http://napsterization.org/stories/ en-us mary@hodder.org 2009-06-27T08:00:58-08:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://napsterization.org/stories/archives/000731.html Doc Searls in a post on celebrity, black holes and productivity comments on celebrity as a form of coasting. Below is my reaction. I think there is more to it. Let me know what you think. I've been talking about celebrity a lot since Thurs afternoon re: MJ, FF, EM, etc. Doc and I discussed this a month ago in depth too. I've been trying to figured out for the past year what the hyperdrive of microcelebrity is on Twitter that so many run after. And then the real celebrities hit twitter en masse and the hyperdrive of real celebrity is there as well. That drive diminishes at times one's ability to have a real conversation because some of those diving into conversations have agendas like trying to get the attention of the perceived AList (whatever that is.. oh yes.. the high follower counts, goosed by the twitter suggested follower list, provide us with a definitive answer... thank the gods). But the triple-hit celebrity death match on Thursday drove me to my thought which is that most people need to follow, most people need something to worship, and most people have given up serious religion (of the type where you spend like 20 hours a week in church and the pope or the ayatollah or the supreme leader or whoever is your celebrity representative communicates with god for you and leads you and makes the decisions and you worship him to get to god because you can't talk to him yourself). Michael Jackson and other celebs are the replacement for that sort of seriously time consuming difficult religion, because media and post-modernism make it easy (where premodern means god is above man, modern has everything equal: god, man, nature, and post-modern means nothing is more important than you). If nothing is more important than the individual, but he/she needs to follow something bigger than the self out of insecurity or whatever and there is very little ritual left post-old-style-religion to set people on their own course of confidence, productivity and humility in the world, and you have the media machine the past 100 years that now includes internet and self-publicity on things like twitter, well.. you have the perfect primordial soup to grow the MJ, etc worship replacing organized religion we see now. And of course, the celebrity version is so much easier and more fun, kind of like fast food. Doc is right, celebrity worship is a tremendous form of distraction, but I would argue most don't have the confidence, discipline, or for that matter the interest in spending their time on more constructive things. While most are capable of much more, there is safety in worship. That's why the church/temple/mosque of old was so effective. It filled the rest of your time after work and set the order that god was first, then the supreme leader as the physical manifestation, then puny you, so you would worship up the hierarchy. Oh, and you were given a structure to think about life and death. Which is frightening to many. And there was a structure for work and discipline, however messed up these organized religions have been over the centuries. In Post-Modernity, celebs fill the worship channel, effortlessly, where the celeb hierarchy is the order and the media connects you. Microcelebs are the long tail of this channel. Nothing going on with the top? Well.. there is always Guy Kawasaki or iJustine. And if you as the worshiper can get nearer to the celeb so much the better. People used to say: god is my savior. Now they say, "I remember exactly where I was when I heard MJ died." It's a way of placing yourself close to the worshiped thing. Not to mention that you don't have to think about death if you go with the celebrity distraction mechanism, except when Farrah and Michael and Ed McMahon leave us, at which point people seem to just increase the worship but don't really have to face facts about their own lives. It's utterly silly, and of course the internet and socialmedia send this tendency and need an order of magnitude higher than before. But I think it's a rat-brain need for the masses to worship something, and celebrity is the post-modern fast-food solution. Opiates anyone? 731@http://napsterization.org/stories/ Culture 2009-06-27T08:00:58-08:00 http://napsterization.org/stories/archives/000721.html A month or so ago, someone (I can't remember who) said to me that mobile engineering was hard for web engineers to do because it was so different. I've worked over the nine months on product development for several mobile applications at Apisphere, and more specifically the last couple of months seen coding for handsets up close. I can see why those who are great at coding the front end of websites that will go out to people with beefy computers might have trouble coding for tiny devices with limited memory, harddrives and processors. Even smart phones are no competition for the latest desk or laptop. Working with engineers on Android, iPhone and Blackberry apps, where GPS data is involved, and each of these phones' quirks are being exposed, I've come to realize there is much more to this than just the difference between webcoding and mobile engineering. I started in tech in the 90's working on boxed software. Huge projects with 60 engineers making things for big machines of the time. Those kinds of projects required enormous specs, Market Research Docs (MRDs) and Product Research Docs (PRDs), etc. When I later switched and started writing algorithms for web apps, building little classification systems, and working closely with engineers on web apps creating the information architectures and meaning on sites, through interfaces and algorithms, I didn't think all that much about the differences between installed boxed software and web development, other than the specs I was writing were far smaller and we iterated a whole lot more on the web development in tighter cycles, and often the usability was built in a bit more from the beginning instead of bolted on at the end. But now seeing development for mobile and creating mobile apps, I realize engineers who learned to code way back when have a huge advantage over web and large app engineers who've never been forced to economize. Those early coders know what it means to optimize for tiny amounts of ram and hard drive space, to create truly elegant code that is compact, efficient, and doesn't take over a device or machine. In contrast, I find my Firefox usage often pushes my laptop out of control as javascripts go crazy on tabs in the background. Those pages were written by programmers unschooled in the art of system management, who may believe the system resources are unlimited or worse, dedicated *only* to the running of the browser+their webapp. They don't even seem to know they ought to be considering users and their resources based upon the pinwheel of death I regularly experience. I'm often climbing through FF tabs on pages open for work and play as I go through my day, trying desperately to locate that one tab that's going crazy, pushing FF to 125% according to Top. When I get it shut down, after massive frustration and system hangs, waiting to see if the next tab is it, I realize another tab is out of control. And so on until I get my machine back. Building mobile apps, there is no way we can put that sort of strain on a smart phone, much less a little tiny phone. At this point after watching 9 months of mobile development, I'm realizing the preferred mobile developer is someone who has hardcore coding experience with languages like Java and C++/C#, who had to optimize for old computers with minimalist ram, hardrives and CPUs. People who code as if their program will be the only one open or up in a browser need not apply. In fact, I would say that older coders with this sort of discipline will often have a distinct advantage over the young new web-only coders, and will be the ones who help us move mobile forward as a viable industry. Of course, those who embody all of these skills for all environments will have the best chances to work in mobile going forward, as I see mobile delivery of webpages as also key to this industry. 721@http://napsterization.org/stories/ Computing | Search | Software 2009-04-16T08:05:58-08:00 http://napsterization.org/stories/archives/000727.html Twitter (and the ISchool -- or one of my poor brethern -- I have a masters from UCBerkeley's iSchool) seem to be in the tweetsphere over one ill-found tweet tossed off by a student and found by her summer internship employer likely via search.twitter.com. For background, you can see this: FattyCisco.com. The poor girl is likely humiliated and horrified over what she thought was an innocent and also, likely, a fleeting thought that didn't really reflect how she felt overall. We've all had those momentary thoughts where when we are ambivalent, we toss something out of our mouths and once it's out there, we think, wow, that doesn't even ring true or, it did for a nanosecond, and now it's changed, or gee, that's about 5% of the way I actually feel about this. But out of mouth, truly ephemeral (unless recorded in some form) is different than written down and searchable in the grand database of the Googlezon and search at twitter. Or maybe it's just a joke. This is one of the problems with online communities and specifically twitter: You don't know who's listening, and because of search tools, you are findable beyond your follower list or your "community" of known tweeters (ppl you @ with or read) unless your account is private. I don't think we have at all sussed out what it means to tweet in the long term, or what the power of the tweet is, or where the tweet goes and what sort of life it has beyond the first few minutes or hours of it's life in the Twitter / client context. This is another example of something that happened recently: A PR exec going to Memphis to meet with a client, Fed Ex, insulted the client on the way to the meeting. The clients wrote a letter to the PR company and him, his bosses, and cc'd everyone at Fed Ex as well. Ooops. The problem is, tweets go to those paying attention at the moment, those who may save tweets in clients (i leave my twitter client open and check it now and then as I have time -- right now I have 15k tweets from the past couple of days), those pivoting on a single user, those searching for key words, those looking a related conversations. But when you tweet, in your head, you're often just thinking about those you expect to read it, like only a few your followers paying attention at the time. What happens with some tweets (some reading by some followers) is not what can happen with all tweets. The interface and interaction at Twitter's website doesn't lead you to believe that what happens most often there will happen in incendiary examples. And different twitter clients (an android or Iphone app for example) don't lead you to understand the permanent nature of tweets, through use, that say, search.twitter.com might, as you see something you deleted appear there anyway. It takes experience with all these different modalities to inform you because there is no advance disclosure or warning of the elasticity of a single tweet. What is most interesting is this pushes me to think harder about what the interface of "aged information" online looks like (and I don't mean google search results that move from page 1 to page 3 over time). And I have to ask myself what it would mean to have what Judith Donath discussed on the panel, Is Privacy Dead or Just Very Confused, moderated Saturday at SXSW by danah boyd. Judith discussed having some kind of a "mirror" for you of your digital self that would reflect all your online presentation and communications and expression... just so you might get a sense of what you show people and what you project at a moment in time. Right now it's really hard to gather that sense of yourself. Right now, you don't really see it in any sort of complete way. But others see pieces of you digitally represented at different times. It would be like re-disclosing for yourself what you've done, discovering how others view you, in slices or on the whole, in order to see the effect you have. It would probably be helpful to know what had reach and where, and what was for now at least, forgotten. But frankly, the privacy implications of that are huge as well. So, I'm thinking. No answers on that one yet. 727@http://napsterization.org/stories/ Culture 2009-03-19T07:57:10-08:00 http://napsterization.org/stories/archives/000720.html So it turns out that Jones Day, the utterly clueless lawfirm, sued a small real estate reporting company, BlockShopper, for talking about Jones Day the normal way we all do online: with the name of a person or thing, linking to that person or things website underneath the name. The settlement agreement (pdf) says future linking must to changed as so: ... instead of posting "Tiedt is an associate," the site will write "Tiedt (http://www.jonesday.com/jtiedt/) is an associate." (The agreement also calls on BlockShopper to say that the lawyer in question is employed at Jones Day and that more information about the attorney is on the firm's Web site.) Via Wendy David at Slate The first way is perfectly normal and the way everyone does it online. The altered version required by the suit is just silly. No one does it that way. Though some do some creative linking expression like so: Clueless bullies with no thought but for their own pride and Federal ninny making decisions who doesn't get trademark, the web, linking expression or his own ass from a tale pipe. Groups like EFF, Public Knowledge, Public Citizen and Citizen Media Law Project tried to file an amicus (friend-of-the-court) brief but federal district court Judge John Darrah rejected it. And he denied BlockShopper's motion to dismiss before trial. The only reason Jones Day "won" is because they are big, litigious jerks who found a judge that doesn't get social norms on the web. 15 years of social norms. Across the world wide web. For hundreds of millions of people. PS. just in case Jones Day is worried (per their ideas in the suit that linking to them means the public could be confused), or anyone else is wondering, this website is not connected in any way with Jones Day. 720@http://napsterization.org/stories/ Digital Rights | IP 2009-02-18T16:48:20-08:00 http://napsterization.org/stories/archives/000719.html Apparently, last night the US House of Representatives passed HR 31 declaring January 28, 2009 National Data Privacy Day. 402 votes in favor, none opposed. Jolynn Dellinger of Intel Corporation, working with Congressman David Price and Congressman Stearns, spearheaded the effort. More info for today's events at The Privacy Association. 719@http://napsterization.org/stories/ Privacy / Security 2009-01-28T09:30:37-08:00 http://napsterization.org/stories/archives/000718.html Hey.. She's Geeky is a few days away, and you can still sign up. The list of great women attending is here: She's Geeky Attendees and Registration Really looking forward to interacting with all those awesome girl geeks on Friday and Saturday at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View! 718@http://napsterization.org/stories/ Culture 2009-01-27T19:24:07-08:00 http://napsterization.org/stories/archives/000717.html The second She's Geeky will happen at the end of this month! The first was held 14 months ago in Mountain View at the Computer History Museum, and this year it will happen there again. Here are all the important links to get you going: Website: http://www.shegeeky.org BLOG: http://shesgeeky.org/sg/blog/ WIKI: http://shesgeeky.org/wiki/ Registration: on site: http://shesgeeky.org/sg/register/ on eventbrite: http://shesgeekybayarea.eventbrite.com/ Facebook Group: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=5010135719 Event on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/event.php?eid=53885344492 LinkedIn Group: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=39189 Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/shesgeeky PLEASE be sure to register for one day $59 or two days $108 and get the early bird price. Let's face it, this conference is just covering costs with those prices... if you are only able to come on a weekday, you'll be able to come Friday, and if weekends are all you can do, Saturday is it, or even better, come both days! Also, check out this totally great video shot at the last She's Geeky: 717@http://napsterization.org/stories/ Culture 2009-01-06T09:26:28-08:00 http://napsterization.org/stories/archives/000713.html Check out the notice below about the documentary showing on October 22, 2008 about the Eniac Programmers. Should be a fantastic night! The Computer History Museum Presents An Evening with Jean Jennings Bartik - 1945 ENIAC Programming Pioneer 7:00pm Computer History Museum | Hahn Auditorium 1401 N. Shoreline Blvd. Mountain View, CA 94043 Wine provided by The Mountain Winery To register: click here or call (650) 810-1005. We hope to see you at this celebration of pioneering women in computing -- an event 60 years in the making! Kathy Kleiman, Historian & Executive Producer, ENIAC Programmers Project eniacprogrammers.org About ENIAC Pioneer Jean Bartik. Jean Jennings Bartik was one of the first programmers of the groundbreaking ENIAC computing system in 1945. She later assisted in converting the ENIAC system into one of the first stored-program computers. Born on a farm in Missouri, the sixth of seven children, Bartik always went in search of adventure. Bartik majored in mathematics at Northwest Missouri State Teachers College (now Northwest Missouri State University). In 1945, at age 20, Bartik answered the Army's Ballistics Research Lab's call for women math majors to join a project in Philadelphia calculating ballistics firing tables for the new guns developed for the WWII effort - she joined over 80 women calculating ballistics trajectories by hand (differential calculus equations) - Her title: "Computer." Later in 1945, the Army circulated a call for "computers" for a new job with a secret machine. Bartik jumped at the chance and was hired as one of the original six programmers of ENIAC, the first all-electronic, programmable computer. She joined Frances "Betty" Snyder Holberton, Kathleen McNulty Mauchly Antonelli, Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer, Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum and Frances Bilas Spence in this unknown journey. With ENIAC's 40 panels still under construction, and its 18,000 vacuum tube technology uncertain, the engineers had no time for programming manuals or classes. Bartik and the other women taught themselves ENIAC's operation from its logical and electrical block diagrams, and then figured out how to program it. They created their own flow charts, programming sheets, wrote the program and placed it on the ENIAC using a challenging physical interface, which had hundreds of wires and 3,000 switches. It was an unforgettable, wonderful experience. On February 15, 1946, the Army revealed the existence of ENIAC to the public. In a special ceremony, the Army introduced ENIAC and its hardware inventors Dr. John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert. The presentation featured its trajectory ballistics program, operating at a speed thousands of time faster than any prior calculations. The ENIAC women's program worked perfectly - and conveyed the immense calculating power of ENIAC and its ability to tackle the millennium problems that had previously taken a man 100 years to do. It calculated the trajectory of a shell that took 30 seconds to trace it. But, it took ENIAC only 20 seconds to calculate it - faster than a speeding bullet! Indeed! The Army never introduced the ENIAC women. No one gave them any credit or discussed their critical part in the event that day. Their faces, but not their names, became part of the beautiful press pictures of the ENIAC. For forty years, their roles and their pioneering work were forgotten and their story lost to history. The ENIAC Women's story was discovered by Kathy Kleiman in 1985. Bartik will discuss what it means to be overlooked, despite unique and pioneering work, and what it means to be discovered again. In conversation with Linda O'Bryon, Bartik will also discuss: * Leading the programming team to convert ENIAC to one of the first stored-program machines (and working with Dr. John von Neumann on ENIAC's first instruction set) * Working in "Technical Camelot" at the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, as programmer of BINAC and logic designer of UNIVAC * Sexism and stereotypes at Remington Rand and her first-hand experience with the abuse of women and the misuse of technology * Friends and pioneers computing history should not forget, including tributes to Betty Holberton, Kay Mauchly Antonelli, the other ENIAC programmers, Dr. John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert * Some pieces of advice to live by. About the ENIAC Programmers Project. Founded in 1997, the ENIAC Programmers Project is dedicated to recording, preserving and sharing the stories of women computer pioneers. Its founder, Kathy Kleiman, discovered the ENIAC Programmers as a passing reference in an computing pioneer's autobiography, sought them out, researched and recorded their oral histories. Her nomination of Jean Bartik for the Computer History Museum's 2008 Fellow Award led to this special recognition -- after 60 years! The Computer History Museum's VIP reception honors Jean Bartik and recognizes the ENIAC Programmers Project's long quest to make a feature-length documentary about the women of ENIAC, WWII Rosie the Riveters who invented many of the concepts of modern programming! To learn more about this inspiring story and opportunities for documentary support and sponsorship, please go to www.eniacprogrammers.org or contact Kathy Kleiman at Kathy@eniacprogrammers.org. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ The ENIAC Programmers Project Honoring Computer Pioneers and Preserving Their Stories Feature-length documentary "Invisible Computers: The Untold Story of the ENIAC Programmers" now in development & fundraising. www.eniacprogrammers.org 713@http://napsterization.org/stories/ Culture 2008-10-03T18:06:48-08:00 http://napsterization.org/stories/archives/000711.html Based upon the Kevin Drum/ Washington Monthly suggestion, I remixed this week's New Yorker Cover based upon Barry Blitt's Illustration. It is much funnier with the thought bubble and McCain. I think it will be easy for people in the current climate to misunderstand the original. But the remix makes it easier to get that it's supposed to be funny. 711@http://napsterization.org/stories/ The Napster Nation 2008-07-14T12:16:12-08:00 http://napsterization.org/stories/archives/000710.html (Part 1 of a 2 part post.) It's been 10 days since we held an alternative event for women who wanted to attend something for girl geeks, but didn't want to be at an event sponsored by, with speaker from or with photographers by a porn company, Zivity because it felt like Zivity was trying to use credibility of girl geeks just after their founder took off her shirt in a video at the top of Techcrunch. Many women I spoke with were amazed at the lack of understanding of this by the Girl Geek Dinner organizers. In discussing this event with people the last few days, it's become clear that what we: me, a couple of women who blogged this, as well as numerous women and men who expressed support for our criticism of the GGD event, understood a few important things that weren't public. When people found out how hard we'd tried to meet with the GGD event organizer, to discuss this before it became a controversy, and what our perspective was verses just the blanket view that we opposed the event in conjunction with a particular sponsor, they really supported the view that we held, which was that we'd tried to talk about it first, were forced to go increasingly public, and that we had a supportable point that women at work, and networking events are included in this, should not be involved with porn, porn companies or photographers paid for by porn companies. And they really supported that we held an event, however last minute, as an alternative, to the GGD event. I've also learned a bit more about the situation, that I wasn't aware of at the time, which I wanted to share. And I wanted to tell what happened at the Girl Geek Revolution event (that name is, as I mentioned earlier, tongue in cheek, because we really felt we had to have a revolution in order not to have porn related things at work). So.. here's what I know about the events the past couple of weeks surrounding the Girl Geek Dinner event: * I was sent an invite to the Girl Geek Dinner event, by @bayareagirlgeek on Twitter on June 16th. Looking at the website then (Located here, but it's been updated from that time three weeks ago; I saw then that Zivity was a sponsor, but later their sponsorship was removed, the link name was changed to remove "zivity" at the end of it and the title the link was created from, and the language around Zivity sponsored photographers was lightened up.) The event, slated for June 26th in SF, showed Cyan Banister, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Zivity, as a speaker, as well as talked about the Zivity sponsored photographers in the post describing the event. * Several of us responded on June 16th to the tweet from @bayareagirlgeek, not knowing who it was who was behind the event and the tweet, saying we were uncomfortable with Zivity as a sponsor because it's a porn company and that didn't feel very supportive of women. We didn't hear anything back: * Again, not realizing who had organized the first Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner that I'd attended on January 31, 2008, I left a comment on the BAGGD blog post announcing dinner #2 on June 26. My comments appeared to be posted, but then later the blog said they were "under moderation." Two other women posted comments, but none of our comments were posted, and appeared based upon the interface to have been deleted. We weren't sure what happened, but discussed this with the "@bayareagirlgeek" in our tweets on twitter, to get the person using that Twitter handle to discuss this with us, as we tried to resolve the issue (see the Summize list of tweets going back to the original invite, and open the "show conversation" links to view the complete conversation.) * On June 17, I decided to post the comments I'd tried to leave at the Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner post to my blog, because I felt really strongly about what was happening, and that porn, in a work environment was not good and would make many women feel uncomfortable and unsupported. And I felt that Zivity in particular, because of the Techcrunch stripper video, was using GGD to get girl geek cred. Those comments are here, and while they didn't comprehensively cover the issues and tell everything that was going on at the time, because they replied specifically to the BAGGD blog post, they were meant to catch the attention via the link (many bloggers follow their inbound links) of whoever had written the post so we could discuss the issues. * On June 18, I checked back at BAGGD blog and the comments had all been removed and the interface said nothing was "awaiting moderation." But I did see in very small type Angie Chang's email as the organizer. I was really surprised, because Angie and I had been through a similar set of things before. In 2007, Women 2.0, an organization I believe Angie co-founded and which runs an annual pitching contest for women entrepreneurs, called Women 2.0 Napkin Business Challenge. That contest required that *only women under 35* be allowed to participate. I had tried to leave a comment on the corresponding blog post at Women 2.0 in 2007, but it was not approved. Note also that while this post now says there are 46 comments, they are currently invisible on that post now for some odd reason that probably is a technical glitch though because many of them are critical, and Angie seems to have a history of not publishing criticism by others on her blogs, it could also be that she simply told the interface not to post them anymore. I have no idea. I wrote a blog post to publich my comments not published at Anglie's blog about the Women 2.0 pitch contest excluding women 35 and over.Angie responded in comments at Napsterization saying she disagreed with me that this was a problem. My thought was first-time women founders need help, no matter their age, and age discrimination in any event was a real problem. Ten or so months later, Angie pinged me, asking to meet because someone (can't remember who but Eve Phillips formerly of Greylock and currently of Chirp comes to mind) had suggested that I wasn't unreasonable, and that she really ought to hear what I had to say about Women 2.0 (btw, I also spoke at an event Women 2.0 held 2 years ago). We had coffee in early 2008, and I explained why I really felt that first time women entrepreneurs needed the confidence boost, and the support of an organizations like Women 2.0, as they go out to pitch VCs for money for their startups. This year, for the 2008 contest, Women 2.0 removed the "under 35" requirement, and made the contest open to any team with 6 or less founders, where 50% were women. Though I couldn't attend I thought that was terrific and congratulate Women 2.0 and Angie for opening up to all women the opportunities the pitch contest gives. So, knowing in June 2008 that Angie was organizing the Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner, and had likely produced the blog post and tweets, I pinged her in email, to say that I'd really like to get together to talk about this issue. After that, I also talked with two other women, who told me they had already pinged Angie, asked to talk on the phone or meet for coffee to talk about the same issue with GGD. That I know of three of us reached out to Angie sometime between the 16th and the 18th trying to talk with her. * June 20, Angie replied to two of us, requesting to meet on the 21st. Since I was leaving the night of the 21st for NYC, and we were having a 100 degF heatwave, I suggested that instead of meeting at 1pm as Angie suggested, maybe we could do 10am? I both phone texted Angie, and replied in email, as did Kaliya Hamlin, about meeting Saturday for a total of 6 messages between us to Angie offering the option of meeting at 10, 11 or as a last resort, the 1pm time Angie had proposed. I was an hour away from the proposed meeting site in Berkeley, but despite having a busy day and workout planned, not to mention packing and a red eye, I wanted to see this discussion happen. Kaliya also spent the day waiting around for the meeting, skipping working out, and other errands, as she too was just about to leave for a conference in Southern California. I also found out about the Valleywag and San Jose Mercury News blog posts. (Neither posting showed up in my RSS feed tracking links to my blog). * June 21. We heard at 4pm Saturday from Angie, who disregarded all the messages to her, but proposed Sunday the 22nd at 11am. By then I was on my way to a family 30th wedding anniversary, and then headed to the airport. Others were off to meetings and dinners, but I replied and suggested we do a phone call (with me in NYC) for 2pm EST/ 11am PST and Mary Trigiani meeting in person with Angie. No reply was received to our suggestions to Angie's proposed meeting time and no phone call took place. * June 22, as I was in NYC, I met a woman who was part of Girl Geek Dinners in London, and friends with Sarah Blow, founder of the entire organization (loosely affiliated as it is, though it it branded the same around the world). This woman, as did approximately 20 other women who were attending Personal Democracy Forum in NYC, told me during the PDF party they were appalled that GGD was having a porn company sponsor and sending photographers, and most had read my blog post, seen my tweets or heard about the issue. They all wanted to do something constructive to voice opposition, and expressed support for my efforts. I asked all to write blog posts about their understanding of the events. * June 23. I received an email from Jackie Danicki who spoke with Sarah Blow, founder of Girl Geek Dinners. Apparently Sarah Blow was "annoyed" with the Zivity GGD situation, and "made GGD remove Zivity as a sponsor." Because of this, I decided to do a blog post to share this new information as well as more completely explain the entire situation to that time. This post, More on Girl Geeks - Yes, Zivity - No was much more direct in analyzing the situation compared to my previous post that had been just the comment I'd intended to leave on the BAGGD blog, and just responded to their announcement of sponsors and the dinner/speaker event. * June 24, I pinged Angie again about doing a call with us. She replied that she was "taken aback" by our reactions to the dinner and Zivity's involvement, and would rather chat on Friday, *after* the Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner, on June 27. I'm not sure what she expected, but as we were trying to talk with her, the dinner was approaching and I felt that the only way to get my views across and mobilize support against the combination of Zivity and Girl Geek Dinners was to blog it publicly. We didn't seem to be getting much direct talking done. In my post, I had directly addressed the issues of what Zivity is, and why I believed it was a bad choice to have them sponsor the event, speak and send photographers because that was the only option I had at that point. * June 25, at the Structure 08 conference I bumped into Calley Nye, and later in the press room, she asked me very directly if I'd like to do an alternative event. I did but definitely didn't have time to do it myself. I told her if we did it together, I'd do it. We went to work on holding our own event, in order to have an alternative event that didn't have Porn photographers shooting the attendees. And more importantly, to make the point that porn and it's associated issues don't belong at work. Part 2 of this will be posted in the next few days and I'll link to it here when it's up. 710@http://napsterization.org/stories/ Culture 2008-07-09T19:53:01-08:00 http://napsterization.org/stories/archives/000709.html SEE UPDATE AT BOTTOM. Cyan Banister has written Calley Nye to tell her to tell me that Zivity was never a sponsor of Girl Geek Dinners. Okay.. all I can go on is this: Zivity was listed as a sponsor, or implied as a sponsor on the GGD SF site. I believe they removed it later, and I got email from the London GGD folks (who founded GGD) that they asked the SF folks to remove Zivity as a sponsor. Wha? Cyan didn't realize this blog has comments? You can reach me here, and leave a comment. Or you can blog about it on your own site. Or you can read this blog, find the email, and tell me directly if you don't want to use social media tools to tell me. Since Zivity, a social media porn company, is unwilling to use social media tools to set the record straight, well, I'm mystified but updating you to say, I *think* Zivity is denying they were a sponsor of the Girl Geek Dinners, but they won't say it publicly or to me directly. In any event, we are still holding our Girl Geek Revolution (without the porn site speaker/photographers in attendance) at a networking event tonight at Sugar Cafe. Why revolution? Cause you gotta have one to get the porn outta your work, apparently. Come have fun, network with girl geeks, eat a cupcake and have a cocktail. More info here at Calley Nye's blog. UPDATE 7/3/08: Note: I went back and found this tweet, written by BAGGD (@bayareagirlgeek on Twitter), to announce the event. And in their own words, they describe Zivity as a sponsor: A few days after the event, I learned from a documentary filmmaker, Cianna Stewart, working on a piece on Zivity, that Cyan had told her that Zivity had in fact paid for the photographers directly. So to my mind, they *were* a sponsor of the Girl Geek Dinners. This is akin to when an event is held, and a sponsor pays a vendor, say the lunch provider or a cocktail party provider, at an event directly. But they are listed as a sponsor in the event web page, and they are posted as a sponsor at the event through some signage. But that sponsor does not write the event makers a check. So the idea that Zivity would send me a message through a third party, to tell me they had never sponsored Girl Geek Dinners, "never written a check directly to BAGGD" as evidence of this, and therefore I had the story wrong was, to my way of thinking about events, meant to mislead me and Calley Nye into thinking they had never been a sponsor. In fact, Cianna Stewart did confirm for me that she had seen the Girl Geek Dinners web page, and noted that Ziviity was originally listed as a sponsor below Facebook, but also later saw that Zivity was quietly removed from the sponsor list after our blog posts criticizing the combining of a porn company's sponsorship with GGD. Cianna also told me that Cyan/Zivity told her the sponsored photos would "belong to" Girl Geek Dinners. Which means Zivity paid for something at the GGD event that was akin to sponsorship. Additionally, I went back to look at an early email from almost three weeks ago, when we were trying to meet with the Girl Geek Dinners organizer, Angie Chang, who describes "the Zivity and Girl Geek Dinner partnership" in an email to us. To my mind, a partnership, when you just invite someone to speak, is not necessary and people don't usually describe speaking arrangements that way. Lots of us speak at events and have no partnership with the event organizers. A partnership for an event is pretty much always around some kind of sponsorship, regardless of whether the money is paid directly to the event organizer or involves payment to a vendor who performs a service at the event, or a media sponsorship where a sponsor and event organizer essentially exchange advertisements about each other. In all instances, these are sponsorships. So to me, Zivity *was* a sponsor of Girl Geek Dinners, and it was disingenuous at best, and lying at worst, for Cyan and Angie to claim that Zivity "never sponsored" GGD. 709@http://napsterization.org/stories/ Culture 2008-06-26T09:33:48-08:00 http://napsterization.org/stories/archives/000708.html Tonight in SF at Sugar Cafe, 6-9pm. More info here at Calley Nye's Blog. Food sponsored by She's Geeky! We're calling it Girl Geek Revolution (okay that's a bit tongue in cheek, but apparently here you have to have a revolution to get a Girl Geek networking event without a porn company as sponsor, speaker or sending their photographers to use their photos for who knows what -- but I'm sure when they stick them on flickr or their own site.. they'll be playing up your girl geek reputation and name to help legitimize their porn company). Re: Zivity, the porn site. I checked out their site with a friend's login. He told me "...yeah.. it's a porn site by my standards." He went on to say that it's more analogous to Playboy, as in, you can see naked girls, posed in retro pinup style, with just a little twat showing, and while he thinks most men who watch hardcore porn (he characterizes that as video of one or more people actually having sex) will think it's cute porn.. and hopefully catch women they know there so they can tease them into going out with them, especially if they work with them, but they won't really use it because it doesn't have the porn they really want day-to-day, if they use porn, which is more hardcore. That said, when I looked, I did note that it was basically full of Playboy style porn. Or like my friend's company in Berkeley, who for the past 10 years has done retro porn. That company gets real homemade "porn" from the 50s, 60s and 70s, mostly like Zivity's stuff. And he does well.. it's a beautifully done site, making him around $200k a month for the past several years. Anyone can submit and he approves and styles the pages. He's a designer by trade, so everything looks like the Zivity site.. which is.. very well styled. However, there is a big difference between my friend's porn site and Zivity's porn site: Zivity lies to me in their tagline, by saying "It's not porn." Red flags. Sorry.. I just don't like to be lied to. And, they want it both ways: they want to say, "We're women founded (1 of the 3 founders is a woman), and support women by sharing the money, via our social network for porn but we're not porn!" That's nice.. better than many porn sites do with their "models." But it's still porn, which is defined as, "Sexually explicit material meant to arouse people" according to the dictionary both online and at my house. It doesn't matter if you style it nicely.. it's still porn. The other way Zivity wants it is to be not thought of porn, but rather to trade on Girl Geek cred, by sponsoring, speaking at and providing a photographer to the Girl Geek Dinners. They want to be "in the community" of geeks and use our reputations to gain legitimacy at a work event, for their VC funded company. They want to seem like a woman founded company (33% wouldn't even cut the Women 2.0 pitch contest requirements) but Zivity's management is publicly stated as being all male, which is very similar to most porn companies where the men sell the women's images (straight men in porn don't get paid a lot and aren't what sells.. it's the pretty women that get you the cash.. hence Zivity's decision to just post women "models"... men may come later but I'll bet you it's gay men.. whose porn also brings in lots of cash). But oopps, their founder (and former CEO CMO) Cyan Banister (someone asked me if that was a real name, or a made up porn star name... don't know if it's made up or not.. sorry) took her shirt off at the top of a Techcrunch post. Exposing the lie that it's really a porn site. And using her body to get to the top. And we are supposed to respect that on a business level, and lend our geek cred to this company that lies to us in their tagline? Don't think so. Once Zivity decides to be honest, and just state that they are a porn company, and not use the porn to get legitimately geek press or work events to stand next to people and insinuate credibility as a VC funded startup just like everyone else (the porn just makes them different, and not at all appropriate for work), I might like them again. But until that changes.. I don't trust Zivity at all. 708@http://napsterization.org/stories/ Culture 2008-06-26T07:53:22-08:00 http://napsterization.org/stories/archives/000707.html Just a quick update to my last post. Apparently the founder of Girl Geek Dinners, Sarah Blow, made GGD SF remove Zivity as a sponsor. I was told this from someone I met at PDF2008 who emailed her, which she forwarded. I didn't hear this directly. But it does explain why I had seen Zivity sponsorship there as a sponsor at the GGD SF website when I wrote about this originally.. and then it was gone without explanation. Couldn't figure out what happened.. but just got word of why it's gone. Blow didn't like Zivity sponsoring.. apparently she picked up on Zivity using the GGD sponsorship to buy cred with GGD. A thought about the many women who work in jobs where they would prefer to not be sexualized at work because they are working with their brains don't have the power or control over their situations some of us do. For example, I worked with a woman who was a single-mom legal secretary, w/ 7yr old son, severely mentally and physically retarded, who desperately needed the office provided insurance. The person I watched harass her, chose sex as the tool, knowing she was in a week position. It's the same as a child molester choosing the weakest kid around to go after because that kid doesn't have a good support network. Catholic priests come to mind, where there are many cases where they would pick a weaker kid over another stronger one to abuse. The problem is, the weakest are vulnerable, without protections and standards for behavior. I wish it weren't the case, but I also recognize that when people can abuse someone, sometimes they will. Which brings us back to my point around GGD, which is that people feel bad about speaking out (I'm witnessing all the people telling me in person how upset they are about this GGD dinner/Zivity and yet, I'm one of a few writing or talking about it publicly. I'm trying to get them to blog about, but they are scared of being pinpointed as the woman who whines about this. I don't want to be that either, but someone has to say something). And people who feel bad about it are often also the ones coerced into doing something they don't want to do... like allowing themselves to be sexualized at work, to be forced to be "hot" first and maybe then be good at their jobs, worth funding, worth hiring for a leadership role. It's unfortunate that we live with that in our culture. But why put women even more in that position, with a Girl Geek Dinner originally to be sponsored by Zivity (sponsorship has now been removed by the founder, as I mentioned above) with Zivity speaking and taking photos. By going to the dinner, it feels as if you are asked to support and agree with Zivity in this implicit way... to put up with the photos thing (where do the photos go, and you have to ask: who owns them and when do they show up on Zivity's blog to show how cool they are associating with Girl Geeks?). It's just bad for professional women to be put in this position. What's interesting about Zivity is that they want it both ways: tech company with woman founder, girl geek cred, sort of a "we're just like everyone else so don't segregate us for being in porn" thing, and at the same time, they really work the porn to get as much publicity as possible. Cyan wants geek cred, and wants to take her shirt off for Techcrunch and did their thing at Techcrunh40 where they walked around with company promotion on their breasts and ass. In the end, they are a porn company, and if it's okay for them to sponsor/speak/photograph Girl Geeks, then why isn't it okay for Girls Gone Wild to do the same? And how bout Penthouse and Playboy? In the 70's Playboy tried to sponsor a lot of women's groups and events, but most wouldn't take the money because those women felt it was "blood money" derived from the objectification of women sexually, and here were those groups trying to make a place for women where they didn't have to be "hot first," where they wouldn't have to be sexualized at work, where they could be successful the way men can be, and it didn't have to be about their bodies first. So one founder of Zivity is a woman. Have you looked at their team page? Of the three founders, one is a Cyan, but she's not CEO, and there is only one other woman at the company (user experience analyst). It's not like they went out and aggressively hired women engineers. They are like any other porn company.. mostly all men, exploiting women, to make money. They share 80% of their income with the women? How generous.. just a bit more than Suicide Girls. But isn't it really just the same thing? 707@http://napsterization.org/stories/ Culture 2008-06-23T11:50:47-08:00 http://napsterization.org/stories/archives/000706.html AP seems to have given a statement to Paid Content about the bruhaha the past few days: In response to questions about the use of Associated Press content on the Drudge Retort web site, the AP was able to provide additional information to the operator of the site, Rogers Cadenhead, on Thursday. That information was aimed at enabling Mr. Cadenhead to bring the contributed content on his site into conformance with the policy he earlier set for his contributors. Both parties consider the matter closed. In addition, the AP has had a constructive exchange of views this week with a number of interested parties in the blogging community about the relationship between news providers and bloggers and that dialogue will continue. The resolution of this matter illustrates that the interests of bloggers can be served while still respecting the intellectual property rights of news providers. I find it a total non-statement and completely bizarre. Also, Robret Cox of Media Bloggers Association is supposed to be on Blog Talk Radio at 3 pm EST today. I probably won't be able to listen until halfway through.. at 12:30 PST/3:30 EST this afternoon as I have a meeting. Hope they have a podcast later. And hope that some real information about yesterday's meeting between Cadenhead / Cox and Jim Kennedy at the AP comes out. My questions include: 1. what is the status of the 7 C&D notices from AP to Cadenhead? 2. what is AP going to do in future? 3. what was the tone of the meeting and who was there? 4. what agreements came out of the meeting and can we see them? 5. what precedent does this set for future blogger quotes and interactions with AP? Hoping these and other questions will be addressed in the radio interview later today. 706@http://napsterization.org/stories/ Journalism | Publishing 2008-06-20T07:32:42-08:00 http://napsterization.org/stories/archives/000705.html More on the AP/Rogers Cadenhead story (covered already here and http://napsterization.org/stories/archives/000700.html). So.. Saul Hansell sez in his condescending and rude blogpost: The A.P., Hot News and Hotheaded Blogs, There was a lot of anger in the blogosphere last week over The Associated Press’s assertion that some blogs were infringing its copyright by publishing excerpts of its articles. When I finally reached Jim Kennedy, an Associated Press vice president, he told me that the news agency now feels its demand was heavy-handed and was rethinking its policies. What it really sez: bloggers are out of control little children having temper tantrums. Since when is passion for your craft and the right to free speech, and belief in Fair Use as a constitutional right, something bloggers should be casual about? A number of bloggers I respect a great deal didn’t find the A.P.’s openness to their ideas to be enough and have declared war on it. As someone who is both a blogger and an employee of a mainstream news organization, I worry that this hotheaded response is part of what gives blogs a bad name. And it doesn’t reflect the complexity of the underlying questions, which can be traced back to when the telegraph was the revolutionary technology of the day. What it really sez: I respect you, even if you are out of control at times. But since I'm the parent and your the children, let me school you on how to think about this. Because otherwise you'll hurt yourselves even more. The current dust-up involves seven blog posts on the Drudge Retort (not the bigger Drudge Report) that contained short excerpts of A.P. articles. Last week, the A.P. demanded that the Drudge Retort remove the posts because they violated its copyright. Mr. Kennedy now says the news agency plans to create new guidelines for how blogs can use its material, after discussions with representatives of blogging groups and others. What it really sez: you bloggers get into these tiffs all the time, and now one of yours has been spanked with C&Ds to remove the quotes he overused. But the nice man at AP will create guidelines for you, after meeting with your institutional representative (hopefully a grown up). In reaction to what Mr. Kennedy said in that article, Michael Arrington declared on TechCrunch: “So here’s our new policy on A.P. stories: they don’t exist.” Jeff Jarvis, on BuzzMachine, wrote: “Back off, A.P. Because we won’t.” What it really sez: evidence that you bloggers are out of control. This is followed by examples of the hot news doctrine, what AP could do to handle the situation and a little history. Consider yourselves schooled. At the end of the article, it's particularly rude and condescending: I don’t know what the A.P. will do. But neither do the bloggers calling for a boycott of the A.P. (By the way, that’s a silly concept as none of these blogs actually pays the A.P. any money. If CBS News or The Huffington Post — an A.P. client — began a boycott, that might hurt.) What it really sez: You bloggers are so silly, how can you boycott something you don't pay for but you can't hurt the AP. (Um, what about all those links and traffic driven to AP articles.. I believe attention is the most valuable thing on the internet, and if that's true, and bloggers stop linking and sending readers, well, that's a huge loss!) Mr. Jarvis, in particular, often talks about blogging as a conversation. It seems like the A.P. wants to talk, and many bloggers would prefer a temper tantrum to a discussion. What it really sez: You bloggers want to converse but like little children, throwing temper tantrums, you are being spiteful about conversing here. So, if I were to follow what Saul sez, I would believe that I was a little child, out of control, refusing to talk, and he was the calm, cool, collected dad, who will set things straight, make me see reason, and stop quoting those darned AP stories or thinking I have any power with my linking habits, before I go have a talk with the nice folks at AP. Saul, please. The narrative and tone in your post isn't a good one to get anyone to "see reason." It's parental and I'm an adult. Let's start over, and try this again. How about a headline like: Bloggers, Passionate about Their Fair Use Rights, Defend Them Vigorously 705@http://napsterization.org/stories/ Journalism | Publishing 2008-06-19T08:13:36-08:00