Is Palo Alto really America?

Palo Alto and Menlo Park where I live and work are the sweetest little towns. Trees filled with small lamps on the main avenue, sofisticated restaurants, professor bungalows, cool art shops, several yoga studios, nice coffee shops and - of course - TWO Apple stores (Steve Jobs lives kind of close) . They make Wisteria Lane seem barbaric. It´s a very nice and balanced quality of life.
But in a way, it doesn´t feel like America. Where´s the melting pot and the energy that comes from mixing different people from different levels with lots of willpower? Its all very established. Even the begging man (one of two I´ve seen in the whole city) outside Wholefoods is rather well dressed, polite and talks about the weather.
Maybe this is what you get when you mix brains (many of them coming out of Stanford university) with money and entrepreneurship (this is the heart of Silicon Valley) with liberalism (its still California), sunshine and extremly beautiful nature. It´s great in many ways, but I kind of miss the type of passion you notice on the streets of NY or even Washington. Maybe I just haven´t looked enough...
This weekend however, we went to Big Sur with Leo and Nicola, who was visiting. Talk about passion. High, powerfull Redwood-trees and dramatic cliffs steeping down to the sea and rather genuine lodges. I hope to be able to sneek away for a weekend there soon!

Geeks in progress

During this four day trip to Washington DC and New York I have recieved the sweetest e-mails from my soon to be seven years old daughter Sun. I can see that she´s been struggeling with the spelling, but she manages to say exactly what she wants. It goes right into my heart.
At home in Palo Alto she throws herself on the computor whenever she has a chance. She has not been in school during our time here - but she has managed to figure out how to e-mail and how to play all the games at PBS Kids (in english) on her own. We sometimes smile at her and call her "Geek in progress". On a more serious level, this gives a whole differend perspective on the 100 dollar computor. Making sure that cheap but workable computors reaches kids in development countries (soon!) is more than important for future education, peace, democracy and dreams.
Love to you Sun (read her blog here).

New York, New York

Sitting in the JFK airport about to leave for SF, feeling absolutly uplifted after having spent three days here. I dont think I´ll ever get over my love to New York. It´s something with the energy in the city, the fact that people and events are simply so much - well - more. People are more creative, smarter, richer, crazier, more excentric, bigger, smaller, more passionate etc than any where else. I could watch New Yorkers for ever - the chic women, the arty girls, the business people in power suits, the dogs... I know its dirty and ugly but I even love the smells and the noice and I actually think it is beautiful.

I was here on a study trip with my fellow Stanfordians. We have visited magazines Spectrum and Fortune as well as Bloomberg. It was really interesting. What strikes me is the fact that few of the bigger magazines have any strategies for new media and their future online life (something I also noticed last summer when I visited Vanity Fair and New York Times Magazine among others). "If I knew that I wouldn´t be working here," was the answer from the editor of Fortune International...
On the other hand, I liked the fact that she stressed the storytelling part - that her magazine is about telling strong stories - and that she revieled that she sometimes uses her intuition in combinaion with observations of people when she tracks down a trend. I do the same when working with Tendens, a series of articles on trends, in Stockholm for TT Spektra.
Bloomberg was felt like something type-casted from the future of media. No walls only transparent glass. Busy, busy. Hi-tech. However they dont really have a strategy for innovation coverage...

On a personal level I got to have lunch with my dear friend Paul (who is one of few native New Yorkers and who knows how to play the saxophone) and to go to dinner and barhopping with his lovely girlfriend Giselle (I felt like 21 when standing on a roof top bar with a cosmopolitan and NY the skyline in front of me...). I also got to do some shopping (strong colours coming now), some strolling, have a great dinner at NY hang out Indochine with the fellows and a group of NY-based journalists, spend the night at my hard working reporter-friend Gunilla's house in Harlem and to go to mysore yoga at a beautiful studio called Yoga Sutra. Today I´ve interviewed a great Swedish designer called Lotta Jansdotter. Visiting her studio in Brooklyn was inspiring and made me think of the importance of having beauty and esthetics in the objects we use in our everyday life.

Online publishing and skylines

So finally my paper on The newsroom of tomorrow is online - you can read it here. And my encounter with ex-Terminator and governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt is live and kicking at Podtech.net - here (it's ruff and raw but we thought it was better to get it out fast that beautiful...).
It's always nice to publish things. In the old days it used to mean you could not do any more changes and that the piece was - well - done. I try to live by that lesson, to let go of things when I publish - although with the internet it's difficult (since you can make changes over and over again). Very often the first thing you write is as good as something you've spent hours and hours on (but again - not always - so there are no rules).
On a whole other subject: American cities are most beautiful at night and at distance, when you actually see the skyline. Crossing the looong Oakland-bridge towards San Francisco the other night was breathtaking, especially while listening to As favorite radio channel smooth jazz :) I'll never lose my love for big cities and the energy in them.

Conversations with O

My fine and very beloved father finally came to visit. When he got off the plane he had a bit of a beard and was groggy from the jetleg, but now - a few days into the visit - he is his very own self (going on about very large and very small things at the same time, always with a list of things to do or to buy in his hand...). The first weekend we took him around Palo Alto, to the PowWow-festival at Stanford (oh yes - hundrads of indians dancing and drumming). We also went through the magical mountains of the peninsula to the beautiful driftwood-beach.
My dad, or O (we call him O since his name is Omar), has been a journalist with Svenska Dagbladet for more than 40 years. Sitting there at the beach he started telling me about how difficult it was to deliver texts from the six day-war in Israel, due to censorship all his conversations with the newspaper had to be in English. Today he told us about the reality of covering the nuclear mealtdown at Harrisburgh in 1978 - when you got different versions of the "thruth" from every official you talked to.
His stories gave me some perspective on the journalistic work I do - having all modern tools in the world, transfering media over the globe in seconds, having access to information and people through the webb. It's always good to have a larger picture. And its also good to remember that most of the time nothing beats the human story.
I keep telling O he should write a book, but he says that he likes to be lazy and that he prefers to play with our kids. For now I'm thinking about giving him a blog - then he can´t get away...
The ongoing week is intense. I've shoot a few podcasts (desperatly trying to get some space in the editing-studio), gone to a seminare on the future of news-media (that didn´t provide any bright visions), prepared for the innovation journalism-conference, done research on design and covered Swedish prime minister Reindfeldts meeting with ex-Terminator and govenor Arnold Schwarzenegger in Sacramento for TT. I´ve also seen some lovely friends and had nice dinners with O and the family.
Things I have not done that I want to do: Drink wine in the garden with A when the kids are sleeping. Paint with the girls. Bake bread. Write to people I love. Spend more time with our fabolous roomie Leo. Put up our new lamp. Hike with the family. See the Vivien Westwood-exibition at the De Young-museum. Discover San Fransisco. Paint my toe-nails.
Theres always a tomorrow - but the challange is to capture the essence of now.

Smile - You´re writing a paper

So I had to write a paper for my session at the international conference on Innovation Journalism. I thought I picked something easy when I decided to write a case study on PodTech where I do my fellowship.
I was wrong.
To understand a Silicon Valley start-up with all its levels of new technology, new media products, new business models, new ethics is - eh - not easy. The paper has followed me in my dreams and kept me buzy every night for over a week now. But I think it is getting ready, I´ll link to it as soon as it is up.
I´ve also discovered that working in Silicon Valley a lot follows this principle: "You wanna learn how to swim? Sure I´ll push you into the Atlantic". I´ve struggled to get a (very small) video-piece, an interview I did with the US ambassador to Sweden Michael Wood on clean tech, done and up. In the end I had to figure out how to edit the piece myself. Its very, very ruff but you can look at it here.
People at PodTech still are extremly nice, I just need to learn how to navigate I guess.
We´ve also done som nice things this last week - we hung with friends at their pool, had coffe at my favorite café in Palo Alto, visited a breathtaking beach - and I went shopping in San Fransisco with a friend from work. I must confess I ended up with three pair of shoes - only to balance the tech-world.

The issue of air condition

The weather is starting to get really nice - outside. Inside, at my office, its rather freezing. I dont think I´ll ever adjust to the American way of using air condition. The whole point of living in a nice climate is to enjoy the warmth - or am I wrong?
Our afternoons/evenings now go like this: A and the children come to pick me up at the office. I come out, wrapped in a big scarf or a sweater, freezing. The sit all relaxed in their t-shirts after having spent a sunny day in the park or at the beach. I immediatly throw myself on the buttons in the car, trying to adjust the aircondition down. They scream at me not to, because they´re all warm.
I guess I have to find my inner thermostat.