Day: February 14, 2007

Discounted by women

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date February 14, 2007

Mary Hodder writes on women speaking and has this to say:

If you aren’t in the loop you aren’t as important as others with similar skills sets and expertise in the eyes of those who fund, engage for consulting, hire for leadership positions, take in PhD candidates or whatever it is that requires discernment between people.

I’m not in the email group consisting of ‘women in technology’, but if I were, I would have emailed Mary with the following:

I look around at the people who are at these conferences, and after a time I wonder if that’s all they’re particularly good at: go to conferences, and speak.

It’s going to take more than a few women showing up at conferences to change this industry. The very fact that there aren’t as many women speakers is a symptom of the problem, not the problem, itself.

However, for those of us who are in the field, who don’t live in California or Boston or New York, by putting yet another burden on us as to how we are somehow failing in the industry because we’re not meeting the requirements of a privileged few, shows how absolutely out of touch the women in this mailing list are.

I was asked to give a session at the Madison, Wisconsin BarCamp, and as much as I appreciated the invite, it’s also in a couple of weeks, and about one week before the draft of my book is due. I need to finish the draft, I’m two months behind. It’s exceptionally important to me that this book do well, because I hope that there might be others that follow.

I have ridden hard on conferences for not having enough women speakers, but it has only been in the last year or so that I’ve come to realize that there’s a lot more wrong with the tech field than not having enough women at yet another mostly useless gab fest; where the ‘insiders’ that Mary seems to think so highly of, can preen themselves in front of the cameras and feel good that they’re above the rest of us.

But then, what the hell do I know? I live in St. Louis, I write books, I help friends who have problems with their weblogs, and I tinker with tech quietly on my own, putting it out for those who are interested. To Mary, or should I say, the important people, I’m not in the loop and therefore, I don’t matter.

(Via Anne, who lives in Colorado and sorta matters.)

Environment

How do you define irony?

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date February 14, 2007

When a Japanese whaler developed a fire and put out a distress call, it was a Greenpeace vessel who responded with offers of help.

“No thanks”, the Greenpeace ship was told.

More on the Japanese whaling industry incidents with anti-whaling forces.

Web

Nofollow

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date February 14, 2007

I guess now it’s OK to be against nofollow. Well, thank goodness our opinions have been validated.

Weblogging

High rent, low rent

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date February 14, 2007

Seth Finkelstein has a Guardian article up on paid blogging and high rent versus low rent bloggers:

There’s a class division, where membership is exclusive and expensive, while payment is common and cheap. But both are monetisation of attention. If we want there to be areas of human interaction which have some protection against commercial pressures, blogs stopped qualifying long ago.

This also follows on a discussion Dave Rogers has been having with Doc Searls this week. The ‘money quote’:

I am opposed to the unchecked expansion of commercial activity at the expense of social and political activities. Markets are not conversations, because conversations are a social activity, not a commercial one. But if you tell people markets are conversations, then it stands to reason that conversations are for sale.

We’re in no danger of losing our heads, what else would marketers have to market to? No, we’re in danger of losing the notion that life means something more than an economic calculation or a commercial transaction.

There’s a person I read off and on. This week the person has mentioned one company in several different posts. I almost wrote in comments, “Are you being paid by this company?”, but didn’t. Doesn’t matter, though, because I realized that I can never approach this person’s writing in the same way again. I doubt I’ll even continue reading their weblog.

RDF

Pipes missing the target

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date February 14, 2007

Uldis Bojars writes:

Pipeline architecture itself is not unique to Pipes. Applying it to the Semantic Web (or to RSS) is not unique either – many have been collecting / integrating information from a number of sources and asking questions like “show me the publications by people who know [user input here, e.g. “Stefan Decker”] and filter the answers according to some criteria” and passing the results to other applications in JSON or RDF/XML. That makes a simple pipeline, even if it is built manually and without a nice UI.

What is unique, though, is how easy it is to create new mashups with Yahoo! Pipes and the potential they provide to make Semantic Web used by a large group of people.

Leaving aside fixing Pipes to work with RDF rather than syndication feeds, another problem with Yahoo Pipes it is seems to have missed its target: the only folks playing around with the site are people capable of creating their own mashups. I’ve seen no interest in Pipes outside of the geeks.