I was sitting at the pool in Portoroz Slovenia this afternoon and had an interesting experience. I grabbed the weekend edition of the International Herald Tribune after the Gotham Gal had finished off the crossword and started reading the opinion section.

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Facebook’s announcement that they are opening up API access to user’s status updates (and more) is big news. The status update has become the ultimate social gesture. You could see this coming if you were watching carefully. All last year, Facebook, who is the leader in social networking and will continue to be as far as I can tell, focused on morphing the user experience, first to the news feed and ultimately to the status update as the primary user experience.

But Facebook did not invent the status update. I honestly don’t know where the status update started but for me it was AIM where I first was asked to leave a short note telling people what I was doing. I’ve heard Jack Dorsey, the inventor of Twitter, talk many times about his inspirations for Twitter and one of them was the status message in AIM.

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Fifty to a hundred thousand high-paying jobs are going to go up in smoke in NYC before this is all over. It’s a mess for this city, tax revenues are going to be down, real estate prices are going to be down, restaurants will fail, etc, etc. We’ll get through it for sure, we always have, but it’s going to suck for a while. As my friend Mo said, “I sure wish Bloomberg would get another four years because we are going to need him.”

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Yesterday evening I took a quick look at Techmeme and saw that the top two posts at that point in time were Tim O’Reilly and my responses to Mike Arrington’s Yahoo post. I clicked through to see Tim’s post and noticed that Tim had done the same thing that I had done; simply cut and paste the comment I had left on Arrington’s post onto my blog. It was interesting to see that the top two posts on Techmeme at that moment in time were in fact comments to another blog post.

I then twittered that thought and went to dinner.

Here’s the thing. I get comments every day on my blog that are as good as any blog posts I see on the Web. And they are stuck behind the comments link. They need to be on the front page, not on the back page.

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So now, in addition to this blog, my tumblog and Twitter, I have to pay attention to what’s going on in FriendFeed. So it’s gone from being an aggregator of attention to a demander of attention. Good for them. That’s the way to play the game on the Web.

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When I started blogging four and a half years ago, there was a clear delineation between bloggers and journalists. But that’s all changed, and now we have this new category, the journablogger.

The journablogger has his or her own blog or works in a blog network like paidContent, TechCrunch, Gigaom, Silicon Alley Insider, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, VentureBeat, etc., etc. Just look at the top of Techmeme’s leaderboard and you’ll see them right next to the traditional journalists like the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNET, etc.

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