I’m going to be migrating to the latest and greatest Movable Type templates soon and wanted to collect the best resources I could find. Here are three:
How to upgrade to Movable Type 4 full templates (MT4) – Robert Green’s DIY
Upgrading Your MT3 Templates to Movable Type 4.0 | Movable Type Docs
Movable Tweak: Movable Type 3 vs. Movable Type 4: A Modular Site Approach
(ah, I used ‘top n-number’ in a post!)
Jeremiah Owyang: The Many Challenges of Corporate Blogging
Akamai Report: State of the Internet
An oldie but a must read to gain some context: NYMag: Everybody Sucks: Gawker and the rage of the creative underclass.
Livia Labate, Principal of Information Architecture for Comcast Interactive Media, my team at Comcast, is asking some hard questions around why there are not more women speakers at conferences. She raises the issue here and follows up here.
Livia, meet Jeneane Sessum, writer, consultant, marketing pro, all round social media expert. In her latest post she runs the Industry Standard over the rails for doing what so many other media publications seem apt to do – publish a list of (top or must read) bloggers and not include women.
Livia, meet Shelley Powers, author, Javascript/AJAX extraordinaire who has written a number of posts on the subject, here are two: Progress, Invisible.
Shelley and Jeneane, meet Livia.
Before I mention anything from my point of view and experiences, two more links – one a shocker, and one a think piece:
NYTimes: Sorry, Boys, This Is Our Domain: Research shows that among the youngest Internet users, the primary creators of Web content (blogs, graphics, photographs, Web sites) are not misfits resembling the Lone Gunmen of “The X Files.” On the contrary, the cyberpioneers of the moment are digitally effusive teenage girls. The section this article appeared in? Fashion. Not Business. Not Technology.
Salon: The question isn’t why a blogger like Emily Gould has the spotlight — it’s why other women don’t.
Onward…
I’ve written in the past about why I feel diversity is crucial to a successful gathering where information discussion is the goal.
I’ve never shared the difficulty I had in helping manage the Norg Unconference to meet that ideal.
The Norg Unconference was to build bridges between media technologists, independent bloggers, and traditional newspaper media, to help newspapers, indeed all of us, find a path to build the new news organization, or norg, as Will Bunch called it.
Many in attendance thought it was groundbreaking how it brought together such radically different world views in media such as members of IndyMedia and the Philadelphia Inquirer.
But part of me walked away feeling it wasn’t such a big success – the participants in attendance weren’t a true representation of the real diversity in Philly – and in assisting Wendy Warren of the Philadelphia Daily News and Susie Madrak, in organizing the meeting, which was taking place in the lead up to Emma being born, and me burning the candle at both ends, I burnt some bridges myself, as I fought, prior to the conference, to get folks to work together across views of each other. I partially failed, and lost some friends I believe. For an ideal. I won’t go into details, as I hope bridges can one day be restored, I have no bad feelings.
I leave it at this – it is very, very hard to get people to open up to what others can bring to the table – and do so pro-actively – while looking outside the usual suspects to make it happen. For all my love of the Web’s capability to widen the scope of conversation, it also empowers us to be discriminating in who we give attention to. It’s human nature at play – the Web is an attention economy. You think it’s bad at conferences? Check out who is considered the ‘thought leaders’ in any niche blogging conversation, who is considered the A-list in any blogging topic space.
More background:
kottke.org: Gender diversity at web conferences
O’Reilly: Women in Technology
Dori Smith (Javascript Guru/Author): BackupBrain: Gender diversity at web conferences.
Kimberly Blessing: Where are all the women? (Revisited)
Anil Dash: The Old Boys Club is for Losers
One last question still bubbles…
This is from my earlier post (which has a lot more reference links):
Aren’t we collectively building an architecture of participation? Our face to face gatherings should mirror that. And if they don’t – then they reveal who we truly care about – don’t they?
Emily Gould, formerly of Gawker wrote of her experience sharing her life online in the NYTimes. It’s a weekend must read.
The piece has drawn interesting reaction from here and there, but the response that stood out the most to me was Garret’s:
NY Times, you got snookered. You need editors who’ve had a history on the internet, with experience of the weblogging phenomena going back to the beginning of the revolution.
Why is there such a strong reaction among webloggers to this piece? To us, the lessons gleaned from this article were new eight or nine years ago. Now they’re reflexive, done without thought: Revealing personal information online, is like lending your favorite books. Only lend what you don’t mind losing. Never lend what is valuable to others, without permission. Don’t expect to be forgiven if you do, because you cannot ‘take it back.’
Repeat after me: The Internet is personal, pervasive, and permanent.
Again, louder.
The Internet is personal, pervasive, and permanent.
The sooner you memorize and understand that, the better.
The NYTimes looks at the effects of DVRs and Web video on mass entertainment. It’s not as clear cut as you think: In the Age of TiVo and Web Video, What Is Prime Time? – New York Times: “As a result of time-shifting, the biggest shows are getting bigger and some of the smaller shows are getting negatively impacted,” the senior television executive said.
That’s so counter intuitive. In my experience, my TV watching not only increased, but Richelle and me watch a far wider variety of shows.
This is weird. I am almost never at a loss for words, but this time I’ve been for over a week now.
Antonella Pavese tagged me to share my favorite historical figure and five random/weird things about him or her.
That’s a hard one! While I’ve read few biographies, I do consider myself a bit of a history buff.
Anyways, as soon as I figure out my favorite, I’m in. Coming soon…
It’s a sad day as Shelley Powers closes down her home on the web to concentrate on other projects. Her blog was host to some of the best online conversations I’ve ever participated in. The people who connected there were smart, passionate, and rarity of rarities in a single online community – diverse. You could get in a heated argument about any number of aspects about online media and respect would still be kept by those conversing. For me, the only place that came close to that experience were Salon’s Table Talk in its early days (before it went behind the pay wall).
I’m looking forward to what comes next Shelley, but I will miss Burningbird.
And congrats to Anil Dash who is celebrating five years at SixApart. The company has made tremendous changes these past six or so months, basically it’s been reborn, without loosing a step. And there is a lot to admire there.
Track your Domino’s pizza delivery with a python script.
Or try this nice one liner in your favorite Unix shell: curl -Is slashdot.org | egrep '^X-(F|B)' | cut -d \- -f 2 for a Futurama quote from Slashdot.
Coding Horor: “Is Eeyore Designing Your Software?”:
Here’s my honest question: does open source software need all that process to be successful? Isn’t the radical lack of process baggage in open source software development not a weakness, but in fact an evolutionary advantage? What open source software lacks in formal process it makes up ten times over in ubiquity and community. In other words, if the Elbonians feel so strongly about localization, they can take that effort on themselves. Meanwhile, the developers have more time to implement features that delight the largest base of customers, instead of plowing through mountains of process for every miniscule five line code change.
Are large commercial software companies crippled by their own process?
I’d say that in large corporations, I’ve seen many internal projects beat down by the same.
The new portal architecture at CIM doesn’t suffer from this, but the old one certainly did. We’ve come a long way.