Some Changes Are Afoot

Hi folks -- I have some personnel changes to report (and no, they're not going to make me President of the AOL Audience group to replace Ted Leonsis, who announced that he'll be stepping out of his day-to-day management gig at AOL at the end of the year -- get the word from the man himself in Ted's blog entry, which includes the e-mails that went out to employees.)

In case you missed his blog entry, yesterday was Journals Technical Project Manager Yoel's last day at AOL -- he's heading off for another job opportunity, which means he'll be switching from the AOL Daily Grind to a fresh, new non-AOL daily grind. Best of luck to Yoel.

Also, in case you were wondering why we haven't heard from Journals Product Manager Susan in a while, she's transitioned over to work on the Ratings & Reviews team (Internet Explorer users can see the "thumbs-up" ratings widget that team did in the Message Boards). We'll expect all sorts of neat things from Susan and the rest of those folks.

Stepping into the role of Journals Product Manager is Stephanie, who's been really active to date on a lot of Community stuff (see her AIM Page profile). Stephanie's blogging over at BamBam!; stop by and say hi when you get a chance (though she can't answer until Tuesday -- she's traveling at the moment).

Whew, that's a bunch of changes right there. But wait, there's more!

At big companies, it's not uncommon to have a lot of horizontal movement among employees (no, not like that), as new opportunities become available (in addition to other things like reorgs and such).

All that's just a long way to say that, after about a year and a half doing this, I'm going to be stepping down as Journals Editor -- I'll be moving over to do stuff for the AIM Pages product, doing a lot of what I did (or tried to do) for Journals -- talking about product features, outages and fixes; creating tutorials; passing feedback to and from the teams that actually do the work; highlighting users; talking about stuff going on in the blogosphere; using any excuse to blog a picture of myself -- all that good stuff.

Of course, I'll be doing a blog -- I'll be working with the existing AIM Pages Team blog at first, though we'll probably switch platforms at some point.

But don't fret -- I'll be leaving you in good hands -- Journals Editor Jeff, who currently blogs over at Pixel Pusher, will be taking over AOL Blogs programming. In fact, he'll be taking over this here Magic Smoke blog and everything associated with the Journals Editor screen name (like the Technorati profile, etc.)

I'll let Jeff talk more about what he plans to do with Journals programming, since it will be his show to run -- he'll have the flexiblity to adjust things as he figures out the best ways to talk about Journals, highlight Journalers' content, and talk about stuff going on in the blogosphere, etc. (expect good big things from him, now that I won't be holding him back).

If you have any suggestions as to what you would like to see in this blog and on the Journals main page, please feel free to leave a comment or e-mail.

Anyway, I'll officially be turning the keys to this here blog over to Jeff next week, so I wouldn't count this as my farewell entry just yet. (Plus, I can see myself doing the occassional guest entry, because I still have a lot of items I never got around to blogging about.) But I just wanted to give you a heads-up, and to thank everyone for making this such an interesting experience.

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: aol journals, journals editor