A Web of One’s Own

But what’s really neat about the movement, is that participants pledge to honour a woman they admire (in blog posts, tweets, etc.) for achievements in science and/or technology in celebration of Ada’s life and work. They can then submit their hommage to the findingada.com database and entries are catalogued and mapped out, all in an effort to spotlight the oft-downplayed contributions of women in these fields.

The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth

Tanya McGinnity: Moshpit Philosopher and Community-builder

For my tribute, I picked local champion Tanya McGinnity, founder of the Montreal chapter of the Girl Geek Dinners (find a group near you: there are 60 worldwide and counting…) Not only because she’s a project manager in tech circles that I admire, but because she uses her considerable community-building experience to bring bright, talented and geeky women together to share knowledge and make connections.

“Definitely Does Compute”

I’ve only been going to the Girl Geek Dinners (GGD) since November, and I can’t believe how much I have learned or how many engaged and amazing people I’ve met through the events in such a relatively short time (Interactive Storytelling in Video Games! WordPress Tutorial!) As the only woman in my web firm for nearly two years, it’s been a treat to meet so very many other tech-friendly lasses (and a few lads, too). In fact, some of the events draw close to a hundred people (where do they all come from?)  I always leave feeling enriched and inspired (so I was rather bummed that I missed this week’s instalment), and that’s no accident…

A Lil’ Punk in the Trunk

It takes real commitment, drive and Thatchers to put on events this successful, draw the right speakers and reach out to build an audience, and Tanya does it because she is clearly passionate about building a better network for women in the tech community. As she says on her blog:

I come out of the punk rock scene and believe that when people fall down in the moshpit, you pick them up and help them out. I believe that you can do it yourself, without the help of a big label backing you up. I believe that we are all need to share and collaborate in order to truly be fulfilled.

She works hard to make Montreal a more hospitable place for girl geeks, and it’s Tanya’s plucky moshpit philosophy that makes me (and doubtless many others) feel like we’re not at it alone, that there’s a tangible community behind us. That sugar and spice might just be the sweet smell of success in the digital age.

Math Isn’t Hard

Tanya has exciting plans to reach out even further, to inspire school-aged girls to take another look at careers in web, gaming, engineering and other geeky fields.You can follow her on Twitter or join the MTL Girl Geek Dinner group on Facebook.

I for one can’t wait to see what she has in store next, for April’s GGD and for the group as a whole.

Future Shop 404: Tearing Apart the Fabric of the Universe

I have to say, I really do appreciate a good 404 page (“Page Not Found” messages that are usually lame, but are occasionally very awesome…) It turns a mild nuisance into an Easter egg: it’s like  uncovering a little bundle of buried treasure on your quest for the Contact page (or whatever has moved/is missing/etc.) It makes me happy to stumble across one of these gems, as I did during lunch, when I landed on this cute Future Shop error page.

So I looked up some classic and creative 404s, and while I can see how an imaginative Page Not Found could occasionally be the result of rogue programming, the best ones are creative, thought-provoking and on-message as a representation of a brand, whether personal or corporate (South Park’s “Son of a Bitch! Where’s My Page?” and the Future Shop 404 being good examples).

But I have to admit, I can’t think of 404s anymore without getting a mental image of a firetruck, thanks to the folks at Very Demotivational. In fact, the other day I saw a 405 firetruck in downtown Montreal, and I was relieved to know the fire that was called in had a +1 chance of being found.

The “dots” or “letters,” do move rather nicely through the lines or “communication channels,” and “principal investigator” is a pretty kick-ass title for Edelstein, I must say. 

Said the world, “wasn’t it content we crowned king?” Well, turning content into dots makes us focus on the really important thing, here: writers of the past had friends, apparently. And in some cases, they even had more than one. And hey, with Twitter rebranding their offering as Information Networking, perhaps we will stop caring about either the medium or the message, and start focusing on the network. At the very least, this Stanford venture has the kind of “enduring” appeal of such Facebook apps as Friend Wheel, billed as a “Wheely Good Friend Visualiser.”

Considering this got a green light, things are looking up for me to receive funding for my upcoming project, “Early Modern Marital Dynamics: It’s Complicated – The Tweeting of the Shrew” in which I plot the relationship statuses of major Jacobean and Elizabethan figures over time using a kind of Ur-Facebook made by carving out of the remains of Bebo.

As I twiddled my thumbs in a seat by the gate and slowly dozed off into my bundled-up down jacket, it occurred to me that the end of 2009 has brought about more cumulative net nostalgia than I’ve ever experienced.

The World Wide Wonder Years

XKCD's One-day Memorial Honouring Geocities

Holding hands and skipping down memory lane with the collective web unconscious started for me in October, with Yahoo shutting Geocities down, and the fitting xkcd tribute to the free site building and hosting service that so very many of my generation (myself included) used to launch a maiden voyage on the ol’ Information Superhighway.

Happy Birthday, Dear Internet!

Just three days later the last of a seemingly endless string of 40th anniversary landmarks for the internet was celebrated, with the microblogosphere all humming “Happy Birthday” and a lovely interview with Leonard Kleinrock on CNN. In it, Kleinrock perpetuates a sweet bit of mythopoeia that magically transforms the first word sent via network from the rather mundane “log” to “lo” (of “…and behold” fame.) He gets away with it because, as this hilarious classic CBC clip of the 80s/90s reminds us, “Internet” is pretty amazing.

Blasts from the UI Past

On the same day as Uranium Interactive posted this adorable flashback Christmas card (note to unilingual readers: it’s in French, but you will get it, and it’s well worth the click), The Onion releases the following video, a glorious piece of web jetsam that hyperlinked its way across the series of tubes at an astonishing rate (if my feeds are anything to go by…)

Internet Archaeologists Find Ruins Of ‘Friendster’ Civilization

Rest In Peace

Along with losing Geocities, a whole slew of sites became fodder for the Wayback machine in 2009. As sites have competed for online survival of the fittest, it’s amazing how much people get attached to a certain UI or look & feel. There’s something so visceral about interactive media that takes nostalgia and resistance to change to a new level (just look at the complaints in your feed the next time Facebook tweaks its UI or rolls out a new feature).

Put on The Neverending Story and I’ll get misty eyed, but load up Super Mario 3 on a DS and there’s nothing like finding that first warp whistle… With online experiences, the stickiest sites of yesteryear hold such fond memories because the joys of using, frequenting and interacting with them are part of a slowly fragmenting and shifting experience: navigating a site in its native environment.

Boulevard of Broken Memes

Content is now broken down and cast adrift as digital flotsam on the high seas of blogs, social media, apps, aggregators, etc. The sites we interact with for hours on end are reducing to a core (Facebook, Twitter, Readers, News sites, Google, etc.), many of which are becoming “too big to fail” (but like AIG, it doesn’t guarantee they won’t be the next MySpace). And as they homogenize, the UI differences, quirks and design elements that distinguished older sites from one another are no longer as disparate. While the semantic web is still a while a way, I think the 3.0 shift will eventually have us remembering Web 2.0 more holistically than we recall individual 1.0 sites now.

Pining for the Adored

So what makes me nostalgic? Well, there are so many sites and software, and so little time to write. So I’ll save some of them for a new day. But for now, I’d have to say that hearing the ICQ foghorn or uh-oh! message alert takes me right back to the days when a shrill squeal from your modem was the happy sound of successfully launching a new mission in cyberspace…

Of course, considering it’s an opt-in, global survey, last year’s results are rather skewed (respondents are heavy on the male developer side, for example). But over time, this project can only help us better understand the differences in approach, corporate structure and hiring practices for web-related fields across the world, so it’s in our best interests to spread the word across digital disciplines and industries.

More data will make this survey a more accurate representation of the people who make websites (or those who consult/write/engineer to make them that much more awesome). So if that’s what you do, whether you’re a writer, developer, PM, designer, consultant or jack/jill-of-all-web-trades you should take five minutes to fill it out.

Sweden's number 2 export: body paint. Number 1: thumbs ups.

I for one think the Swedes are commendable for their efforts to fight the inevitable extinction of natural blondes. If we were to map the human genome on an actual map of the world, Sweden would presumably be one big dollop of topographical recessiveness.

Maybe I have a soft spot for the country because a close friend from my time in Ethiopia was half Swedish. She taught me a little, though now I can only remember “Jag måste pinka” (I need to pee) and “Ost” (cheese). Admittedly, that is all I would ever need to survive for months on end in Sweden itself, but I felt the need to learn a little more… Maybe it would make me feel more connected to whatever mystery developer of years past left those telltale Swedish imprints in our code.

So I decided to look up “fail,” which according to Google Translate is most likely “misslyckas” (which is funny enough as it sounds: I wonder if they have a misslyckas blog?) but my hands-down favourite of the supposedly 22 different translations for “fail” is definitely “GÖRA FIASKO.”

Any culture that has 22 different ways to fail must try awfully hard.

While many French interfaces dodge around it by using recevoir/envoyer or importer/exporter for clarity, I think it’s neat that for “Télécharger” the focus is on the action in space (data transfer), rather than whether the user is sending or receiving. In building sites, we often spend a lot of time focusing on labels, buttons and instructions (after all, great interfaces = copywriting) that sometimes we forget to describe what is happening in space.

Liesl: Why does the secret police always travel in threes?

Intrigued coworker: I don’t know, why?

Liesl: One can read, one can write, and one keeps an eye on the intellectuals.

Intrigued coworker: Is this your new project management philosophy?

After a good laugh, it got me thinking about the way we approach and often categorize “talent.” At HTC, for example, our office is in a nice open concept loft space. But there is a short wall, about waist height, separating the strategy/account team from the “talent” (developers, designers, etc.) Sometimes when we have a question too mind-bogglingly complex to ask via IM, we’ll discuss over the wall, in a Wilson-from-Home-Improvement-style exchange that usually clears things up pretty quickly (or leads to long, interesting email exchanges about development/design philosophy).

What I’ve realized I appreciate most in my coworkers, is that they all bring so much to the table, often skills that they technically don’t need for what they do (seriously, many of them can read AND write). We also all have unique points of view (POV), and often debate usability, information architecture, design, etc. to the benefit of the final product. At the same time, we all have our go-to areas of expertise, and when things get really busy, it’s easy to forget our coworkers’ POVs inform the totality of a solution, and we proceed to box everyone up in their particular niche. You have to: it’s crunch time.

But, particularly when in the planning phase, it is nice to know that I’m in the midst of a bunch of intellectuals, and that we can all keep an eye on each other to stay in the game.

CMS Watch's 2010 Content Tenchology Vendor Map

CMS-Watch recently published a neat document they call the 2010 Content Technology Vendor Map. It gives a quick overview of just how many options are out there, and reinforces the message that the purpose, nature and content of your project should drive which CMS you choose. Too often, companies are locked in to a system that does not adequately suit their needs or one that is far too complex, leading to feature shock. With hundreds of options out there it can be difficult to figure out which one(s) are up to the task. And that’s before you start debating Open Source vs. proprietary…

Luckily, the strengths and weaknesses of different solutions are getting more and more coverage, making it easier to choose the right one to meet project goals. All it takes is a little patience, some research and a roadmap and you’re on your way…

HTC Insights

Over the past year, we’ve been fielding many calls from clients who are interested in enhancing existing Web strategies and developing new measures to maximize the return on their marketing investments. So HTC (my company) decided to pool together some tips, suggestions and advice to get some cost-effective ideas out there.