Women speakers at conferences, expanding the conversation, some personal experience

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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?

Emma Pictures!

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Richelle and me put together a list of songs that Emma sings and pretty much knows the words to – it’s over 20 songs!

Sooner or later I promise to post some videos. Until then – it’s picture time 🙂

Garret Vreeland: “The Internet is personal, pervasive, and permanent.”

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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.

lang:groovy – extend your Spring app with scripting

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The Spring Framework offers many ways to ease application development and maintenance, but one that gets my interest really going is its dynamic language support.

codehaus: Dynamic language beans in Spring

codehaus: Groovy and JMX

raible designs: Using Dynamic Languages with Spring with Rod Johnson and Guillaume LaForge

organic thoughts: Spring Meets Groovy!

“the 110 AC outlet”

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There’s a good piece in the NYTimes on cloud computing for the uninitiated: Cloud Computing: So You Don’t Have to Stand Still

Traditional companies are also beginning to adapt their computing infrastructure to the cloud. Reuven Cohen is founder and chief technologist at Enomaly, a software firm in Etobicoke, Ontario, that helps companies do just that. While most of its clients are technology businesses, Mr. Cohen says Enomaly is working with a New York-based bank that uses cloud computing to develop and test applications. He says that another customer is a large media business that uses the cloud to process video.

He sees this kind of need-driven use as a “fundamental change in how we manage technology.”

In fact, cloud computing is poised to do for technology what the electrical grid did for power, says Nicholas Carr, author of “The Big Switch,” which compares the rise of the cloud to the rise of electric utilities. The electrical grid streamlined operations for companies; when every home had cheap power and outlets, “you had incredible innovation in how to put all that cheap power to use,” Mr. Carr says. He thinks that cloud computing will prompt a similar cycle over the next decade.

There are practical problems that could turn the cloud into a thunderhead. The technology is still emerging: Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) went offline for a couple of hours in February.

Peter O’Kelly, an analyst at the Burton Group, a technology research firm, says he thinks that many established companies will not save money by moving to the cloud. And Alistair Croll, a partner at Bitcurrent, a consulting firm that specializes in Web and cloud technologies, says companies will not be able to put data willy-nilly into the cloud because of security concerns.

At the same time, Mr. Croll says the cloud is here to stay. “The Web has become the interface” for computing, “the 110 AC outlet,” he says. That is a fundamental shift that could power a new cycle of technological innovation.

What’s the impact of time shifting on mass entertainment?

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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.

Celebrating Life

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You can’t help but be inspired by how Randy Pausch is facing his oncoming death – by celebrating his life and sharing it with others.

NYTimes: Keeping Priorities Straight, Even at the End:

The real wisdom of Dr. Pausch is that he tries to enjoy every day he has left with his family, while at the same time trying to prepare them for life without him. To that end, he is videotaping himself spending time with Dylan, Logan and Chloe so they can look back and see how he felt about them.

“I’ve always said I only care about the first three copies of the book,” Dr. Pausch said. “The lessons learned are the lessons I’ve learned and what worked for me. But so many people wrote to me and said, ‘This was a jumping-off point to have conversations with my kids we haven’t had.’ “

Using Disk to Scale

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One of the largest concerns when developing an infrastructure for a site as large as Comcast.net is determining smart ways to scale. By smart, I mean requiring the least amount of effort to launch new channels or services. Each new channel or page can draw thousands, if not millions of page views. You need to plan for it.

When growing Cofax at Knight Ridder, we hit a nasty bump in the road after adding our 17th newspaper to the system. Performance wasn’t what it used to be and there were times when services were unresponsive.

A project was started to resolve the issue, to look for ‘the smoking gun’. The thought being that the database, being as well designed as it was, could not be of issue, even with our classic symptom being rapidly growing numbers of db connections right before a crash. So we concentrated on optimizing the application stack.

I disagreed and waged a number of arguments that it was our database that needed attention. We first needed to tune queries and indexes, and be willing to, if required, pre-calculate data upon writes and avoid joins by developing a set of denormalized tables. It was a hard pill for me to swallow since I was the original database designer. Turned out it was harder for everyone else! Consultants were called in. They declared the db design to be just right – that the problem must have been the application.

After two months of the team pushing numerous releases thought to resolve the issue, to no avail, we came back to my original arguments. The terrific thing was that restructuring the database was a no pain affair – we had a terrific service layer between the main web tier and the db that hid its schema. We were able to deliver a release of the database that did not require any code changes on the web tier.

There is no silver bullet here, for smaller sites you are adding a great degree of complexity taking this route and it is, most likely, not advisable. However, if you have a large site that is thrashing – dealing with the demands of growth – take a hard look.

Related – and supporting of this:

High Scalability: “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Using a Lot of Disk Space to Scale”.

High Scalability: Scaling Secret #2: Denormalizing Your Way to Speed and Profit

Dare Obasanjo: When Not to Normalize your SQL Database