Of course, as Om and others have already mentioned, there’s no guarantee this deal will actually be consummated: it could fall apart on valuation, as so many deals do — or Facebook could swoop in with a much higher offer and snatch Tumblr out of Yahoo’s clutches, the same way it did when it stole Instagram away from Twitter last year for close to $1 billion.

Update: According to the Wall Street Journal, the Yahoo board of directors has approved a $1.1-billion all-cash bid to acquire Tumblr.

It makes Yahoo look desperate — because it is

Even if the deal does get done, one of the risks for Mayer and Yahoo is that the company could look desperate by paying more than $1 billion for a site that had revenues of less than $15 million last year (although CEO David Karp has said that figure should hit $100 million this year). That’s an almost bubble-like multiple for a company, and there will likely be plenty of criticism from investors who believe that $1 billion could be better spent elsewhere — in other words, on businesses that would make Yahoo a better return.

But the painful fact is that Yahoo doesn’t just look desperate — in many ways it is desperate. Mayer has made some changes since she took over the ailing former web portal, including the acquisition of Summly and a number of other mobile-focused startups and services, but the company still needs to make some aggressive moves if it is going to jump-start any growth at all. And since Yahoo has about $4 billion in cash on hand, it can arguably afford to make a big bet.

Yahoo buying Tumblr makes sense. Tumblr is only big, cool, newish social platform that Yahoo can afford.—
Henry Blodget (@hblodget) May 17, 2013

For Yahoo, the addition of Tumblr would do a number of things: because of the size and profile of the deal, it would make a major statement about Mayer’s intention to do whatever it takes to revitalize the company, and it would also send a signal to Facebook and Google — and even Apple — that Yahoo is a potential force to be reckoned with when it comes to potential acquisitions. Is doing that worth $1 billion? That’s for Yahoo’s investors and board of directors to decide.

Just as important, it would inject some much-needed life and energy into the somewhat stale lineup of content that the company currently relies on, which caters more to the over-50 set than it does to anyone in the much-desired 18 to 25 demographic. More than any other network, Tumblr is the platform of choice for media-obsessed teens and 20-somethings, who spend massive amounts of time sharing photos and videos and animated GIFs on the site — an engine of potential value that Yahoo desperately needs.

Tumblr gets a massive exit

This doesn’t come without its own risks, of course: As a number of observers have noted, Tumblr’s content contains a large quantity of not only mature or arguably offensive content but outright pornography, which many argue is the source of its massive traffic numbers. How Yahoo (or Facebook for that matter) would deal with this kind of content remains to be seen.

3 q's for Yahoo: 1) Can you convert Tumblr users to Yahoo products? 2) Can you monetize Tumblr PVs? 3) What to do w/ all that Tumblr porn?—
Mark Zohar (@markzohar) May 18, 2013

For Tumblr, meanwhile, being acquired would solve a number of problems — the main one being that the company has gone well beyond the “we’re a startup so we don’t really have to make money” stage, and is facing increasing pressure from the investors who have given CEO David Karp more than $125 million in venture financing, an investment that values the company at about $800 million. Accepting a giant check from Yahoo would take care of that problem in one fell swoop, especially if it was all in cash.

With a major company like Yahoo as a partner, Tumblr could connect its massive audience of users to the firehose of ads and other monetization methods the giant web portal has, and potentially generate much more revenue than it could have by itself. The only lingering question at that point is whether Tumblr fans decide that Yahoo is poisoning the well of social content and community on the site, and decide to flee for greener pastures. In other words, does Yahoo make Tumblr into YouTube — a successful standalone network that can grow and prosper on its own — or does it become MySpace?

The only scenario where a Yahoo-Tumblr combo works is if Yahoo keeps Tumblr separate in the same way Google managed YouTube.—
Mark Birch (@marksbirch) May 18, 2013

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / ollyy and Albert Chau

Parakweet is a company that’s working to use natural language processing to cull through your tweets and make smart, targeted suggestions based on the data. On Friday, the company plans to announce the launch of two products. One is Bookvi.be, a consumer-oriented book recommendation engine, and TrendFinder For Movies, which is a social media dashboard primarily for entertainment companies to monitor conversations around movies. The latter is a paid product that provides the company with revenue, and the former is free for consumers.

“It’s a very hard problem we’ve tackled, which is accurately identifying sentiments,” CEO Ramesh Haridas said. “With 400 million tweets a day, there are 700,000 a day discussing movies, and if you tried text-matching techniques you’d come back with 40 million results. Many movies and books have very common titles, so you’d just drown in data.”

Both products use natural language processing to figure out how common a title is on Twitter, but also how a consumer is tweeting about a particular product, and they make recommendations based on those tweets. For instance, if I tweeted that a particular book is terrible and no one should ever read it, it would look ridiculous for a book recommendation engine to suggest that book to people. So Bookvi.be is structured to recognize the words I’m using in my tweet and know not to recommend that book. Users can choose to have a weekly email send to them with book suggestions, and they can type in their Twitter username to get book suggestions based on the people they follow.

“The bar on accuracy is very high,” Haridas said. “Especially if it’s sent via email, the precision needs to be intact.”

I’ve looked at a good number of social recommendation tools, and this one definitely stood out. For one, it was incredibly accurate — all the books it suggested were books I would actually read. But most importantly, it didn’t require me to create a new social network, or depend on friends for reviews, so you could get a lot of value from it right away. This is the obvious benefit of using someone else’s social graph, but Twitter seems perfectly suited to making content recommendations for things like books. Because unlike my Facebook friends, the people I follow on Twitter tend to accurately reflect my intellectual interests.

Of course, there are the obvious potential pitfalls of building a product around someone else’s platform, although Haridas said they support Facebook and are adding other platforms. But there’s a good deal of money to be made in accurately processing and understanding the words people are tweeting, as evidenced by Twitter’s acquisition of Lucky Sort this week, a similar company that also tries to figure out what people are talking about on social media.  As I’ve written before, as Twitter ramps up its advertising products it’s more important than ever for the company to be able to provide brands with more accurate ad targeting which hinges on the words people are tweeting and searching.

Columbia University plans to explore these issues, Emily Bell, director of the Columbia J-School’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, said at Betaworks Betaday on Thursday. To that end, the Tow Center will run a weekend workshop on sensor journalism in June and will fund a few projects. And next year, Bell said, the Tow Center plans to run a “sensor newsroom classroom” in partnership with the architecture school.

Some of the challenges are technical: How can journalists and newsrooms build their own low-cost sensing techniques? WNYC’s John Keefe, for instance, built a cicada tracker to figure out exactly when the expected cicada plague will hit New York City this summer. Can other organizations do the same thing?

“How do you get the really efficient things from sense networks in a way that helps you do human reporting?” Bell said. The techniques also create ethical questions: “We are moving into this world where the line between transparency and privacy is constantly in tension. When you can survey everything, what do you report?”

“Practically, we’re very close to being able to survey most of what people do most of the time,” Bell told Betaworks’ Andrew McLaughlin. “I come from Europe, where everything is solved by regulation, In America, the momentum is very much with business rather than the individual. [Google CEO] Eric Schmidt said at the journalism school the other day that privacy is all about making good judgment calls about what you put online. That’s just not true. You can’t make adequate judgment calls to control your own data. That’s only going to get worse.”

It would be wise not to read too much into those McKinsey numbers, however: virtually all of the available evidence shows media consumption in print continues to decline, particularly with younger audiences, and as a result advertising revenue is disappearing as well. Media companies need to adapt to that fact, rather than trying to pretend it isn’t happening.

According to a post by Rick Edmonds at the Poynter Institute, the research came from a presentation by McKinsey principal Michael Lamb at a recent conference of the International News Media Association in New York. Lamb said that based on data from a number of sources, about 35 percent of the time consumers spend on news consumption is devoted to newspapers and magazines, while TV accounts for about 41 percent and smartphones and tablets account for only about 2 percent.

In other words, the research seems to show that while digital devices account for more than half of the total time that consumers spend with media in general — and about 10 times more than the amount of time they spend with newspapers and magazines — the amount of time they spend with “legacy” platforms expands dramatically when looking specifically at news consumption.

Time spent is not the only important metric

Although Edmonds notes that there isn’t much research out there to confirm McKinsey’s conclusions (apart from a Nieman Journalism Lab post in 2009 that saw Martin Langeveld try to dig into some readership numbers for newspapers), he says that other researchers he contacted thought that the numbers were probably “not far off” — in part because of the “lean back” form of consumption that print media involves, where users often spend hours with a cup of coffee and a paper.

Edmonds also argues that encouraging advertisers to look at these kinds of time-spent numbers might help newspapers and magazines improve their appeal, since time spent is a big factor in where advertisers spend their money. As he puts it:

“The time-spent metric suggests that there is more life in legacy formats than raw audience numbers and falling print ad revenues would imply. Since the ‘dying industry’ meme is part of print’s problem with advertisers, this could be incorporated in a case for the medium’s continued relevance.”

Unfortunately for publishers who might see this as reason for unbridled optimism, however, Edmonds goes on to note that the time-spent numbers “do not solve the basic advertising problem of vanished monopoly pricing power and strong competition from a wide range of targeted digital marketing options,” and that while users may spend less time overall with digital platforms when consuming the news, these shorter digital sessions “may be a more efficient way of consuming news.”

For most, the news occurs elsewhere

I think Edmonds puts his finger on one major problem: namely, the fact that for many news consumers, the “lean back” experience simply isn’t necessary any more. As research from the Pew Center has shown, large numbers of consumers are getting their news from aggregators such as Google News or Yahoo News — or possibly from newer solutions such as Prismatic and Circa and Flipboard — because they don’t have either the time or the inclination to go to a single newspaper source, or read in print. Is a lack of efficiency really a selling point for legacy print publications?

That’s not to say the “lean back” experience doesn’t still have value for many news and media consumers, but the other painful fact is that most advertisers aren’t specifically looking to advertise to news consumers — they want specific demographic segments or topic-specific shoppers, or other kinds of targeting that legacy publishers can’t offer, and they want engagement or “time spent” across a range of content types, not just news.

As Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker has repeatedly suggested in presentations about the evolution of the digital-media marketplace, advertisers are moving to where the puck is going to be — not where it is now. And according to virtually all of the available evidence, even from McKinsey itself, that means mobile and social and other platforms, not print. Publishers can either try to convince advertisers that they are wrong about this move, or they can try to adapt to it.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Arvind Grover

Retwact — whose full name is Retweet Retraction — is the brainchild of a programmer named Stonly Baptiste, a developer in Pennsylvania. In a nutshell, the service archives your incorrect tweet with a correction or apology of your choosing, then shoots a link out to all of your followers to try and encourage them to read the corrected version. In addition, it also sends an @ mention and link out to the first 100 people who retweeted your original incorrect message, in the hope that they might also help spread the correction.

Correcting tweets would be complicated

As it turns out, this latter feature appears to have run afoul of Twitter’s terms of service, which are designed to prevent spam accounts, and Retwact’s account was suspended on Thursday. Baptiste says that he plans to go ahead with the other features regardless, and may even make his project — which received a lot of support on Y Combinator’s Hacker News forum — open source.

The impulse behind a tool like Retwact is an obvious one: as Wired writer Mat Honan notes, there is a sinking feeling whenever you tweet or retweet something that is incorrect (or turns out to be incorrect), and it would be nice to be able to retract or remove not just that tweet but all the subsequent retweets of it as well, to clear up the public record. Honan joins a growing chorus of critics asking for a correction mechanism (or trying to design one, as some members of this post-Boston Branch discussion did).

Adding that kind of editing or retraction/clarification ability seems to be something that is within Twitter’s grasp: in the same way that it has built hooks into Twitter’s code so that media companies can embed video clips and other data within its “Cards” or expanded tweet feature, it would theoretically be possible for Twitter to add a hook that would connect a mistaken tweet with its subsequent corrected version, so that both would follow each other around the social web.

As Twitter engineer Nick Kallen has explained, however, the likelihood of Twitter actually building in this feature seems somewhere between slim and nil — in part because they driving force behind most of the company’s changes over the past year or so (with the exception of expanded tweets) has been to strip functionality and features away rather than to add them. An editing or correction function could also theoretically be abused in a number of ways.

Twitter is a real-time stream

But more than that, I think Kallen puts his finger on the problem when he says that adding correction features would change the nature of what Twitter is in a fairly fundamental way. The whole point of the service is that it is a stream of content that never stops — and the only way to correct a tweet is to send out another one. In that sense, it mimics conversation, which is also inherently un-correctable except through more conversation. It may be flawed and messy, but that’s the way information works now, for better or worse.

And yes, this has obvious flaws, because the correction never travels quite as far as the original mistake (as Craig Silverman of Regret The Error has pointed out). But over time, I firmly believe that Twitter becomes what Sasha-Frere Jones of the New Yorker called a “self-cleaning oven” for news.

On top of that, I don’t think adding an editing or correction function like Retwact would actually help all that much. People would continue to believe whatever they want to believe — as wrong as that might be — and no matter how thorough the mechanism was, it wouldn’t stop those who created their own manual retweets or retweets of retweets. I also think that having errors emerge and get stamped out over time is a positive process that creates more skepticism about real-time news, something that we need to encourage. It is a process, not a finished product.

So as much as I cringe internally whenever I send out a mistake — which I have done, and will no doubt continue to do — I hope Twitter ignores the requests of its critics to implement an official editing or correction function.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / Hirurg

Feedly Co-founder Cyril Moutran

So engineers moved static content off the Feedly servers inside a data center and, somewhat ironically, onto Google App Engine, which scales very nicely, Moutran said. Dynamic content stayed put on the Feedly servers, which store terabytes of data, including indexed content from the feeds users subscribe to.

Less than a week later, Moutran said, “we saw another really, really crazy spike.” The site went down again. Developers took a look at the code that communicates between the client and Feedly servers, and tried to make the client more efficient, thereby reducing the load hitting the servers. “Then we had to order some more hardware,” Moutran said — load balancers, to be specific.

That second outage came on a Monday. As it turned out, Feedly gets more traffic on Monday than on any other day, and generally speaking traffic is higher on weekdays than on weekends. Desktop traffic picks up at around 8 a.m. local time and decreases around 6 p.m. Why? Many Feedly users look to the service “not so much in a casual context but more to catch up with what’s going on with the industry,” Moutran said. People use Feedly for work, in other words. Lawyers, designers, and writers are typical business users.

As many more users get on board — more than 3 million had joined since the Google announcement as of April 2, on top of 4 million users active before the announcement — more feeds pile up. The number of feeds is now up to 100 million, Moutran said.

With many more business users and a greater variety of content, monetization is a bigger question, and Feedly feels it must accelerate its efforts in that direction. The company, which is based in Palo Alto, Calif., and has 10 employees, is now looking at how it will introduce a premium or pro version later this year. Feedly could also add a way to take revenue by providing streams of publishers’ premium content inside the desktop and mobile versions of the application.

While plenty of people find Twitter handy for getting news, the migration of millions to Feedly shows the desire for a strong RSS reader still exists. If that desire keeps steady and if Feedly can keep adding features that interest users, it could turn Google’s trash into Feedly’s treasure.

But how exactly ebook publishers reach that audience and how the industry tracks who’s interested in reading what is less clear. A series of ebook publishers who spoke at our PaidContent Live conference in New York on Wednesday talked about the critical importance of gathering data on readership and consumption, and using it to transform the industry:

“The old eveolution of the book publishers used to be very allergic to data. And what you just heard is a very different approach from that. For us it’s about metadata and surfacing. And then rinse and repeat,” said Dominique Raccah, the publisher and CEO of Sourcebooks. “Metadata is a new term in our industry, but it really is the key.”

Raccah pointed out that unless publishers know who is reading the content, it’s hard to craft specific marketing messages or know what people respond to:

“It’s really important to know that book publishers know a lot about what touches readers,” she said. “So it’s important to help craft those messages in interesting ways.”

Rachel Chou, the CMO for Open Road Integrated Media, said they’ve seen a lot of success working with Twitter, as well as sponsored stories in Facebook, to drive traffic and understand where customers are coming from.

“Then after a while, you start understanding what the best partners are,” she said.

Evan Ratliff, founder and CEO of Atavist, said they have a small team but because they’re especially focused on finding customers by building up the Atavist brand, understanding data on the company’s products is important.

“We’re also on a very small level, we’re experiment with different ways of reaching people and social media,” he said.

Check out the rest of our paidContent Live 2013 coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

A transcription of the video follows on the next page

Go to page 2 (of 2) on paidContent .

One of the most prominent, Microsoft researcher danah boyd (who spells her name without capital letters), said on Twitter that the takeover was “sad,” and that she doesn’t believe Mendeley can help Elsevier repair the reputation it has developed for being against open access to research — a reputation that is based on the publisher’s support of the failed anti-piracy legislation SOPA, among other things.

Another prominent critic of the acquisition is David Weinberger, a senior researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and a co-director of the university’s Library Innovation Lab, which played a role in designing the new Digital Public Library of America project. Despite the assurances of executives at Mendeley that it would remain open — including its access API — Weinberger expressed scepticism that the company would be able to resist Elsevier’s attempts to make it more closed (he expanded on this on his blog).

Some of those who responded to the news of the acquisition seemed to see Mendeley’s acceptance of the takeover as a breach of faith, since the company had been such a vocal supporter of the open-access movement — a movement that many saw as directly opposed to the interests of companies like Elsevier. At least one observer compared it to “Haliburton buying Greenpeace,” and others made comparisons to the Empire in the Star Wars movie universe, or the Borg from Star Trek — both evil forces who eventually absorb or destroy the heroes of the story.

Mendeley’s director of academic outreach, William Gunn, responded to many of the critical comments about the acquisition, and said that the company plans to remain as open as possible following the deal:

Elsevier has been the target of a sustained attack from open-access advocates who organized a boycott of the company’s journals, galvanized by Fields Medal-winning mathematician Tim Gowers — arguing that its publications are too expensive and keep valuable research locked up in a virtual cartel. One commenter on a news story about the Mendeley acquisition said: “They spent their whole life as a company arguing they were the next big thing in open publishing only to sell out,” while a commenter on a thread at Hacker News about the deal said:

“Mendeley should be ashamed, and you personally should be ashamed for perpetuating this nonsense. Within a year your company will be effectively dismantled and anyone left over who actually cares about open access can start over from scratch. I wish them luck.”

News of the acquisition re-ignited interest in the “mendelete” hashtag on Twitter, which was devoted to criticisms of the deal and the exploration of alternatives such as Zotero. One commenter said: “Was Mendeley more about its values or its services? Some of its biggest supporters have become its shrillest critics #mendelete.” If nothing else, these kinds of responses show just how much work Elsevier has ahead of it when it comes to reassuring academics and others that their commitment to openness is real. As Emily Bell at Columbia University put it:

Disclosure: Reed Elsevier, the parent company of science publisher Elsevier, is an investor in GigaOmniMedia, the company that publishes GigaOM.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Luis Santos

So, now that the takeover has come to pass (the Financial Times reports the deal value as £45 million (USD $69 million), or around £20 per user), what fallout should we expect?

Cleaner data

According to Mendeley CEO Victor Henning, everything should be just fine. Mendeley will “stay an independent site” with plans to expand its 50-strong team to 80 within the next 18 months, he told me, adding that the deal would give both parties better data:

“All those resources will help us do two things. One is more integration — the biggest gap in our product offering is that it’s too difficult for users to get to full text content. When people found something on Mendeley it was usually just the metadata with a link to the publisher’s website. Elsevier publishes around 20pc of the world’s scientific output and has deals with other publishers for its Scopus database. We’ll be working to integrate Mendeley with Scopus and ScienceDirect to make it easier for our users to enrich and clean up the content we already have — our content is crowdsourced. Elsevier has a lot of clean structured data we can use to clean it up, and our data can enrich Elsevier’s because we have rich social information.

“We can now also take a more long-term perspective about monetization versus feature development and user growth. As an independent startup we were always trying to break even as soon as possible, and were under pressure to monetize new features. Now we can pick up certain things for the roadmap, for example hiring a fully-fledged mobile team. There will be a new iOS app soon, and we’re going to start building an Android app from scratch.”

Henning added that Elsevier’s existing 17 million author profiles would also have a positive effect. “Now, once we’re integrated, when you sign up to Mendeley we will immediately be able to present you with your profile to claim,” he said. “It will make it easier for users to get started.”

But what about all that criticism of Elsevier? There, Henning insisted there was little risk of users taking flight:

“People have criticized Elsevier for things they’ve done in the past but, particularly last year when they were subjected to criticism for their stance on open access publishing, they’ve taken that feedback to heart. They’ve doubled the number of open access journals that they publish. They do support open access publishing and they will expand on it in the future. Another move they made last year is, people were saying they’d like to text-mine content that you have, and they opened up to the community about that.”

Elsevier, meanwhile, also said in a blog post that Mendeley was “open, social and collaborative, and it is important to [Elsevier] that it retains all of those traits”.

“Elsevier has all the power”

However, not everyone is sounding so positive. One notable perspective is that of Jason Hoyt, Mendeley’s former R&D head and, since leaving the company, founder of open access publisher PeerJ.

Hoyt said in a post on Tuesday that Elsevier had previously hampered or outright stymied open access projects at Mendeley, including the service’s PDF preview functionality and a scheme to automatically put papers filed with Mendeley into the open access archive of the author’s institution:

“If one is honest, from a business perspective the Mendeley founders did the right thing to comply with Elsevier’s demands. My personal passions about Open Access hindered that, so no surprise it didn’t work out for more than a few years… I think that Mendeley as it stands today will continue to be useful even at Elsevier. That said, I think it will be challenging for Mendeley to become a truly transformative tool in science, which is what had originally convinced me to move from San Francisco to London four years ago.”

Meanwhile, open access blogger Mike Taylor noted that “Elsevier has all the power in the relationship” with Mendeley:

“So Mendeley say things like ‘very little will change for you as a Mendeley user’ and ‘we will continue to support standard and open data formats’, and I’m sure they believe them. But it’s dependent on the whim of Elsevier. The moment it becomes inconvenient or financially disadvantageous for them to do these things, they’ll stop.”

It will be worth keeping an eye on the user numbers of Mendeley and its main academic community rivals (such as ResearchGate) and reference management rivals (such as Zotero) to see which way the scholarly users themselves feel the wind is blowing.

Disclosure: Reed Elsevier, the parent company of science publisher Elsevier, is an investor in GigaOmniMedia, the company that publishes GigaOM.

Before blogging became a big business, Stern created a tech blog called Center Networks, which became a go-to destination for many in the early Web 2.0 movement. Later, he sold that business and shifted focus to a new startup called CloudContacts — and more recently, he moved from his home town of New York to Austin, Texas to start a company called Let’s Talk Fitness.

My good friend @allenstern has passed. Founder of @centernetworks back in the day. The original blogger king, and a heart of gold. :(

—
Louis Gray (@louisgray) April 07, 2013

Having struggled with his weight for much of his life, Stern poured his energy into becoming more healthy, and had lost more than 125 pounds in the past year or so, according to his friend Louis Gray. His most recent business was aimed at helping others achieve similar results with the use of fruit and vegetable smoothies and other products, and he had built a large following for his newsletter.

Here’s what Om had to say about Allen:

“He was a stand-up guy and always spoke his mind. He never took to fools and as a result always found himself defending those who couldn’t defend themselves. I met him once, briefly at a Techcrunch 50 event, but we were internet friends and often exchanged Facebook and Twitter messages. He was always in good cheer, ready to share a moment of sadness and spread the happiness. As a fellow Yankees fan, he and I would often talk baseball during our exchanges.”

Tech and health blogging innovator Allen Stern has died. He was a kind man with a lot of integrity & hustle. facebook.com/allenstern/pos…

—
Marshall Kirkpatrick (@marshallk) April 07, 2013

Louis Gray, a startup advisor who now works at Google and wrote a remembrance of his friend on his blog, had this to say:

“I’ll miss Allen. I missed it when he stopped posting as regularly to CenterNetworks as he once did. But more, I’ll miss the fun email threads and fun phone cals that always left me laughing and feeling better. Death sucks and tonight, I’m sad. Bye, Allen.”

So terrible to hear that @AllenStern, a longtime NY tech fixture, passed away this week: bit.ly/14NHAq9 (via @DanDotLewis)

—
Caroline McCarthy (@caro) April 07, 2013

Others have also posted their memories of Stern, including Dan Lewis — who founded the site ArmchairGM and is now the director of new media for Sesame Workshop — and another early blogger named Duncan Riley, who said Allen would be sorely missed by friends who “came to appreciate a big guy with a huge heart who spoke as we all should: honestly and from the heart.” Author and entrepreneur Jesse Stay posted on his Google+ page:

“This is devastating news – even though we never met in person (but I sincerely hoped to, and have had numerous remote video conversations with him), I considered Allen Stern a dear friend of mine. He always knew how to lift people up and make them laugh. I sincerely enjoyed his health posts as of recent, and am very sad to hear of his death. This was way too soon, and many, I’m sure are mourning with me.”

Oh my. My friend @allenstern has passed. A big loss to our community. Very sad.

—
Micah Baldwin (@micah) April 07, 2013

As tech blogging became more and more of a cut-throat business, Allen remained a personal friend to most, and was always sincere in his openness to others. As Om put it: “The world just got a lot less nicer because of this one subtraction. Give heaven a taste of your heaven, Allen — you will be missed by me and thousands of others whose lives you touched.”

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Chris Tingom