The WIPT Wire

You have to read this amazing story of a 17 year old girl entrepreneur, Ashley Qualls: Girl Power & Whateverlife.com.

An excerpt:

Whateverlife just sort of happened, another accidental Web business. Originally, Ashley created the site in late 2004 when she was 14 as a way to show off her design work. "I was the dorky girl who was into HTML," she says. It attracted zero interest beyond her circle of friends until she figured out how to customize MySpace pages. So many classmates asked her to design theirs that she began posting layouts on her site daily, several at first, then dozens.

Posted by WIPT at 11:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

 Via The Caucus

...why more men seemed to be involved in politics online than women. I wondered if you 1) agreed with that and 2) why or why not.

Posted by WIPT at 06:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

With publications for women in tech and in business.  Examples: 

• There are no tech/geek mags for women.  But there are a zillion for men.  So if I want to read something nerdy, I have to suffer through pages and pages of ads for things like Axe Body Spray.
• WIRED magazine online has a cadre of blogs.  They have themes - one for MAC users, one on politics/security, etc...  And, although there is a geek dad - there is again, no blog for geek women.  However their pop culture blog is named "The Underwire" because only people with boobs care about pop culture. Obviously.
  
• The only business magazine aimed at women in Borders has a full on pink cover and articles inside about what make-up to wear to work.  If I wanted to know that I would have just read Cosmo. 

Posted by WIPT at 01:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Via Lifehacker. 

Posted by WIPT at 01:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Via xkcd.com

Posted by WIPT at 04:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Running an online program to support and expand the philanthropic efforts of celebs like Jolie and Pitt...

Posted by WIPT at 09:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Newspapers are abuzz this morning with talk of Verizon's selective text messaging policy.

A spokesman for Verizon said the decision turned on the subject matter of the messages and not on Naral’s position on abortion. “Our internal policy is in fact neutral on the position,” the spokesman, Jeffrey Nelson, said. “It is the topic itself” — abortion — “that has been on our list.”

Mr. Nelson suggested that Verizon may be rethinking its position. “As text messaging and multimedia services become more and more mainstream,” he said, “we are continuing to review our content standards.” The review will be made, he said, “with an eye toward making more information available across ideological and political views.”

Naral provided an example of a recent text message that it had sent to supporters: “End Bush’s global gag rule against birth control for world’s poorest women! Call Congress. (202) 224-3121. Thnx! Naral Text4Choice.”

This sums it up best:

Timothy Wu, a law professor at Columbia, said it was possible to find analogies to Verizon’s decision abroad. “Another entity that controls mass text messages is the Chinese government,” Professor Wu said.

UPDATE:

Saying it had the right to block "controversial or unsavory" text messages, Verizon Wireless last week rejected a request from Naral Pro-Choice America, the abortion rights group, to make Verizon's mobile network available for a text-message program.

But the company reversed course this morning, saying it had made a mistake.

Posted by bruinmccon at 08:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by WIPT at 09:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This week I've decided I want to be like Christine Comaford-Lynch when I grow up.  Her just published book, Rules for Renegades, is on it's way to me, via Amazon.  But in the meantime, I've been obsessivesly listening, reading and browsing Christine's website.  She links to a guest post she did on her tips for networking and it is definitely worth a read.

She says:

Networking is about creating an extended family. It's about developing connections, caring about people, increasing the size of your "tribe." Most of all, networking is not the awkward social ritual many of us think it is--networking is actually FUN!

Go read it, you'll be glad you did. 

Posted by WIPT at 11:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Via the Women in Technology series at the O'Reilly Network:

 A: You've studied the cultures of Friendster and MySpace. Do you feel that these sites can change the dynamics of how the sexes interact?

db: Again, not really, for the same reasons as I've stated earlier. The important thing to remember with social network sites is that they aren't about the virtual, they are about modeling offline connections and maintaining them. Gender dynamics are culturally embedded and that means that they seep into the online world.

That said, I think that they open up opportunities for conversation. I remember hearing of a discussion on Flickr between self-identified feminist Americans and women from the United Arab Emirates. The American women were irritated with the UAE women's desire to restrict images of women's tummies and breasts as "pornographic." The American women accused the UAE women of being victims of masculine oppression. The UAE women shot back with something along the lines of, "Why do you need to validate yourself by making yourself available for male objectification?" I found this discussion eye-opening. From the UAE women's perspective, modesty was feminine strength, a desire to be valued for something other than male gaze.

I built a private online community for V-Day organizers. We had so many amazing discussions about feminism, sexuality, identity, empowerment, etc. I think that community spaces that gather people around a shared interest in these issues are far more productive than social network sites, simply because social network sites are meant to support pre-existing networks while community sites are more about helping people gather around an interest.

The whole thing is worth a read - danah discusses the inherent sexism in video games, online communities and challeneges women face in the tech sector.

 (I have no idea why danah boyd is never capitalized properly, but I'm going with it...)

Posted by WIPT at 11:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Via Wired:  

Bring on the tech gear, but don't make it girly: That's what women want, according to a survey released today.

Just 9 percent of the fair sex want products that "look feminine," like a pink Playstation or Hello Kitty keyboards. The remaining 91 percent seek something sleek and sophisticated, more boardroom than teenage bedroom. The data comes from a study, done by the advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi, of 750 British women age 24 to 45.

The agency says its study indicates it's time for tech companies to go beyond the pink ghetto.

"There are clearly some smart, forward-thinking marketers in the industry, but for some reason, when it comes to targeting women, things haven't moved on," said Belinda Parmar, planning director at Saatchi. "Most women feel cheated when they walk into stores or see ads with baby-pink, diamante-encrusted products."

But that doesn't discourage "lady geeks," as the study dubbed them, from getting the gear. These "empowered" women, 37 percent of the total, owned an average of six devices, including a digital camera, desktop or laptop, multimedia mobile phone, MP3 player, digital TV and handheld game console. Overall, U.K. women own only slightly fewer tech items (11 percent) than men.

"What's fascinating to me about this research is the index of just how much technology women own," said Dr. Genevieve Bell, resident anthropologist at Intel. "Yet we still have these ideas about women and technology that are clearly out of step with the realities of the marketplace."

Posted by WIPT at 10:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by WIPT at 07:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)