Category: women

Be who you are. Be identifiable. Be somebody.

Look at these results from a Google blog search for Foxit Reader.

admin

no reply

Who the hell are all these people named admin or with email addresses like noreply@blogger.com? Everytime I do a blog search (which I do about twice a week) I find these unidentifiable bylines on blogs. Why can’t you just set up an account name on your blog so people can tell who you are? Are you trying to keep it a secret? Don’t you want anyone to know who writes your blog? Sheesh, people.

I think maybe all these admin and noreply people are women. Because you sure can find a lot of blogs in a blog search that are written by Matt or by Bob or by Jay or by Gavin. Yet, you hardly ever see a woman’s name in a byline. Is Google biased against women bloggers? Are women bloggers hoping to be anonymous? I happen to know that millions of women are writing blogs. Surely some of them are writing about the things I’m searching out.

So, if it’s women who are posting as admin or noreply, cut it out. Just stop it. Go into your blog control panels and give yourself a name that identifies who you are!

It matters a lot to me if all these unidentifiable bloggers turn out to be actual women. That’s because I spend a lot of time, energy and caffeine writing for a website which has the expressed commitment and purpose of helping people find women bloggers. We want to find you and promote you. If I were to base my thinking on the results of a Google blog search, I would think there were only 3 women bloggers in the entire world.

Get over it. Be who you are. Be identifiable. Be somebody.

Useful Links

Dealing with Speculative Work at WebWorkerDaily has some good advice for the designer who’s asked to submit work on spec. This might make a good discussion springboard with students who will be eager to land clients as they head out on their own. And it might keep one of them from getting burned. I wrote something several years ago, taking the perspective of the person looking to hire a designer. You might find that useful to discuss with students, also. What to Know Before You Hire a Web Designer is the article, on my personal site.

Want to Play? is my latest BlogHer post. It’s about girl gamers and the community waiting for girls who play video games.

Years ago, when our family “game machine” was a clunky little gadget from Radio Shack and the best games were of the Pac Man generation, I watched my son become addicted to games. He still is, and he’s passed the torch to the next generation, his 12 year-old daughter.

One of the points I touch on in the BlogHer article is the skills that learners develop playing video games.

Related post: 21st Century Learner

Useful Links

Letter from Taos on my writing blog First 50 Words will explain what I’ve been doing instead of posting here lately. I’ve also been occupied writing things like Eco-Friendly Recycling of Electronics at BlogHer. If you are about to get a new digital TV or plan to dispose of anything from a cell phone to a fax machine, that article will help you find a recycler who will do the right thing with all the lead, mercury and other toxins in your electronics.

Another way to Classify Twitter Users from Sarah in Tampa describes some new ways to classify spammers on Twitter. I’m hardly a power user of Twitter, but I’ve already attracted my share of spammers.

Morgan Stanley’s March Internet Trends Report: Social Applications Dominating at TechCrunch shows the entire presentation. It’s worth looking at every slide from Morgan Stanley, don’t just read the selective summary in the post.

SAP Global Survey: Australia’s Laurel Papworth: Building a Social Network for Arab Women is an interview with Laurel Papworth about her recent experiences teaching blogging at the Arab Women’s Network. My background info on this here .

Useful links

BlogHer/Compass Partners Social Media Benchmark Study be sure to download and look at the PDF with all the stats. Among those stats: 36.2 million women actively participate in the blogsophere every week.

The John Slatin Fund Accessibility Project at Knowbility honors John Slatin’s contributions to accessibility while giving businesses an inexpensive opportunity to get an accessibility review. You can donate to the fund, volunteer your expertise as an accessibility consultant, or help spread the word about this project to business site owners.

Lynda.com online tech courses now with closed captioning caught my eye today at Popgagdet. Kudos to lynda.com for doing this. Imagine the work it took to bring all their hundreds of videos up to this state. A very nice thing to be able to mention right after talking about John Slatin.

Useful links

Kottke points out the 1:37 ratio of female:male speakers at Google’s upcoming Web Forward conference, prompting Susan Mernit to to comment, “. . . we were taught that it was good business practice to have your development teams reflect the audiences you were creating for. Despite the fact Google has Ellen Spertus, does this mean that they are only building apps for men?”

Good Tube is like YouTube, but features only people doing good. You can contribute your videos to Good Tube.

Wall Murals from HubbleSite.org will put the Universe on your wall. In case you need a little help keeping a sense of perspective, or in case you love natural design.

Deception about Defamation at 43(B)log points out, “JuicyCampus may be violating the state’s Consumer Fraud Act by suggesting that it doesn’t allow offensive material but providing no enforcement of that rule — and no way for users to report or dispute the material. . .”