Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science.

My blogpost for #ald10 is dedicated to three women that I know well.

My colleague Joitske.
Joitske has a background in the developing world. She lived in Africa for several years with her family and used all kinds of methods and technology to connect to people and get her work done. These days she makes a living by guiding others online, doing projects from her home in The Netherlands.

She uses technology to achieve her goals.

My friend Lilia.
Lilia practically published all of her PhD online, before she knew what she would write in her thesis. It took her readers seven years to see her complete work. Lilia wrote her thesis into existence and now that she’s known as dr. Lilia she does the same for the life that will be.

She uses technology to fulfill her needs.

My mother Fenneke.
Fenneke has been taken photo’s as long as I can remember. We even had a dark room in the attic. I would often stand by her side waiting for the chemicals to reveal the image on paper. A time consuming hobby and for quite some time she hardly developed pictures herself. Then digital photography became affordable and she jumped on it straight away. Ever since her first digital camera she grew her kit and developed advanced skills in photo-editing. Aged sixty-two she started to give digital photography workshops to help others gain more from their digital camera.

She uses technology to capture her imagination.

On and off I’ve been working on a solution, but without a result so far. Weird things happened while remarrying the separately edited audiostream with the videostream.

A couple of weeks ago I decided to compromise and just use the material as is and start pushing out snippets of the four interviews I have so far (it’s only the first two that have the sound issue, by the way).

As much as I hate to have published this snippet (although, snippet … it’s 7:30 minutes) with an annoying hum, I’m very happy to be able to start showing you some of the material. So without further ado I encourage you to read about and watch part of the interview with Lilia on my In Full Flow project-blog. Happy viewing

Yammer is a tool for making companies and organizations more productive through the exchange of short frequent answers to one simple question: ‘What are you working on?’ (source)

I would describe Yammer as the in-house Twitter for companies, with more than 140 characters allowed.

Since I don’t work for an organization or company I haven’t had the chance to experiment with it. You can only form a network when using a valid company email address, meaning all with the same domain-name. This is to prevent ’strangers’ to get into the network.

However, last week my co-worker Joitske suggested for me to take part in an initiative by her and Christian to join the ‘non-existing organization for independent consultants net4dev.org’. By assigning people an email address using that domain we can now exchange more in depth about work, without having to worry clients (or family) ‘listening in’ to what you’re saying.

We’re only using it for a week and it needs more members (interested?), but I can see this can grow into a great networking tool for us independent workers.

I’ve been missing something at Reboot ever since Jaiku and Twitter were introduced: the real backchannel conversations.

Today two things crossed my interaction stream on backchannels:
1. Joitske’s blogpost on backchannels and she embedded this:

2. Jere sent me a message that Twirc is now open for beta testing. As a response on my earlier blogpost he showed me this tool by a friend of his and it looked simple, yet promising. Sign up for an invite if you’re interested.

Geeklounge Enschede from Elmine Wijnia on Vimeo.

Pedro, Patricia, Joao, Margarita, Tomasz, Olga, Henk, Melina, Robert, Lilia, Alexander, Mark, Edwin, Irina, Ton and me. Thank you for your conversations!

And for clearing my severe headache

(about the number in the title)

Trine-Maria linked to a rant by Clay Shirky on male versus female behaviour. He rants about reasons why men are ahead of women in their carreers. He concludes that women are not self-promotional enough, whereas men more easily overstate their capabilities and thus bluff their way into a carreer. Women could do better when they learn from male self-esteem.

A snippet:

Now this is asking women to behave more like men, but so what? We ask people to cross gender lines all the time. We’re in the middle of a generations-long project to encourage men to be better listeners and more sensitive partners, to take more account of others’ feelings and to let out our own feelings more. Similarly, I see colleges spending time and effort teaching women strategies for self-defense, including direct physical aggression. I sometimes wonder what would happen, though, if my college spent as much effort teaching women self-advancement as self-defense.

I suggest you head to Shirky’s blog to read the whole (long) article, and make up your own mind on his point.

(about the number in the title)

Unexpectedly, Queen Beatrix made sure there was a lot of activity on Twitter during Christmas day. It’s a tradition that the Queen sends us (her people) a Christmas message and this year was about loving and caring for each other in difficult times. Sounds like a sensible message, right?

Well…

In her speech she blames modern communication technology for widening the distance between people. She criticizes people hiding behind their screen, uttering rudeness anonimously. She tells us it’s time to put a halt to increasing individualism and start searching for the ‘we-feeling’. Virtual meetings can’t fill the emptyness created by a lack of togetherness. We need real physical contact to be able to bond with our neighbours.

Her speech was total and utter nonsense. Every Dutch person who knows a little bit more about social media responded on Twitter with pretty much the same words. The best response I read came from my colleague Joitske:

ach ja, zo denken de meeste 70-jarigen toch.. geeft nix Bea!
[in English: oh well, that's how most 70-year olds think..that's OK, Bea!]

In my words: Queen Beatrix surrounds herself with too many grey suit wearing men.

(about the number in the title)

While doing that I noticed many blogs are a neglected space. Several people link to sites from their Twitter-profile which haven’t been updated for a year or longer. Is Twitter the only reason to blame for this?

Last week I felt disappointed with the amount of writing by what I have labeled as my tribe: people that I’ve known for a longer while and have met face-to-face (roughly speaking: the Reboot-crowd). This is the category in my feed reader that I check on a daily basis, but less postings means less inspiration.

On the positive side I guess you could see this as an oppurtunity as well. Less posts leads to less overload leads to more attention for those who DO blog. However, I’m convinced everyone has stories to tell that are longer than 140 characters, so I’d like to call upon everyone to keep/start sharing your stories. It feeds me

(about the number in the title)

The first story I came across was on Bright.nl, a Dutch magazine/blog on Innovative Lyfestyle. They wrote about Dutch author Ivo Victoria who offers the digital version of his debut novel without DRM, but with an ePub Watermark, which makes it possible to lend your e-book to a friend. (Read more about DRM and Watermarks on Wikipedia) On top of that the buyer can decide how much he wants to pay for it, starting from €1.

The second story I read came via Suw. She linked to an article by author Paul Carr, who writes for Techcrunch. He describes why and how he offers his book for download. A snippet of the beginning of the article:

“So that’s your advice is it? As my agent? On the week my book comes out in paperback, I should produce my own pirated version and give it away free? Why don’t I just punch my publisher in the face? That would be less work.”

I encourage you to read the whole article.

I’m wondering if publishers will ever catch up with both authors and readers on the concept of digital books.

(about the number in the title)