Sarah Milstein

Happily between gigs right now, Sarah Milstein was until recently UBM TechWeb's GM & Co-chair for Web 2.0 Expo. She's also co-author, with Tim O'Reilly, of The Twitter Book and a frequent speaker on social media for business. Previously, she was on the senior editorial staff at O'Reilly Media, where she founded Tools of Change for Publishing (TOC) and led development of the Missing Manuals. Before joining O'Reilly in 2003, Sarah was a freelance writer and editor, and a regular contributor to The New York Times. She was also the CSA program founder for Just Food, a local-food-and-farms non-profit, and co-founder of Two Tomatoes Records, a label that distributes and promotes the work of children's musician Laurie Berkner. She holds a B.A. from Rutgers University and an M.B.A. from U.C. Berkeley's Haas School of Business. Bonus fact: she was the 21st user of Twitter.

Everyone's New Favorite Question About Twitter

For a while there, you couldn't surf a single drop of the web without smacking into the question, "How will Twitter make money?" Although that question remains unanswered, Internet interest has shifted. Today's favorite question about the micromessaging service is: "Has Twitter has gone mainstream?" Or, somewhat less optimistically, "Will Twitter go mainstream?" Of course, the question isn't new; people…

Why Does Twitter's Business Model Matter to You?

That's a real question, not a rhetorical one. In a Radar post I wrote last week about whether Twitter's user base was hitting a critical inflection point, the first comment was, "How does Twitter make money?" Although the post wasn't about Twitter's business model per se, a lot of the comments were. Which wasn't too surprising, given that many people…

Twitter's Hockey Stick Moment?

Over the weekend, TechCrunch postulated that with a frenzy of election-related activity, Twitter hit its hockey stick moment in late October. The theory goes that Twitter saw a 25 percent increase in U.S. visits from September to October and is thus about to experience the sort of explosive growth that will propel it into mainstream consciousness. That could well be…

Join Us for a Tweetup Tonight

If I'm blogging it, is still a tweetup? Either way, we're hosting a little shin dig tonight (Thursday) to celebrate the release of our new report, "Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution: Communication, Connections, and Immediacy–140 Characters at a Time." Join us from 6:30 – 8p at House of Shields, 39 Montgomery St, SF. It's a block from the Palace Hotel…

New Radar Report: Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution

It would be a stretch to say that Twitter helped Obama win the presidency. But there's no question that the messaging service played an important role in this year's elections. To wit: * Obama signed up early and has by far the most followers of anyone on Twitter. He and his campaign sent messages regularly from the trail. * Twitter…

A Successful Experiment

During Web2Open yesterday, we ran an experiment that turned out to be a big success. Because it felt like a model that could be extended and used by others–but it hasn't been blogged about widely–I'll explain here what we did. We started with the idea that we wanted to hold a conference speed-dating event. But we didn't have a natural…

Web2Open: Announcing Speed Q&A

Web2Open, a free unconference within Web 2.0 Expo, starts tomorrow, and we've got a new twist: after some really good speed-dating suggestions from you, we've been inspired to try speed Q&A. Here's how it's going to work: we'll have 50 minutes, five prominent people and five tables, one each for programmers, designers/UI specialists, marketing/community experts, businesspeople and undeclared. The prominent…

Small Business Hacks at Web2Open

We've got a cool new development on the Web2Open front: Jen Bekman, Don MacAskill and Bryan Mason will be joining us for "Small Business Hacks," an open discussion moderated by Tony Stubblebine. Particularly neat is that each of them has worked on a Web 2.0 company with a different business model. Jen started 20×200 as a site connected with her…

Troll Whispering at Web2Open

Earlier today, Teresa Nielsen Hayden posted the guidelines she uses for moderating the comments on BoingBoing. Of course, not everyone agrees with her take-no-prisoners approach, and her post has drawn some fire. But whether you're a fan (which I am, big time), there's no question that Teresa's advancing our collective understanding of online community dynamics. If you're grappling with an…

Seeking Ideas for Conference Speed Dating

Last week, I came across conference speed dating. I immediately fell in love with the idea and wanted to try it at Web2Open. But I'm not sure how to set it up. Seeing as the Open is a community-based event, I'm hoping some of you will have stellar suggestions for making this work. The basic idea with conference speed dating…