Getting Above the Glass Ceiling Before It Forms

Blogher.com has just hosted it's conference. Sounds like it was a wonderful event. The one fact that I picked up from the NYT article was that among internet users 14% of men blog, and 11% of women, however when it comes to top bloggers it is rare to find women's names in the list.

Who sets the rules for which candidates are selected for top listings? We need more influence in these lists, but again its legacy of a old system to judge new contributions. I use google alerts to help me keep up with topics to post on this blog. I love receiving custom news snippets about things I care about, I can never tell if I'm not paying attention to enough main stream news/technology media, or whether I don't find it appealing because of bias in the content (not the reporting but the styles don't resonate with my needs). There is more data today about our buying purchase power, our income, and our capability to set up businesses. I would love to see as new avenues for communication become available or new topics get hot women are able to play stronger roles in the first rounds, so as to not leave us on the outside trying to get in after the fact. Any ideas how we can do this?

Repeating What Women Want - How is it Possible?

Here's a neat article on 'What Women Want' that documents the growth of the Lifetime Movie Network. This network launched in 1998. In 5 years it ended up with 4 million subscribers. It now boasts of 334K viewers in primetime network for 18+ women which is considered a prime segment. What I particularly like pulling from the article is this quote:

"Based on hundreds of focus groups and polls, Greco said, “Today’s woman, whether it’s real or perceived, feels like she’s really busy and has a fully loaded, hectic life.” Knowing that, LMN executives are attempting to portray and position the network as a TV destination that allows for a temporary escape. “It’s a place designed specifically for them, where they can take a break and escape, unwind, and have some personal time,” Greco said.

This again exactly maps to the philosophy of this blog - quick moments - that bring pleasure, and a break from everything else, where the experience is beautiful and the technology dissolves into the background. LMN has been experimenting with webisodes , they're getting into their strides with this. What other ways can we leverage technology to give us that momentary break and we can be immersed in the flow of the experience.

A Glut of Women in the News and Making News

Lots of things of interest here. First the website - Newsonwomen is a neat find - a website that is focused on Women in the News. There's nothing more empowering some days than to read about a slew of women who are succeeding, if in doubt about how to succeed take a look here and be inspired. The article that caught my attention is related to a kickoff event called, 'Women Making a Difference in Digital Media'.

While looking at the presenters at the event I found out about Natalie Del Conte and 'Loaded', Natali kicked off an online series around CES season earlier this year. I've just taken a glimpse at a couple of the daily episodes. Its fast, happy, and an E! type of presentation but of technology. Natali does a nice job of presenting the facts and also has quick insightful one liners about 'her' perspective on the technology, position, or whatever. Her philosophy is generally that there are a lot of technology shows about the 'specs' but not about the 'personal experience', she hesitates when saying that women are more attracted to the personal experience as she doesn't want to offend but honestly I think she's onto something. It has the lightweight appeal of glamour mag show, but actually is informative and just the sort of information you might need to have to drop in a technology conversation, or appear tech savvy - but the great part of it here is it is consumable by non-hard core geeks, and will help you stay up to date, with the added refreshment of a female commentary.

Worth taking this podcast to the gym (now if only I could findmy podcast player wire to connect to the PC, and figure out how to download the podcast, and remember to have it charged when at the gym.... any solution for that anyone???)

SheZoom! it's kinda YouTube for Women

A new beta site opened up this week called SheZoom! It's a managed , video site that is aiming at the female audience - it's goal is motivate women to better themselves and others. It is currently pre-populated with a lot of video content, with it's final goal to have both produced content and user content. There are sound bites of video street commentary - the video I saw on gadgets was a random set of people identifying their favorite gadget. 'What makes a woman sexy?' also was a random set of people from the streets providing short comment with their opinions - nothing outrageous, it was pretty tame stuff - mostly comments of the 'confidence', 'eyes', type.

I also saw an article on nutrition which was an expert asking questions and quizzing the viewer on what they knew about nutrition in food.

Now this site is still in it's beta phase and quality of content is going to be critical to the site. The question is whether women are going to step up to provide content to this female community. So far the research suggests women are more consumers of video content than creators of YouTube types of video, however may be there are some budding broadcasters out there who are looking for the right supportive venue to get started in saying something. It will be interesting to see if the site can gain critical mass of followers and content creators to be successful.

SheZoom's founder is Stacey Artandi. I will return to the site in a month to see how it's doing.

Your Phone Video Clips in Overheated Symphony

I love media projects like this that take aspects of real life from around the world and creatively assemble them for a larger audience enjoyment. There is a film festival about to start in England called Birds Eye View (March 6-19). One creative project they have running is to collect phone videos (40 second to 4 minutes) submitted by women to their site. On March 9th Sarah Turner (film editor) will edit the clips to produce a film called Overheated Symphony. The film will be shown at the festival and then posted on their site.

What a fascinating project to get insights from women around the world - so many voices to listen to. I can't wait to see what they come up with. Video is being used much more now not only in casual home postings, but also as a medium to post comment to blogs or video postings. I'm curious to see how well video takes off as a feedback mechanism for companies. In my work as a user researcher we have known for years that a power video clip of a user having difficulties can impact a team to respond more than heaps more research and numbers. How will the use of video feedback to companies empower, or not women to impact the products they want? What types of skills will companies need to understand free form video feedback? Given women are known to be better at interpreting non-verbal communication will they be better judges of content? There are some interesting times ahead in the use of video.