Brian Alvey: If this is paradise, I wish I had a lawnmower

Our Weblogs GM Judith Meskill is leaving. Today we're having some Weblogs sales meetings in NYC and tonight we're taking her out for a farewell dinner.

It has been a roller coaster ride recently for me at AOL. Losing Judith is definitely a low. Meetings with the new AOL Platforms boss Ted Cahall and the new "owner" of Weblogs Marty Moe have been the highlights. Even Ron Grant seems like he knows what he's doing, so I guess you can't believe everything you read in Valleywag.

Between the three of them, my AOL optimism tank is no longer on empty.

That tank is a long way from being topped off, but at least I am seeing signs that AOL could be turning around.

If you work at AOL and believe that AOL doesn't need any turning around, I'd like to point you to a hot web 2.0 resume service some friends of mine built. You'll thank me a couple of months from now. An updated resume is your friend.

Here's part of a note I sent out to our blogger mailing list last Friday about Judith:

Imagining Weblogs without Jason is easy, but I can hardly imagine Weblogs without Judith.

Judith hasn't said what she plans to do next, but I wish her the all the best and I can't wait to see what she does.

Working with her has been a pleasure and we were lucky to have her. She was overqualified for every role Weblogs ever used her in, including the top spot.

That makes this an even bigger loss for AOL than it is for us.

Engadget's Ryan Block also talks about Judith leaving on his blog.

Update: C.K. Sample also eulogizes Judith and links to her Flickr page.

Comments (3)

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Joost Schuur 1067 days ago

Brian: From my perspective, I tend to judge how well Weblogs Inc. is doing by how regularly they're launching new blogs.

It's a little bit of a skewed metric (especially since you seem to be moving towards focusing on the big blogs and retired some smaller niche ones), but I haven't seen a lot of activity on that front lately. I'm not that into any of the stock blogs and ParentDish/StyleDash/ThatsFit are the only other ones I've seen in a long, long time.
Haggis 1063 days ago

Nice Talking Heads reference in the title. Friggin love that song. Good luck Judith!
Dave Thomas 1062 days ago

Wow, good luck to Judith. Brian, I wish you well with the future of the group too. Feel free to drop me a line sometime.

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