charmed life

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, but I saw a post on how most Twitter users do not use the service, and thought I’d expand some thoughts. The majority of my friends do not Tweet. Nor does my family. They do not care about it. They see “follow us on Twitter” during TV broadcasts and don’t know why they should. Further, they are not getting more interested despite an increasing barrage of the service.  If anything, they are even less intrigued to the mystique that is Twitter than ever before.  Note that some of my screenshots contain vulgar language – nothing compared to Xbox Live banter, but you’ve been warned.

Here’s the “first impression” a user gets by coming to twitter:

 

Independent of all other things, this doesn’t really give any insight as to why people are going crazy about Twitter. If I’ve heard that Oprah and Ashton are tweeting, and my favorite football player, and it’s the latest hottest thing, and all I see is a static page with a bunch of random-seeming terms, I’m not yet compelled.  Further, the major tagline “Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world” isn’t exactly right.  If you make a search like “how are things in haiti” you get a very bizarre set of responses that do not inherently answer the question.  Knowing how to search in Twitter is important, yet isn’t taught.  Showing hashtags also overly geeks up the screen, and in a bad way.  To continue this “new user experience”, I clicked on “pregnancy pact” (was curious) and saw the following:

 

This didn’t really explain anything to me, just showed me, well, the exact type of garbage the average person does not want to be reading.  It’s not even gossip/fun, it’s just *weird*.  Sure there’ll be the occasional clever gem, but for the most part, especially with popular topics, it’s becoming a haven for spam or utter drivel.  Also, as an aside, Twitter should not display foul language to users who aren’t logged in – some people still prefer to keep vulgarity elsewhere. It actually gets even worse if you look at trending topics:

Huh?  No thanks.

Now how about the new user experience from the perspective of following someone they were “told” to follow.  The @CNN account shows recent CNN headlines, as it should.  However, this does not exactly “add value” to someone’s life, as finding CNN headlines is relatively easy to do.  How about mega-celebrity @Oprah?

 

Not exactly new and interesting, and definitely not “real-time”. All we’ve learned is she seems to like Avatar, uses capital letters inappropriately, and then includes a bunch of things that look like gobbledygook.  Why? Because once you do get “into” Twitter, you start using acronyms, links, and vocabulary that make texting look downright poetic.  What’s a ow.ly? Who’s RT? It looks foreign and daunting.  It’s as if there’s a huge “insider’s” club, and if you don’t get it, you feel awkward and alienated.

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December 26, 2009

Trend setters may only be visible in rear view mirror:

I've just found this excellent Fast Company article from last year challenging the idea that there is a 'tipping point' in fashions or trends driven by small numbers of highly connected people who have a disproportionate influence over which new products or ideas become popular.

The piece is based on work by Duncan Watts, a physicist and sociologist, who created numerous computer simulations of how trends move through society in a similar way to how medical scientists model how diseases spread.

One study has suggested that the role of key highly influential people in starting fashions or trends is likely to have been vastly overstated. This conclusion has rattled the cages of many in the marketing world who have been focussed on identifying and targeting 'trend setters' for many years.

Watts set the test in motion by randomly picking one person as a trendsetter, then sat back to see if the trend would spread. He did so thousands of times in a row.

The results were deeply counterintuitive. The experiment did produce several hundred societywide infections. But in the large majority of cases, the cascade began with an average Joe (although in cases where an Influential touched off the trend, it spread much further). To stack the deck in favor of Influentials, Watts changed the simulation, making them 10 times more connected. Now they could infect 40 times more people than the average citizen (and again, when they kicked off a cascade, it was substantially larger). But the rank-and-file citizen was still far more likely to start a contagion...

Mind you, Watts does agree that some people are more instrumental than others. He simply doesn't think it's possible to will a trend into existence by recruiting highly social people. The network effects in society, he argues, are too complex--too weird and unpredictable--to work that way. If it were just a matter of tipping the crucial first adopters, why can't most companies do it reliably?

As Watts points out, viral thinkers analyze trends after they've broken out. "They start with an existing trend, like Hush Puppies, and they go backward until they've identified the people who did it first, and then they go, 'Okay, these are the Influentials!'" But who's to say those aren't just Watts's accidental Influentials, random smokers who walked, unwittingly, into a dry forest? East Village hipsters were wearing lots of cool things in the fall of 1994. But, as Watts wondered, why did only Hush Puppies take off? Why didn't their other clothing choices reach a tipping point too?

However, Watts' work is largely based on computer simulations. These have the advantage of having to be based on very explicit well-defined descriptions of the phenomenon, which many of the more popular accounts are not, but have the disadvantage or having to include various assumptions and simplifications about what actually happens when people pass on ideas.

The Fast Company article is interesting as it looks at how some core marketing ideas are being tested by Watts, and how the public relations world is reacting to having some of their assumptions questioned.

Link to Fast Company article 'Is the Tipping Point Toast?'

—Vaughan.

This guest post was written by Ravit Lichtenberg, founder and chief strategist at Ustrategy.com - a boutique consultancy focusing on helping companies succeed. Ravit authors a blog at www.ravitlichtenberg.com.

Today, it is impossible to separate social media from the online world. Facebook reached 350 million users last month -- 70% of whom are outside the US -- and it accounts for 25% of the Web's traffic, according to Pew nearly one in five people on the web use Twitter or some other service to check status messages, and 94% of enterprises plan to maintain or increase their investment in enterprise social media tools. The social media conversation is no longer considered a Web 2.0 fad -- it is taking place in homes, small businesses and corporate boardrooms, and extending its reach into the nonprofit, education and health sectors. From feeling excitement, novelty, bewilderment, and overwhelmed, a growing number of people now speak of social media as simply another channel or tactic.

So what will social Web bring next? What will "being connected" mean? What will the next experience be for the 2 two billion people who are connected to the Internet? Here are 10 ways what we've called social media will evolve in 2010.

Social Media Will Become a Single, Cohesive Experience Embedded In Our Activities and Technologies

By this time next year, social media will no longer be "social media" -- it will be an integrated, unquestionable component of your online and offline experience. Last year we spoke of cross-platform integration across media sites. Open APIs and OpenID made that possible, and even LinkedIn announced last month that it too will finally open its APIs. 2010 will be about integration and a single, cohesive experience across platforms as well as across products and devices -- Web, mobile, TV, and video -- will become near-inseparable experiences.

Users will access content from any device or platform, co-create and mashup their photos, videos and text with traditional content while interacting with each other. Publishers will create new kinds of content for the connected world, and the last years' lull in good entertainment will finally be lifted. This trend will cut across all of our activities -- from playing games to shopping to emailing and texting -- nothing will be lost; everything we do will be gathered and streamed together, allowing people to view their world of activities as if it were projected in front of them, open to change, review and input at any point in time from any device or online tool.

Social Media Innovation Will No Longer Be Limited By Technology

With Web technology maturing and the near-elimination of previous barriers such as closed platforms and discrete logins, companies will now look to innovate the way they use existing technology, rather than focus on technology enhancements themselves. We will see a move to leverage existing assets -- content and capabilities -- in new ways, turning information to wisdom and insight to action. Whereas once user research required focus groups and usability tests, companies will utilize the Web's capabilities to achieve the same. Naturally occurring conversations will be utilized in product innovation and design, and companies will create incentives for people's attention and engagement while repurposing and analyzing content and engagement in new ways that will deliver valuable input.

Mobile Will Take Center Stage

Worldwide, the iPhone alone accounts for about 33% of mobile web traffic and IDC predicts the number of mobile web users will hit one billion by 2010. As the technological barriers come down, people will increasingly use their phones on-the-go to access social networks, search, read content and find location-based information. Our phones will be used as a central hub and beacon -- enabling a slew of new capabilities and experiences.

Expect an Intense Battle As People and Companies Look To Own Their Own Content

2009 marked the year of open Web, and divergence of content, making content available anywhere, anytime, by anyone and to everyone; it was the year content exploded across the web, platforms and devices. The issue Google solved so magically -- content find-ability -- will become all but moot in the coming years. Instead, content relevance and quality will become the key focus. In 2010 we will start to see convergence as companies take measures to own their own content, its location and its cost. Last month, Rupert Murdoch announced he may opt News Corp out of Google, instructing it to de-index its publications from the search engine and giving exclusive rights to Bing for a fee. This means that content publishers will be able to determine where they make their content available and at what cost.

With the growth of user generated content and the dwindling relevance of search results, people will gradually shift their trust from large aggregators like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, and move to searching and finding content at specific locations and, eventually, creating and integrating their own content hub into the rest of their personal digital experience. "People don't realize that everything they do -- on Facebook, Ning, Google and with their credit cards -- is being collected, tracked, analyzed, owned and monetized by these companies who provide (so-called) free services. It's not a healthy model." Says John Faber, COO of af83, a Drupal development house and co-founder of the upcoming DrupalCon.

Enterprises Will Shape the Next Generation of What We've Called "Social Media"

It was easy to forget that enterprises and large institutions are the originators of some of social media's pillars: listservs, forums, intranets and collaboration tools. As social media became a public domain, enterprises have been cautious participants, predominantly in the product space, with few visionary leaders like Zappos, IBM and Dell. But cautionary they are no more. With a reported average of 25% increase in funds allocation toward social media activities, in 2010 we will see a surge in adoption of social media across product, services and solutions companies.

Having the need and the funds, enterprises will determine the next generation of social experiences. They will push enhancements that meet their needs, specifically around monitoring, automation, alignment with the sales cycle and integration with existing systems, expanding social "media" to encompass the ecosystem of social computing across solutions, and making them actionable for the company. Jive, blueKiwi, Remindo and Sharepoint support companies internally. Most recently, Salesforce.com released Chatter, designed to turn the corporation, and CRM, social. With its APIs opening later this year, "Chatter can become a new layer over its Force platform, already being used by 68,000 customers, enabling companies and developers to leverage the Salesforce infrastructure in a secure environment," said Bruce Francis, VP corporate strategy Salesforce.com.

Next page: ROI Will Be Measured -- and It Will Matter

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Sustainability

Nov 30 2009, 8:12 am by Dave Thier

Image by sabrina.dent/Flickr CC

 

 

Farmville, a Facebook farming simulation, put a survey to its 60 million plus users the other week: "What kind of farmer are you?" Some farmers strive after aesthetics, some after accolades, and some are just about the bottom line. It might seem to mirror reality. I first found the game after a friend of mine gave me a horse, I clicked "accept," and all of a sudden I had a small farm with some strawberries growing. I wondered, what kind of virtual farmer would I be?

Farmville, the most popular game on Facebook, is in many ways a descendant of the classic Harvest Moon series, a still-running franchise begun on the Super Nintendo. In 1996, Harvest Moon boldly said, "Not very much is going to happen in this game. And you're going to be okay with that." The game consisted mostly of simple, repetitive tasks and a lot of waiting. For some reason, gamers really wanted to do this.

Maxis, the developer behind Sim City and The Sims tried their hand at farming with the more realistic Sim Farm a few years earlier, in 1993. In Sim Farm, players managed a large industrial farm with crop dusters, pestilence, nitrogen-based fertilizers and heavy machinery. It was more realistic, but realism is rarely why people play videogames. Nobody plays Call of Duty for the chance to get shot in the leg and spend six months in an army hospital.

Like most sim games, the principle product is satisfaction: Farmville gives you the chance to accumulate things--fields, buildings, animals, decorations, coins--then look at them and feel pleased with yourself.

Farmville is anything but realistic. The game is a farmer's dream: click on a field and it's plowed, never worry about weather, grow full heads of cabbage in two days. The little cartoon version of myself strolls around the fields with blue overalls and a self-satisfied smirk. Like most sim games, the principle product is satisfaction: Farmville gives you the chance to accumulate things--fields, buildings, animals, decorations, coins--then look at them and feel pleased with yourself.

When I began my farm, I put my training in small-scale organic gardening to use. I planted diverse crops, mixed livestock with vegetables and tried to design a place my avatar could be proud to call his home. Some of my neighbors made more money with massive, industrial expanses planted hedgerow to hedgerow, but that seemed to me improper, even on Facebook.

That didn't last so long. I soon fell victim to the glittering lure of making enough farm coins to afford the elusive, million-coin villa. I found myself planting fields to fit my machinery, cramming my cows into crowded barns, and eschewing my diverse fields for a few high-value cash crops. Finally, in a gesture more symbolic than practical, I echoed Chekhov and chopped down the neatly planted cherry orchard in the back of my farm.

Farmville does in fact, provide a good farm simulation in some ways--materials are expensive, profits are often razor thin, and the only surefire way to get ahead is by pulling out your wallet. This is Farmville's secret: the easiest way for a player to get virtual currency is forking over real currency. It seems unlikely that rational people would be wiling to pay real money for a small picture of a baby turkey, but the numbers tell a different story. Zynga reports that about a third of their annual income comes from such transactions.

When you log into the game, Farmville shows you a random picture of one idyllic farm or another--a bountiful field of pineapples, flowers, and wheat next to a little cottage, maybe, or perhaps an autumn scene of maple syrup and bright red trees. The reality, however, is that in order to afford such decorations you must either pay US dollars or plant endless fields of cash crops. Maybe I'm thinking about this too much, but for a simplistic videogame, Farmville offers a curious model for juxtaposing pastoral fantasy with the industrial realities of modern farming. The parallel isn't perfect: I'm pretty sure an alien cow on a real farm would fetch way more than 120 coins.

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This whole phenomena totally baffles me.

Founded by Adaptive Path UI designer Alexa Andrzejewski and Get Satisfaction engineer Ted Grubb, Foodspotting lets users upload photos of their favorite dishes along with a restaurant address. In Posterous-style fashion, you can also email your finds to food@foodspotting.com. From here you can rate dishes and users, add additional details, earn reputation points and follow places, dishes and community members. The difference between Foodspotting and Yelp is that every review is a positive one. Instead of showcasing restaurant rants, Foodspotting offers a visual menu of customer favorites.

ReadWriteWeb got an early look at the duo's upcoming iPhone application. Set for release in early 2010, foodies will be awarded points for their uploads as well as the particular foods they've tried. In Foursquare, users become the "Mayor" of a particular establishment, but in Foodspotting users become the "Champion" of their favorite dishes. And because so many towns are famous for a particular dish, you're likely to see stiff competition for the "Champion" of Maine lobster or Chicago hot dogs. Users will also compete to collect dishes through scavenger hunts and a food passport system. In the future, as we begin to record more dishes, the system will amass our flavor profiles. These profiles will later form the basis for a dish-related recommendation system.

While the mobile application will not hit the market for at least a month, Foodspotting is well on its way to offering salivating diners a chance to discover nearby favorites on a per-dish basis. To register for the site's early alpha visit foodspotting.com/ilovefood.

Good article about the strengths and weaknesses about what is sure to be a permanent part of our online lives.

The War For the Web

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 33

On Friday, my latest tweet was automatically posted to my Facebook news feed, as always. But this time, Tom Scoville noticed a difference: the link in the posting was no longer active.

It turns out that a lot of other people had noticed this too. Mashable wrote about the problem on Saturday morning: Facebook Unlinks Your Twitter Links.

if you’re posting web links (Bit.ly, TinyURL) to your Twitter feed and using the Twitter Facebook app to share those updates on Facebook too, none of those links are hyperlinked. Your friends will need to copy and paste the links into a browser to make them work.

If this is a design decision on Facebook’s part, it’s an extremely odd one: we’d like to think it’s an inconvenient bug, and we have a mail in to Facebook to check. Suffice to say, the issue is site-wide: it’s not just you.

As it turns out, it wasn't just links imported from Twitter. All outbound links were temporarily disabled, unless users explicitly added them as links via an "attach" dialogue. I went to Facebook, and tried posting a link to this blog directly in my status feed, and saw the same behavior: links were no longer automatically made clickable. You can see that in the image that is the destination of the first link in this piece.

The problem was quickly fixed, with URLs in status updates automatically now linkified again. The consensus was that it was in fact a bug, but it's little surprise that people suspected otherwise, given the increasing amount of effort Facebook puts into warning people that they are leaving Facebook for the big bad unsafe Internet:

 

All of this is well-intentioned, I'm sure. After all, Facebook is attempting to put in place privacy controls that allow its users to manage the visibility of their information -- and the Web's expectation of universal visibility is not necessarily the best default for much of the information posted on Facebook. But let's not kid ourselves: Facebook is a new kind of web site (or an old kind redux), a world of its own, playing by different rules.

But this isn't just about Facebook.

The Apple iPhone is the hottest web access device around, and like Facebook, while it connects to the web, it plays by a different set of rules. Anyone can put up a website, or launch a new Windows or Mac OS X or Linux application, without anyone's permission. But put an app onto the iPhone? That requires Apple's blessing.

There is one glaring loophole: anyone can create a web application, which any user can save as clickable application on their phone. But these web applications have limits - there are key capabilities of the phone that are not accessible to web applications. HTML 5 can introduce all the new application-like features it wants, but they will work only for web applications, and can't access key aspects of the phone with Apple's permission. And as we saw earlier this year with Apple's rejection of the Google Voice application, Apple isn't shy about blocking applications that it considers threatening to their core business, or that of their partners.

And now, of course, we see the latest salvo in the war against the accepted rules of interoperability on the web: Rupert Murdoch's threat to take the Wall Street Journal out of the Google search index. While most people have repeated the existing wisdom that to do so would be suicide for the Journal, a few contrarian observers have noted the leverage Murdoch holds. Mark Cuban argues that Twitter now trumps search engines when it comes to breaking news. Even more provocatively, Jason Calacanis suggested, a few weeks before Murdoch's announcement, that all big media companies need to do to cut Google off at the knees would be to block Google, while cutting an exclusive deal with Bing to be found only in Microsoft's search index.

Of course, Google wouldn't take that lying down, and would likely make its own exclusive deals, leading to a showdown that would make the browser wars of the 90s seem tame.

 

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I continue to think that Tim O'Reilly is a brilliant analyst.

« Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter the new communication modes | Main

Thanks Microsoft, Hello Google

Thanks to all the fine people at Microsoft. It was an interesting ride. Four years, 11 months, and 20 days, and I enjoyed every one of them. Well, except for the last few days, that was not fun at all. I hope I played a small part in making Microsoft more approachable, friendly to startups, and easier to work with. Microsoft is a different company, a better company, than when I joined 5 years ago. There are more new people who joined Microsoft in the last 5 years than all the previous employees combined. However, laying off 5,000 people when you have $37B in cash and huge profits is not cool. But hey, thanks for pushing me on to the Next Big Thing.

Mike Arrington at TechCrunch broke the story late Sunday night. TechMeme has other stories. He also did my exit interview last week, and seemed to know where I was going before I did.

Thanks Microsoft, I’m going to Google! Vic Gundotra at Google was the first one to contact me with an opportunity…90 minutes after the news of the layoff hit. That fast decisive action was refreshing, and such a contrast to the slow, secretive, bureaucracy at Microsoft. That speed and decisiveness also reflects different approaches to hiring great people, building great products and serving customers well. I have always admired Google. I am excited to now be part of the team. My job at Google will be helping developers (and startups) build great products and services using Google technology and platforms. Google is building world class products for companies of all sizes, but especially the enterprise market. I will be part of the team to make that happen.

Last week started a new personal journey for me. One without Microsoft. So, why not move forward without Microsoft technology, and try the new alternatives? Old habits die hard, but these were actually pretty easy to break.

Thanks Microsoft Outlook, but I’m going to Gmail. I made the switch to Gmail last week and it has been awesome! Outlook has been an old familiar friend for years, but it was getting kind of tired. Gmail is new, fast, web based, and has all the features I need. I especially like the way it threads conversations making it easy to keep everything in context. And of course the search capabilities are world class. One other subtle thing…no spam. I never realized how much corporate spam invaded my Microsoft inbox. Endless emails about corporate meetings, events, promotions, and CC's on email threads I don't care about. Gmail has been liberating.

Thanks Microsoft Office Office 2007, but I’m going to Google Docs. Hey, isn’t this November of 2009? Why Word 2007? One of the nice things about Google Docs, and all web based products, is that they can be updated continuously with no interruption to you. New features and bug fixes happen automatically in the background so you always have the latest technology…not the 2007 version. Another great thing about Google Docs is the easy online collaboration, and always working with the most up to date version of a file. No more need to attach versions of docs, spreadsheets, or presentations to emails…and then search for another email with the latest version. I have been experimenting with Google Docs and have been able to do everything I did in Microsoft Office. I can’t think of a single feature missing from what I need every day. There may be some edge cases…but I haven’t bumped into any yet.

Thanks Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.5, but I’m going to Google Android. OK, now that I am no longer with Microsoft, I can admit I had iPhone envy. My Windows Mobile “Smartphone” didn’t measure up. But, the problem was my whole family has phones on the Verizon Family Plan network. And, AT&T doesn’t have good coverage in my area. My good friend Rich Miner showed me his Google Android phone last week. It is beautiful, lots of great apps,…and it works on the Verizon network. Awesome! Can’t wait to get mine.

Thanks Microsoft Internet Explorer, but I’m moving to Google Chrome. Chrome starts faster, loads pages faster, and is easier to use. The web browser is where most of us spend the majority of our time. And, most new applications are web based. Google Chrome is making the Operating System irrelevant. In fact I tend to forget it is there…until I see that “blue circle of death”. With applications now running in the browser, the client OS becomes less and less important.

The transition from Microsoft to Google will be an interesting story for this blog. Making the switch to new products and technologies will be fun. I hope many of you will share your experiences too. It is an honor to be part of the Google team. The new chapter starts right now.

Despite starting Blogger, Evan Williams rarely blogs. But yesterday, for the first time in several months, he decided to put the digital pen to the digital paper in order to layout his thoughts for Twitter’s new Retweet functionality. It’s a great view into the mindset behind what is already becoming a controversial change.

Why is there so much controversy? The answer is simple — literally. When Twitter began, you could do one thing on it: Send a blurb about what you were doing in 140 characters or less. This led to an immediate outcry from a wide range of people who thought that it was just about the dumbest service in the world. Others saw the potential behind such a simple service, precisely because it was so simple, and history has proven time and time again that sometimes simple ideas can explode into the biggest ones.

As Twitter grew in size, its simplicity remained largely intact. While just about everyone had ideas for what features Twitter should add, Twitter stayed the course in its core simple vision. Instead, it decided to rely on both its user base (@replies, RTs, etc) and third-party developers to add functionality. In fact, at points, Twitter began removing features (auto-refreshing, IMing) because it simply could not scale with so much load on its servers.

While some might view this as a failure to innovate. I would argue that this adherence to simplicity is what brought Twitter to where it is today. We live in an age where feature-bloat reigns supreme. Far too many startups replace the word “better” with “more.” That is to say, rather than perfecting the product they have and maintaining a singular focus on what they want to accomplish, they keep adding new features either because rivals are doing them, or because users are suggesting them. This is rarely a good idea. One great feature beats a dozen half-assed ones any day of the week. Keep it simple, stupid.

That’s why the past several weeks have been so interesting for Twitter. With its scaling problems seemingly now solved and with enough funding in the bank to buy a small European country, Twitter finally gained the flexibility to address a terrifying question: What’s next?

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Great analysis...nice to see a lengthy, well-thought-out post these days.

What is keeping women out of tech? Do you really want to know?

1 comment  

By Sarah Stokely on November 11, 2009

 

Yesterday, Boris threw down the gauntlet and asked why so few women are applying their smarts in the tech industry. Why aren’t we rising to the top as web entrepreneurs, leaders and speakers? Is it true that “most women never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity?”

So, in the interests of getting all of us – men and women – thinking about why women are often less represented in the tech field, I’m taking Boris up on his offer of a right of reply, via guest post here at The Next Web.

As a longtime tech journalist and editor turned web publishing teacher and communications consultant, I’ve spent the last decade working in Australia’s male dominated tech industry. So I have experienced my share of frustration at the fact that the gender balance is so poor. In the open source tech community in Australia, women make up just 7 % of participants.  I hate the fact that so many Australian girls drop out of maths and sciences at high school, that their enrolments in tech related courses at uni are so low, and that girls are often absent from tech events for students.

I teach web publishing, and I’ve tried hard to instill a ’startup’ culture in my students. It is an uphill battle – university courses are geared towards getting students to complete coursework, not incubating startups. But I’ve tried, nonetheless. Last semester, I invited Australian web entrepreneurs Duncan Rileyand Stephen Mayne to a one night ’startup camp’ in which students had to pitch their website prototype as though they were pitching to a VC. (No, I couldn’t find a female web entrepreneur in Melbourne to join the panel. That sucked too.)

I’m disappointed that despite so many of my promising students developing awesome web prototypes, so far they don’t seem inclined to take the next step into launching them as commercial ventures. I feel this is a touchy thing to say where my female students will read it, but to be honest,  I’ve come to expect that my best female students, who are often the driving creative forces behind the web projects build in my class, are even less likely than their male counterparts, to take the leap into startup land. But I’m going to keep trying, because that’s why I do what I do. I want to help young people make awesome stuff on the web.

In short, I’m not unaware that there is a gender imbalance in tech, and I’ve put in a fair amount of time to organising events aimed at helping even up the gender balance. I have walked the talk.

So I feel qualified to point out two reasons why Boris’ article asking “What is keeping women out of tech” is just, well, unhelpful. It annoys me that so often discussion of the low representation of women in tech is blamed on women. It kind of makes me think of a guy with terrible body odour and bad breath sitting at a party, wondering why people are avoiding him, and then saying they must all be terrible snobs, it couldn’t be HIS fault. My other pet peeve is when people make huge generalisations about ALL WOMEN:

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A complicated, many-layered issue...