I've decided to start a new "series": Homes for the New New Migrant Worker, or Cafes that Won't Kick You out.

Our inagural cafe: Cafe del Doge in Palo Alto.

The cafe has had a few other names in the past, but this latest incarnation looks like it will make it. It's arrogantly, vigorously Italian. I've been abused for wanting to add more milk to my hot chocolate (which is the best in the valley, if a bit strong for my taste. Think melted chocolate bar.) It's a narrow space, and the key seats are in the mezzanine where you can look down on people.

Power Outlets: yes. At least two upstairs
WiFi: Yes, not a bad connection. If it goes down, you can sometimes crib from Neotte next door.
VC sightings: plenty

Tripped over this little fellow on the british ZDNet. I wonder if he's working as well for them as Linkedin's progress bar works for them.

On the other hand, i can't say I found myself overwhelmed with the desire to email everyone I knew a whitepaper just to see the line change.

Great article The WCM Renaissance(pdf), and particularly gratifying is this quote:

Web 2.0 is also exposing cracks in WCM space. Much the same way that WCM specialists accuse ECM vendors of "not getting it," many WCM tools that only recently added blog and wiki functionality suffer from complicated interfaces, unfriendly URLs, and other un-Web 2.0 shortcomings.

In particular, the prevalence of sexy Ajax interfaces on the public web makes traditional WCM contributor interfaces seem very outdated. Vendors point out that re-engineering their product UIs is not a trivial matter.

Growing interest in user-generated content (UGC) has also created architectural challenges for integrated WCM packages the same way that the rise of the web caught many document management vendors flat-footed. In enterprise settings, most web-content management services and repositories live in a protected zone behind the firewall, and don't naturally lend themselves to authors coming in from the public web.

To be sure, most enterprise customers don't know yet what it means to "manage" user-generated content, and important questions are stalling some initiatives. Should we put UGC through an approval workflow? Do we need to archive it? Do we expose our internal classification scheme so we can cross-reference internal and user content? And so on.

I couldn't have paid someone to better explain the PublicSquare approach. USG is a gruesome acronym, mind you, but the idea is crucial: publish with your audience, not at them.

The publications that willingly erase the line between "them" and "us" will charge ahead. While we see plenty fo pure-play user media companies, such as YouTube, and some cautiously inviting the audience to help out like US Today's digg-like new features, I wonder where the future hybrids are coming from? When will we see a reader byline on the New York Times? When does the audience get to help write and edit? When do the sandboxes start to share sand? okay, bad metaphor, but still..

in any case, I may not know when, but I can tell you how: it's PublicSquare. We have built a system -- you see it now on Boxes and Arrows and on Found|Read -- that allows the readers to write. Any smart comment becomes a story acorn, any blog post can be trackbacked into the idea pile! then off to a happy editorial process where it can be fact checked and grammatically corrected and become digestible by humans like you and me. And we did it with a sexy Ajax interface.

I don't want to sell you; don't get me wrong.

I want to gloat.

We built something cool.