yet another of the many things that are Beyond My Ken, but I understand enough to know that it sounds exciting. So again: congratulations!

You appear to have obtained copies of the Earth-47 documentation. Report yourself for debriefing immediately, citizen.

(Jeez. Some people. It's so hard to staff a dinosaur hunt these days!)

Though in my increasingly fewer visits to Tor, I shall miss seeing you at your crowded-in desk.
(Tears)

Jane

Of all the things you get out of this, I'm jealous of an office with a theremin. How cool is it that you can perform your own eldritch theme music while you work!

*I would do the happy dance on your behalf, but I'm in the upstairs office and I think the people sleeping downstairs would complain at the noise*

I wondered if the Flamer Bingo thread was [REDACTED] related, but I didn't know how to ask without being redacted. (Actually, I thought Teresa was writing a book. But this new job is so much more immediate and hands-on.)

Good luck with the new gig.

Much luck in juggling both FMP and Tor (and I am glad Vlad and his friends are still in safe hands)

Gotta love an office with a theremin.

All I can add is: Wowwww.

Also:

Of course, Teresa will continue to be a consulting editor for Tor Books, because nobody ever stops being a consulting editor for Tor Books, bwa ha ha ha.

Just when she thought she was out. . .

Tor's hiring of Michael Corleone was bound to have repercussions.

now, when can we get together, o master and mistress of old and new media?

#31--Also, the Aunt Sophronia brand of pickles, preserves, syrups, and marmalades. Be careful of the hot chowchow.

Yup, poor guy, he gets to play with the real masters of the game, for the sake of the game itself.
I give him three months before depression creeps in.

Congratulations, by the way. As already stated, they're lucky to have you.

...

[...]Teresa will be deploying her ninja community-engineering skills[...]

Am I the only one imagining Ms. Nielsen Hayden in full ninja gear running along shall-not-be-photographed-building walls to have a pleasant chat with shrouded in black pie-cooking secret operatives?

Note to self: do not try to type before cats have been fed.

I expect you'll be blogging from a high altitude hot air balloon soon, if you haven't started already.

I still want the book, though.

Hm, that is a bit of a bother. The problem, as I see it, is that the goggles are of the "two eyepieces connected by a thin rubber strap" variety. Which would mean there'd be no way to put glasses on underneath.

Contacts, maybe?

-giggle-

It's early, and I haven't finished my coffee.

Sorry. More coffee.

As for myself, I think of Teresa as an Organian. Didn't you know that's the real reason this site is called Making Light?

Serge #72: you can get prescription goggles for pretty much any activity for which goggles would be useful (swim/dive, motorcycle, safety, etc). A brief google turned up this site (http://www.heavyglare.com/goggles.php), and I'm sure there are many more out there.

if not, then I guess it's cyclops goggles as a fall back plan.

You do realize you won't match the other super-bloggers, though.

Of course. In the world of blogging, I am less like an X-man and more like the wannabes in the movie Mystery Men.

God's given me a gift. I shovel well. I shovel very well.

J

Serge, wouldn't these be worth going without glasses? Get thee to Hungary forthwith.

(And congrats to Ms. Nielsen Hayden, of course.)

But, Good Editor, keep plenty of band-aids at your desk. You'll be working awfully near the bleeding edge.

My apologies for taking the thread off topic. Again, my congratulations to Teresa. Today, Tor. Tomorrow the world.

Ah! I thought the name was familiar (beyond just my obsessions with Bataille). FMP's CEO wrote the techier of the two Google books.

You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

Seriously: Congratulations, Teresa!

(Ah, we can only dream - a universally Teresa-moderated Internet.)

Speaking of which (or rather, our current lack thereof), who didn't see this coming?

Nigerian pupils browse porn on donated laptops.

Now, if we can get the damn thing filtering Fox News Channel, we'll really be getting somewhere.

Seriously, congratulations.

Failing that, enjoy yourself, and buy nice things with the paycheck.

Good Luck in your new pursuit.

Teresa is an Account Manager at Federated Media, where she deploys her online community-engineering skills in the service of various FM clients. She’s also writing what she swears will be a “short” book about online moderation.

This group is good...

Follow the link to the pictures on Flickr and step through them. You'll find it there, somewhere past the stairs and the firehose.

Xopher @ 111, if you're still searching. Laughing Squid's photostream on Flickr has a set called 'Federated Media New York Office', wherein which are these two pix of the Theremin. Once't you're in the area there, you can look around for other photos & tags of interest.

Googling for goggles.
Or, from your hot air balloon,
goggling for googles.

Epacris (#114): Thanks for the direct link to the theremin pix. Downloading the whole set of photos by dial-up took so long, I just glanced at the thumb-nail versions and gave up before I really got a good look.

Theresa: Any further comments on the job, or is that verboten?

Does anyone have a more geek-friendly explanation, especially for someone steeped in GSF 1 and 2?

The only thing I know about Federated Media is that they were somehow behind this, which sets off most of my "scummy marketing sleezeball" alarms.

That aside, yay on the new job. I just accepted one of those (an offer for a new job) myself. And, I should note, with a company which itself lives off advertising revenue, and which is routinely accused of everything from being the 1200-pound gorilla, to being the new big brother, to unfair trade practices. So I'm well aware of this glass house I'm sitting in over here. I just honestly don't have a mental handle on what FM does.

The other thing FM appears to have is a solid sales force, grounded as much in ad-industry experience as in the new-media world. Of course they can't compete on numbers or scale with Microsoft's giant underground facilities where sales reps are grown by the thousands in vats, or with Google's mile-long crystalline automata gently wafting into low Earth orbit from their remote launching pads in the American West, but there's always a place for an agile, knowledgeable boutique operation staffed (mostly) by unmodified Homo sapiens. That's the theory, at any rate.

But they do have the Theramin:

"It's kind of a shock the first time you see it glow black and smell the sulfur and hear it dispensing advice in a guttural voice echoed by a choir chanting in Latin, but dang, that thing is right ten times out of ten!"

Maybe not, but if you put this phrase in your comment thread, Google Ads offers up a bunch of PPP links in the sidebar.

How annoying is that?

I was going to complain about all the ads on the Internet, but most of the blogs FMP lists look like compilations of press releases for gearheads and quasi-magazine advice columns ("life hacks"? hoo boy. Silicon Valley much?).

I can see how this would be interesting in a professional sort of way, but I was actually wondering whether they were aiming at inducing the Arthur Silbers of the world to advertise on their blogs. (Thank goodness, not.)

Not a lot of them have much going on in the comments either. One of the writers actually complained of being lonely and never getting any feedback.

I can see that my idea of "conversational" marketing is not their idea.

Probably a good thing, that.

The tricky bits appear to be in the careful measurement, the removal & installation, and making sure your prescription lens is thin enough (or thick enough, I suppose) to be held properly in the frames.

#123: As far as I'm aware, FM doesn't run any "pay-to-post advertising schemes."

Maybe not, but if you put this phrase in your comment thread, Google Ads offers up a bunch of PPP links in the sidebar.

How annoying is that?

I dunno, how annoying is that? More to the point, what do the ads served up on our Google adstrip have to do with whether some entirely different company runs some sort of "scheme" or not?

I was going to complain about all the ads on the Internet, but most of the blogs FMP lists look like compilations of press releases for gearheads and quasi-magazine advice columns ("life hacks"? hoo boy. Silicon Valley much?).

...um...

...well, a long time.

Think about standard old-fashioned bifocals for a second: the line separating the distance lens from the close-in lens needs to be horizontal and somewhat below the straight-ahead line of sight. The same is true of progressive lenses, except instead of one clear line like that, there's a whole gradient series.

At least, that's my non-expert guess, based on the extra measurements the fitting person took for my progressives, and how much more finicky they are about where on my nose they sit than my old glasses were.

*I stopped by the store today to tell him I'd ordered the loveseat I wanted and there was a gang of little aliens with truncated cone heads standing around.

No, reactionary lenses always have a dark view.

Those are reactionary mirrors.

Re: "Of course, Teresa will continue to be a consulting editor for Tor Books"

That's good - very good, actually, but I noticed it wasn't:
"continue to be a consulting editor AND co-edit the 'Making Light' blog."

Surely a small oversight?

(My contribution? Threat: the exit prize for Making Light moderation is a tribble.)

We're way down here in a quiet corner at the bottom of the thread, so here's some of the story: for a while there, I was getting all sorts of interesting inquiries and offers. I think we'd reached the moment when lots of businesses and other organizations realized that all this Web 2.0 user-generated-content online community hoohah doesn't work unless you have a moderator -- and almost no one had a business card saying "moderator." Why I wound up where I am will become more evident later on.

I had an odd realization during that period: all the really good moderators I know are connected to the science fiction community. Maybe that'll be our ethnic industry, like Greeks running diners, Koreans running corner groceries, and Russian women doing database backup and storage.

Another bit: remember when I was slagging off a couple of major news organizations for not bothering to moderate their discussion threads, and I mentioned that a top-notch large-board moderators of my acquaintance was available? The news organization that contacted me wasn't one of the ones I'd been writing about, and I wasn't the moderator in question. Don't feel obliged to state your conclusion when it occurs to you.

The most frustrating thing about that particular episode was that Linkmeister's uncle turned out to be acquainted with the person who contacted me, and I couldn't say so when we were telling the Linkmeister story. But it's true: there were even more coincidences than we reported at the time.

So this all goes back to Linkmeister, once again. There is even more to this gent from Hawaii than I had thought.

I wonder why?

Two possible theories, off the top of my head (not much more than the top is rising above the moving boxes).

1. A significant proportion of SF fandom has been online longer than a significant proportion of other groups. So we've simply had longer for natural selection and survival of the fittest to breed communities and moderators that work.

2. A significant proportion of fandom goes to conventions, and has a shared mental model of what a long discussion on a given topic* should look like. Both the successful con panels and the failures go to build a communal Platonic ideal of a discussion. This allows moderators to focus on steering communities into that mode, without having to be distracted by inventing the goal as they head for it.

You'll note that both of these theories are about the evolution of the communities as well as the moderators. I admit that this may be like Suetonius' assertion that historians are as important as the doers of great deeds** - the observer taking credit for the acts of others.

-----
* or off of it, if the digressions are amusing enough.

** because historians preserve the memory of heroes beyond their lifespans

True enough. But I think it's really because SF fandom was instantiating the internet decades before it rode over the wires in IP packets. We know a lot about virtual community. When Teresa and I first met, we were sheets of mimeo paper in a monthly apa mailing.

I'm not sure what other communities have long online experience, but I would not be surprised if certain other RL communities with a long history of consensus-oriented decision making and operations, like the Friends or American Buddhist communities, were also to turn out good moderators.

You're ascribing more influence to me than I've got. This is the first I've heard of that little detour, too.

What turns on a theremin? Another, slightly shorter theremin?

Well, I know you were thin, but I had no idea you were actually mimeo paper.

That's cool.

Bwahaha.

Slainte, Teresa!

Does this mean you're *not* doing the moderation book?

Oh, and Teresa, congratulations!

"Making Light... for America!"

Notice that the antennae on either end of a classical theremin are different shapes, one a ring (not necessarily circular) and the other a rod. This makes theremins hermaphroditic, so I don't think they're turned on by physical dimorphism as much as humans are. I suspect it's the sound that gets them.

I think that's a large part of the reason*. There is another, I think, that dates from a little later: since the late '60s, at least, fandom has diversified considerably in the backgrounds and personalities of the fans. Many SF communities are much more diverse than most interest groups, and so have had to work harder and learn more to develop reliable ways of attaining consensus, or risk even more spectacular ways of melting down.

* It's scary to think that fandom is older than I am (though not by a lot).

Look carefully at your dental benefits from both Tor and FM, dental benefits are (or were when I managed this trick) based on calendar year. So you may be able to double-dip for this year (assuming you can get an appointment(s) before your Tor insurance runs out). No guarantee, the loophole may have been bricked in, but worth looking into.

I think my Theremin wouldn't mind rubbing its pitch antenna against another pitch antenna...but only if they were both upright.

Aren't you worried that Baptists would accuse them of dancing?

(My dad had bifocal SCUBA goggles back in the '70's sometime, and the prescription wasn't quite the same as the one for his normal glasses. He probably had rather an easier time finding someone to make them, though, since he was an optometrist.)

Oh, and to bring this a little more on-topic, congratulations Teresa! May the reach of your awesome moderation powers never grow shorter!