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Stephanie Troeth is my pick for the woman in technology to honor on Ada Lovelace Day. I first became aware of her through her work with the Web Standards Project. More . . .
Stephanie Troeth is my pick for the woman in technology to honor on Ada Lovelace Day. I first became aware of her through her work with the Web Standards Project.
Ada Lovelace Day is a concept that began as a pledge to blog about a woman in techology whom you admire on March 24. The catch was that it would only happen if at least 1000 other people took the pledge to blog about a woman they admire on that day, too. The goal of 1000 pledges was reached and surpassed quickly. The last total I saw was 1,527.
Stephanie Troeth, or Steph, was born on the Sarawak side of Borneo, Malaysia. She grew up in Melbourne, Australia. She now lives in Montreal, Canada. Her background extends across several languages and continents. I asked her about her background.
I speak many languages because I grew up in a place that spoke a mix; immigrants from different parts of China brought their languages with them, intermingling with local languages and also English from the British colonial era. When I was born, the country was phasing out English as a medium of instruction to Bahasa Malaysia, the formal version of Malay.
The interesting thing is, until I moved to Australia, the uniqueness of this mix wasn’t apparent to me. And later on, living in Montreal, I learned even more that the languages are such malleable constructs that are inherently tied to cultural contexts, through simple experiences like: trying to order food at a Chinese restaurant. While I’m fluent in Mandarin, I often can’t order very well in Chinese restaurants because the food is so different to what I knew and grew up with in South-East Asia—my vocabulary is different, even if the language is technically the same.
Having spent my childhood, then my formative years, living in different places is something that I treasure; I think it has given me the ability to see things differently.
Very early in life–at age 7–Steph started performing music on public stages. She plays for her own enjoyment now, and occasionally posts an impromptu piece at her blog, unadorned. At university in Melbourne, she studied computer science. She commented on being a multidisciplinary woman in a world looking for specificity.
Today, we are often expected to specialise and excel in only one particular field of knowledge or expertise, even one particular area of a field. I have always grown up loving both the arts and the sciences, so it’s important to me to spend my time working on things that addresses the challenges of both as much as possible.
And so, it’s probably not much of a surprise because people expect everyone else to specialise, it’s nearly impossible to communicate all of one’s passions in a way that seems plausible, nor for most people to understand an eclectic mix of passions. For the most part, I don’t generally talk about all my interests to everyone; they get revealed over time to those I eventually, over time, foster a deep relationship with.
Steph spent a few years doing various programming and interface design jobs. She got involved in the MACCAWS project. In 2002, she joined the Web Standards Project (WaSP) where she has made important contributions ever since. She’s worked on WaSP Learn, WaSP Asks W3C, the Education Task Force, WaSP International Liaison Group, and the WaSP InterAct Curriculum Framework. I asked her about her seven years of volunteer work for the Web Standards Project.
It was amazing to be asked by Molly Holzschlag to devote energy to the Web Standards Project all those years ago, to be part of a grassroots organization that has done remarkable work to create bridges between the W3C recommendations, browser vendors, designers and developers through industry experts who cared.
I think the best explanation for why I do what I do is the one I’ve managed to give is to my father, who was curious as to why I’d do all these things without getting paid a single cent. The work of the Web Standards Project, to me, is really part of a much greater whole: to ensure that the underlying technologies that make the web remain open and available to all, that innovation for the WWW remains an equal playing field for all those who build for it and use it. The WaSP InterAct Curriculum Framework has a view towards providing resources to address the disconnect between the web industry and the education sector, to ensure our next generation of web professionals are well-trained.
She’s worked in Montreal since 2002. I asked her about the move to Canada.
I have always wanted to see more of the world. Perhaps it comes from a childhood of travelling; having moved once, it’s easier to think about moving again and again. Montreal is an easy city to live in, and it has a special vibe about it that likely stems from being a place where everyone passes through, so it’s almost a perpetual cauldron of many dreams in the process of being formed.
Her most recent move is to step out of the corporate environment to become an entrepreneur. She founded a company with Hugh McGuire called The Book Oven, which is a new venture into a different kind of publishing. Steph explained what The Book Oven is.
The Book Oven is a collaborative platform to help writers and publishers transform texts from manuscript into finished products, into the hands of readers. We are still in early development phase, but are looking to expand our alpha group of users very soon.
What’s exciting about working in this space is that we have the benefit of looking back at industries affected by new media trends: broadcast, music. At the same time, we’re witnessing the evolution of a medium that hasn’t changed much in hundreds of years.
In her bio, Steph said, “Her true passions are for music and the arts, poetry, literature, good food, good wine and good scotch and all such other things that make life worthwhile.” You can see a tiny hint of Steph expressing some of these interests on her unadorned blog where she writes and sometimes records music. On her .com site, Stephanie Troeth she claims to be “an incorrigible amateur,” however if you look at her photos, her poetry or listen to her music, you’ll probably disagree with that assessment.
I am happiest when making things: I make jewellery, I sew, I dabble in natural perfumery, and any new technique I can get my hands on. I love the physical engineering of it. I recently started a new blog related to thought around our relationship to things and travel, hippiesque.
I also love photography, but I shoot most when I am abroad. My writing, music and photography live loosely on Flickr and unadorned. Writing and music are part of my voice, so I’m not even sure I can call those “hobbies”. Likewise, I live to read.
Steph has two blogs, hippiesque, and unadorned. She also blogs occasionally at blog.bookoven.com between managing the product development and the team. Her personal site is Stephanie Troeth.
Steph Troeth is an exemplary example of the tradition of women in the sciences that we honor on Ada Lovelace Day. You can learn more about Ada Lovelace and the other honorees at
– Finding Ada
– The list of blog posts on Ada Lovelace Day
– Ada Lovelace Day at PledgeBank
– Ada Lovelace Day Home for Lost Posts
– Flickr Group
– The Science Museum
– @FindingAda on Twitter
– WITsend
Technorati Tags: AdaLovelaceDay09
Cross Posted at BlogHer
Julia Angwin, Danah Boyd, Betty Sue Flowers, Heather Gold.
The explosion of social media is entirely a feminist thing. Gold talked about how long the 3rd wave of feminism has taken and how it led to social media.
Flowers: the personal is the political, everything is connected, gossip makes the world go round.
Angwin: My Space was created by men, but is actually about girls. She went to My Space and all the guys were reading Seventeen and Cosmo to try to figure out what to do with My Space. The audience was girls and men had to learn to speak the language. What used to be called women’s work is now just the way the world is.
Boyd. Social networks are strong tie networks, which is a more feminine thing. and weak-tie networds, which is a more male thing. Interactions take place in more formal structures. Social networks shift all the time.
I’m having trouble getting the point of the discussion. Heather Gold keeps asking questions, but leaves no time for answers. Things are jumping around a lot. She’s encouraging the audience to share.
Angwin. Need room for a personal space online. Not public. For extended conversation.
Will government catch up with social networks? When everyone has grown up on it? Flowers is at LBJ Library and says they have trouble just getting archives of Presidental Library online, much less social networks.
A lot of people in audience said they would like to spend time online in a protected space. Boyd. People with less influence have more trouble negotiating context in social settings. There’s a convergence between contexts now.
Unitary identity online. Do you have more than one online identity.
Lots of women at the audience microphone. Too many topics to follow. Maybe I’m just too tired to figure out what we are supposed to be talking about here.
Jill Whalen is a leading expert in the field of search engine optimization (SEO) and the head of High Rankings. Meet Jill Whalen.
Q: Tell us a little about your background and training before you became the woman behind High Rankings.
A: Since I started online in the early 90’s I didn’t have much background or training to prepare me for SEO. There weren’t articles or books on the subject, heck, it wasn’t even called SEO back then! I started with a BA from UMASS Amherst and a love of computers and the Internet.
Q: What sparked your interest in search engine optimization (SEO) and how long have you been in the SEO business?
A: I was a mom at home playing around on the Internet whenever I had a chance. There weren’t many parenting websites back in the early 90’s and I had created one to complement my parenting chat channel on IRC. I wanted parents to easily be able to find the website online so I studied what made certain sites appear in the search engines and others not, then made changes to my site accordingly. From the very beginning it was clear to me that the information you put on your pages was one of the most important factors, just like it is today. I was also dabbling in website design for small businesses and would include optimization in my packages. Since SEO was such a new subject, I quickly became the go-to person on web email discussion lists when the topic would come up. Eventually, business started booming as more companies became interested in SEO; so much so that by 1997 I made it my core service offering.
Q: You have so many irons in the fire: you do consulting, website audits, teach classes, publish a newsletter, respond to questions in the forums. And you have to keep up with the antics of the search engines and be ready to help people react appropriately when something like Google changing its algorithm happens suddenly. Describe what your typical work day is like.
A: You do make it sound tiring! Thankfully these days I have some help. Over the past few years High Rankings has grown from being just me working at home to having a office and a few additional team members. A typical day for me consists of getting to the office, then checking the High Rankings forum posts that came in overnight and answering any that weren’t already answered by one of our top-notch moderators. I’ll also review and answer any emails that may have come in, and perhaps make one morning tweet on Twitter to start the day. By 9:00 or so I try to settle in for some “real work” which could be anything from reviewing a site audit report that was prepared for a client, writing one of my SEO columns or creating a presentation for one of our SEO classes or a conference. Throughout the day I’ll also be answering questions and working with the others on my team on various client action items.
The best part is that most every day is different. Newsletter days get mostly taken up with that, and training class days are solely focused on that. I try to organize my week so that I am focusing on only one major project per day, be it the newsletter, writing an article, or some sort of client project. That way when I need a break from it, I’ll check out Twitter or the forum, or answer newsletter email questions. Thankfully, none of it feels like actual work as SEO is still fun and interesting to me.
Q: High Rankings was an early success story in terms of online business models. You sell books and videos in addition to the training and consulting. You provide free information with your newsletter. Talk about how you developed the various pieces that went into making the business a success.
A: Yes, I was one of the first in the SEO biz to tell everyone else exactly how it was done — all for free! I’m pretty sure I annoyed many of my competitors back in the day when I did this. Partially because I was constantly spilling the beans on how to do SEO, but also because I would bust the myths and scare tactics that other companies would use on their clients. In my early days, I was even giving out free site audit reports. Providing the free info became yet another avenue for establishing myself as an expert. While learning SEO isn’t rocket science, there can be a steep learning curve. So even with all the free info provided by High Rankings, the average site owner or business doesn’t have the time or inclination to become an SEO expert. Like most professional services, it’s often cheaper in the long run to hire an expert than to spend the long hours figuring it all out for yourself.
I’ve always felt passionate about ensuring that businesses understand that SEO can and should be done without having to do anything sleazy or tricky or spammy to the search engines. That’s been the biggest reason why SEO education had become such a large part of what we offer. Along with our public classes, we spend a good chunk of time educating clients so that they can eventually take their SEO in house and maintain the SEO work themselves. Clients appreciate not feeling locked into anything, and secure that their targeted search engine traffic won’t suddenly disappear when they stop paying us for services.
Q: How does the use of social media tie in with search engine optimization? Or does it?
A: It ties in nicely these days as a means of gaining links. The days of putting up a links page on your site and trading links with others are gone. While you can still do that, there’s so much competition that you have to really set yourself apart from the others. The best way to do that is to have something truly unique, creative and useful and then get the word out about it. Social media is often the best way of getting the word out.
Q: You speak at conferences. What sort of conferences do you like to attend? At BlogHer a constant topic is the visibility of women in tech and in the conference world. Are you the lone female SEO expert, or are there quite a few women in evidence at conferences and in the SEO world?
A: I typically speak at most of the search marketing related conferences. When I first started speaking (in 2000) there was definitely less women in the industry than there are today. This has changed a lot over the past few years, especially as people began to recognize that SEO is actually marketing as much (or more) than it is tech. Still, some of the conferences that focus more on the tech side do have more men than women in attendance even today. I was just at PubCon in Vegas and it seemed to have a lot more men than women as compared to say Search Engine Strategies or SMX.
Q: You spoke at BlogHer Business 08 in New York and posted the video of your session on your site. What are the benefits of sharing sessions like this free to anyone who wants to watch?
A: Since BlogHer had already made the session publicly available, I embedded it on our site in our “past speaking events” section. Doing that is another means of adding credibility and providing more education to our site visitors. It’s also helpful to point others to who might be looking for a speaker or moderator for their conference or seminar.
Q: I looked at one of your training sessions. You limited the enrollment to 6! That’s unusual. Trainers usually try to get as many bodies as possible into sessions. I’m sure you have a good reason for doing it that way, and I’d love to know what it is.
A: Years ago we were offering larger search marketing seminars in various parts of the country two times a year. However, as the search marketing conference/training market expanded, it became difficult to fill the seminars with enough people to make it profitable so we stopped offering them. That was a tough decision for me because I felt that what we were offering was so valuable to those who attended. Plus, there was nothing else out there at the time that was comparable enough to recommend when people would ask about SEO training. So that’s how the small classes came about. We are able to do them in our own office, thus eliminating travel, hotel and room rental expenses. Filling up 6 seats is fairly easy with just a bit of promotion through our email lists, and we can typically fill up 1 class a month. The attendees get personal attention as we review their websites in advance, but they don’t have to pay high consulting fees since they’re within a classroom setting. They get to learn from each others’ websites which we’ve found is also valuable. It’s been a win-win situation all around.
That said, we had so many requests from our attendees to offer some more in-depth and advanced classes that we’ve just added four web marketing workshops to the training that we offer. These are 1/2 day sessions offered over the course of 2 days (Apr. 2-3, 2009) covering keyword research, copywriting, social media marketing and web analytics. We are allowing more than 6 people to sign-up for these, but will still keep them fairly small. Budding search marketers can sign up for just one-workshop, an entire day or the full 2-days.
Q: What’s your advice for someone who wants to do a redesign of their website?
A: When you’re redesigning an existing website, it’s the best time to review your existing SEO strategies and/or to begin a new SEO campaign. The worst thing you can do is develop your new site first and THEN think about SEO (unfortunately, we see this happen all the time). If you’ve already done some SEO and are getting good search engine traffic, you’ll also need to make sure that you don’t mess that up during your redesign process. That’s another thing we see happen all too often. I can’t stress enough how important it is to consult with your SEO agency during your redesign if you don’t want to be in for nasty surprises somewhere down the road!
Q: If you could only give a blogger one tip for SEO, what would it be?
A: This isn’t necessarily directly related to SEO, but my tip for bloggers would be to only post when you truly have something interesting to say. While not every post has to be exceptional, every post should have a reason for existing. The worst thing a blogger can do is just post for posting’s sake. Sometimes bloggers and others are so frenzied about creating as much content as possible that they post a lot of useless or repetitive junk that nobody really wants to read. When given the choice, choose quality over quantity. It will be better for your users and whatever is better for users is also better for search engines!
My thanks to Jill for agreeing to the interview so we could get to know her better. Equally important, thanks to Jill for all the great advice about SEO that she’s provided to us over the years.
Cross-posted at BlogHer.
Related posts: A Garden Full of Women in Tech, Women in Tech: Maria “ubergeeke” Webster, Women in Tech: Addison Berry, Women in Tech: Shelley Powers, New Mexico’s Dynamic Duo
The list-making has begun. No, not Christmas wish lists—those end of year lists of the top, best, or most important. In recent days there have been three new lists of notable women in tech.
Read the full post at BlogHer.
Related Posts: Maria Webster, Addison Berry, Shelley Powers, Elaine Montoya and Becky Padilla, My Web Design Author’s Dream Team.
Meet Addison Berry, a woman who traveled a roundabout path into tech and is now one of the most visible leaders in the open source content management world of Drupal. My thanks for Addi for agreeing to answer some questions and let us get to know her.
Q: Let’s start off with Drupal. You work for Lullabot, a company that does Drupal books, podcasts and videos. And, you’re head of the Drupal.org documentation team. How did you become so interested and involved in Drupal?
A: Well I was a WordPress user for a while and had started doing little side jobs building sites with it. I managed to do quite a bit with it. Then at my old job, in the midst of redoing the website there, I told them that it didn’t make sense for me to hand-code the whole thing and be the only one who knew what was going on. I convinced them that we needed to use a CMS instead. The only problem was that I didn’t know of one to use. I quickly realized that WordPress would not stretch that far for us. So I sat down and started reviewing open source CMS. I needed to decide quickly and honestly Drupal just made more sense to me, more quickly than the handful of others I was looking at, so I put my stake in the ground and started building.
As chance would have it, a few months after I decided on Drupal, Lullabot offered their first Drupal workshop and it was located in Washington, DC – literally three blocks from my office. It was an easy sell to the boss. After the workshop, I really grasped the full potential of Drupal and got really excited about what I’d be able to do with. That got me excited about the software and they mentioned some community stuff, but ya know, I needed to get my work done. Several months after that a new thing called the Drupal Dojo started up and I plunged in full-speed ahead. It was a great learning opportunity, but more importantly I really got to know people and finally engaged with the community. The Drupal community is just amazing and once I was there, I jumped in everywhere I could. Lots of people helped me and so I did what I could to help others. That ended up coming back to me in a job offer from Lullabot that allows me to work with Drupal full-time.
Read the full interview at BlogHer.
This is the first of several interviews with women in technology. Today you’ll learn about Shelley Powers. Shelley is perhaps best known as a writer. Her most recent books are Learning JavaScript and Painting the Web. She’s also a programmer and web developer, and she applies a powerful and logical mind to everything she does.
Q: I looked you up on Amazon and found a list of books you’ve written that includes Learning JavaScript, Painting the Web, Adding Ajax, Learning JavaScript: Add Sparkle and Life to Your Web Pages, Unix Power Tools, Practical RDF, Powerbuilder 5 How-To, Developing Asp Components, Dynamic HTML, Dynamic Web Publishing Unleashed, Javascript How-To: The Definitive Javascript Problem-Solver, and Using Perl For Web Programming.
Wow!
How did you get started on a career as a writer? What was your education and background?
A: I’m a late bloomer educationally. I quit high school when I was 15 and joined a religious cult, Children of God. When I came to my senses and left the group, I went from the frying pan to the fire by marrying, at 16, a man who had learning disabilities and resented the fact that I liked to read. We lived in a house in the country and if it weren’t for the fact that the local library would send books out, and allow you to return them in pre-paid envelopes, I would have had very little to read for two years.
. . . Read the full post at BlogHer.