What She Said!
"The next time some guy asks you where all the female bloggers are, tell them What She Said!" A compendium of women-run blogs. Not tech-focused per se, but worth checking out.
"The next time some guy asks you where all the female bloggers are, tell them What She Said!" A compendium of women-run blogs. Not tech-focused per se, but worth checking out.
The blog of Carrie Bickner, who works for the New York Public Library system's Digital Library. She is also the author of Web Design on a Shoestring, which apparently was inspired by her experience of trying to design a website for NYPL as the economy fell to its knees. She's funny, too, describing a past project doing cataloging which taught her two lessons: "1. catalogers rule and 2. I am not a cataloger."
Via the blog mention in the previous entry I learned about Misbehaving.net, a collaborative blog which is "a celebration of women's contributions to computing; a place to spotlight women's contributions as well point out new opportunities and challenges for women in the computing field." It looks like it's going to be fun to read, too, and has a wonderfully long blogroll...
This site is the weblog of a researcher at the Department of Humanistic Informatics in Norway. Recent entries muse on such things as a new Swedish MP3 player designed for women, complete with mirror, which she describes as "example of how technology often is marketed to women as 'other things'... than 'technology.'"
How did I miss this one? Netwomen is the site and blog of Tracy Kennedy, a PhD student and instructor in Toronto who focuses on internet use in the home, with a focus on how gender affects it. She started her site "in hopes of drawing a network of women together in the cyber-world - NETWOMEN. We are women who integrate the physical and the virtual, and strive to make technology useful and beneficial for all women. It is neccessary [sic] to recognize to social processes of gender, race, class, sexuality, age and ablism that inform technology." The blog is excellent — in addition to the usual news links, she interviews various techy women by email and posts the interviews. Check it out.
--> www.netwoman.ca
The author of this site is a programmer and network administrator living in Baghdad. In this entry, she discusses what her working life was like before the war and what it's like to try to be a working woman in Iraq now — fairly close to impossible at the moment.
I'm one of the lucky ones… I'm not important. I'm not vital. Over a month ago, a prominent electrical engineer (one of the smartest females in the country) named Henna Aziz was assassinated in front of her family — two daughters and her husband. She was threatened by some fundamentalists from Badir’s Army and told to stay at home because she was a woman, she shouldn't be in charge. She refused — the country needed her expertise to get things functioning — she was brilliant. She would not and could not stay at home. They came to her house one evening: men with machine-guns, broke in and opened fire. She lost her life — she wasn't the first, she won't be the last.
--> riverbendblog.blogspot.com/ 2003_08_01_riverbendblog_archive.html# 106175377049311765
"Well, there's no time to start a blog like when you run into Ev Williams at a conference (thanks, Tim O'Reilly) and he offers to help personally to set you up with your very own blog... a lot of what I do is stuff I simply can't write about: internal meetings with portfolio companies, corporate regime change, private briefings and such. This blog will be an experiment covering the things I *can* talk about. But now I need to give this machine back so they can close the exhibit...." With that, Esther Dyson kicks off her new home on BlogSpot. Should be interesting reading as time goes on...
"A one-person website devoted to exploring and furthering the emerging art of user experience design and information architecture on the web," this site is the creation of one Christina Wodtke, author of Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web (New Riders, 2002). She write with wit and intellegence about all things informationally architectural.
--> eleganthack.com
Based on the idea that librarians need to "shift" in order to meet the changed needs of people and to deliver information to them, this site is a blog with a variety of technology stories.
--> www.theshiftedlibrarian.com
"Plain-English computer tutorials" from a woman in Australia. Not specifically for women, by any means, this site offers tutorials, hints, and advice for computer users on various subjects, with a focus on Windows XP. A useful reference. I am bookmarking her article Sifting Misinformation and sharing it with everyone who has ever forwarded me that stupid Neiman-Marcus cookie recipe story or an emailed petition...
"Puttin' the 'rarin' back in librarian since 1993", this blog is run by one Jessamyn West and focuses on all things libraryish... whether it's filter failure or the Special Library Association considering changing its name to SLA (do they really want to get confused with the Symbionese Liberation Army? Evidently!)
I was lead to this site by an article, "Telling All Online: It's a Man's World (Isn't It?)" in the November 28 issue of the New York Times (not linking to it directly because it will go away in a few days, probably, but it's in the Technology/Circuits section.) Anyway, the article's claim is that men are more prominent on the blogging scene. This site refutes that idea, being a portal to the blogs of dozens of women. Frankly, I had no idea men dominated blogs; I've seen plenty of both; anybody can set up a blog pretty easily, and heck, this is one too, and gee, I'm female... don't know what's going on at the Times, but it's not like it's a slow news week or nothing. I think I ate too much turkey. Happy Thanksgiving!
I've mentioned this site before for its news coverage, but it is important in its own right. For one thing, the webmaster updated it today — a Sunday! That's dedication. Seriously, this is the most comprehensive resource of its type that I've found so far. "The Center has a four-fold mission: to encourage more women and girls to study computer science and/or information systems and to pursue careers in IT; to enable all women and girls to use IT comfortably and knowledgeably; to assure that the richness and breadth of women's lives and concerns are fully represented and readily available on the Internet; to foster research concerning the relationship between gender and IT."
A website and e-newsletter about research databases and search engines, run by professional researcher Tara Calishain. Geneology databases, photo collections, changes to the inner workings of Yahoo or Google... all is revealed here.