ang*e (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} watchyourmouth) wrote,@ 2008-03-08 20:44:00 |
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What it means to be a blogger.
Today I went to a swanky Yahoo! event at the Clift Hotel in San Francisco. The goal of the event was to preview the new shine.yahoo.com website to women bloggers and relevent people. There were 2 "break-out sessions" -- am I the only one who cringes with anticipated ennui at words like "break-out sessions"? -- where we critiqued the Yahoo! site for women, and then listened to a panel of mommy-bloggers, Lisa Stone of Blogher, and Brandon Holley of Yahoo! Shine (formerly editor of Jane magazine). It was strange being in a room of self-proclaimed, self-realized bloggers -- listening to them talk about the power of blogging, et al. I started blogging in 1999, writing HTML in AOL Press in high school here. In freshman year of college, I hand-coded a blog as well. I joined LiveJournal in 2001 to begin what remains my most personal blog, thanks to their privacy features and my friends who have stayed with me on LiveJournal through the years. As the Internet and Google have grown more popular thru the years, privacy issues became important so hence the migration to LiveJournal's friends-only blogging feature for the meatiest blog posts.
People find it disconcerting that I use many different services for many different things. Xanga became my art/movies blog, Tumblr holds my feminist thoughts and rants, Pownce holds my more technical friends, Flickr holds the San Francisco Bay Area crowd, Picasa holds another different San Francisco crowd and more Google people, Facebook I keep around for its usefulness in marketing my Women 2.0 and Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner events, Twitter I use because my social networking -abhorrant sister actually uses... and I try to SuprGlu them all together at one place. It's not perfect, but I'm too busy juggling 7 other projects that working on my own domain doesn't seem so important. I guess I'd rather be a Level 5 leader dedicated to boosting other women who deserve it, instead of a pseudo-celebrity/egocentric leader that is all about them. I just finished reading _Good_to_Great_ :o)
But I digress. I was sitting at this event this morning thinking about all these BLOGGERS. I never think of myself as a blogger. I found myself raising my hand when they asked "who is a blogger?" because I do blog and hold lots of them. But I'm not a blogger. I identify more with "rabble-rouser", because I say things that piss people off and I do a some things that people commend me for doing, like kicking off Women 2.0 by asking Noah Kagan why his Entrepreneur27 events and conferences had no women (at which point he put Shaherose, Wen-Wen, Shivani, and myself together at Facebook HQ for lunch and the first Women 2.0 meeting). I organized the 1st Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner because there were ZERO in the United States but a dozen internationally, because it just had to be done. I was thinking just now that if anything, I guess people would also label me as an "early adopter" for new technology websites (and definitely not gadgets, I'm a luddite with gadgets). I joined Yelp in September 2005 while exploring the ecosystem at my first job in the Valley, and enjoyed TechCrunch and Valleywag in their inchoate days. Now the only things that get me to lift an eyebrow are feminist thoughts, like why are women VCs visibly declining in numbers - where do they go? Why are there so few women speakers at tech conferences, similar to Lisa Stone's motive for Blogher - "Where are all the women bloggers?". Why do the editors of TechCrunch and Valleywag put up with chauvenistic and immature comments littering their blogs? Don't even get me started about Valleywag's choice of pictures of women - sometimes I thought I stumbled on an old issue of Playboy online rather than a "tech gossip rag". But I digress.
Today I met some girls who might be able to help me start that conversation, on how to possibly right an obvious wrong, by uniting forces with other groups and putting our collective minds to the matter. And I'm still waiting for a Feministing alliance to pop up in SF!
Today I went to a swanky Yahoo! event at the Clift Hotel in San Francisco. The goal of the event was to preview the new shine.yahoo.com website to women bloggers and relevent people. There were 2 "break-out sessions" -- am I the only one who cringes with anticipated ennui at words like "break-out sessions"? -- where we critiqued the Yahoo! site for women, and then listened to a panel of mommy-bloggers, Lisa Stone of Blogher, and Brandon Holley of Yahoo! Shine (formerly editor of Jane magazine). It was strange being in a room of self-proclaimed, self-realized bloggers -- listening to them talk about the power of blogging, et al. I started blogging in 1999, writing HTML in AOL Press in high school here. In freshman year of college, I hand-coded a blog as well. I joined LiveJournal in 2001 to begin what remains my most personal blog, thanks to their privacy features and my friends who have stayed with me on LiveJournal through the years. As the Internet and Google have grown more popular thru the years, privacy issues became important so hence the migration to LiveJournal's friends-only blogging feature for the meatiest blog posts.
 Above: High school blog (1999-2000) |  Above: Freshman year blog (2000-2001) |
People find it disconcerting that I use many different services for many different things. Xanga became my art/movies blog, Tumblr holds my feminist thoughts and rants, Pownce holds my more technical friends, Flickr holds the San Francisco Bay Area crowd, Picasa holds another different San Francisco crowd and more Google people, Facebook I keep around for its usefulness in marketing my Women 2.0 and Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner events, Twitter I use because my social networking -abhorrant sister actually uses... and I try to SuprGlu them all together at one place. It's not perfect, but I'm too busy juggling 7 other projects that working on my own domain doesn't seem so important. I guess I'd rather be a Level 5 leader dedicated to boosting other women who deserve it, instead of a pseudo-celebrity/egocentric leader that is all about them. I just finished reading _Good_to_Great_ :o)
But I digress. I was sitting at this event this morning thinking about all these BLOGGERS. I never think of myself as a blogger. I found myself raising my hand when they asked "who is a blogger?" because I do blog and hold lots of them. But I'm not a blogger. I identify more with "rabble-rouser", because I say things that piss people off and I do a some things that people commend me for doing, like kicking off Women 2.0 by asking Noah Kagan why his Entrepreneur27 events and conferences had no women (at which point he put Shaherose, Wen-Wen, Shivani, and myself together at Facebook HQ for lunch and the first Women 2.0 meeting). I organized the 1st Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner because there were ZERO in the United States but a dozen internationally, because it just had to be done. I was thinking just now that if anything, I guess people would also label me as an "early adopter" for new technology websites (and definitely not gadgets, I'm a luddite with gadgets). I joined Yelp in September 2005 while exploring the ecosystem at my first job in the Valley, and enjoyed TechCrunch and Valleywag in their inchoate days. Now the only things that get me to lift an eyebrow are feminist thoughts, like why are women VCs visibly declining in numbers - where do they go? Why are there so few women speakers at tech conferences, similar to Lisa Stone's motive for Blogher - "Where are all the women bloggers?". Why do the editors of TechCrunch and Valleywag put up with chauvenistic and immature comments littering their blogs? Don't even get me started about Valleywag's choice of pictures of women - sometimes I thought I stumbled on an old issue of Playboy online rather than a "tech gossip rag". But I digress.
Today I met some girls who might be able to help me start that conversation, on how to possibly right an obvious wrong, by uniting forces with other groups and putting our collective minds to the matter. And I'm still waiting for a Feministing alliance to pop up in SF!
