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.

Keeping Wired Women Working

Quick post about a new service called support.com. I found it on the money.cnn site. The article points out that each month a busy family probably spends up to 12 hours trouble shooting and maintaining their computer. This is quite a bit of time away from those 'quick moments'. The reason for including within scope of the blog is that they have a sweepstake going at the moment called, Wired Woman Sweepstake, to win a laptop and support services. They're obviously seeing an advantage of directing themselves at the female home decision maker - has providing technical support to the family now come up as a skill we need to have? The service is going to be featured in July's edition of Women's World Magazine.

So advice for the day is - back up your machine, you'll regret you didn't sometime soon no doubt according to statistics.

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???)

We Know What Your Brain is Thinking!

Well, at least we know how there are differences between responses to certain situations, or at least we think there are. A new market research technique is being used to read brain patterns of participants in studies. The article is interesting as Jim Meskauskas, comments that we don't need this expensive research to confirm what common sense can tell us. The example in the story is about the differences in reaction between men and women when watching a detergent ad, where the story line has a pregnant woman drop some ice-cream onto her shirt. Men apparently show now stress when the ice-cream falls nor relief when the shirt comes out of the washer clean, meanwhile women show a ray of emotions to the story line.

I have worked with similar systems in user research and it's always hard to determine how actionable this type of data is, and also how difficult it is to be concise with the variables, but it feels there could be some interesting uses of it to make the world continue to recognize how different we all are when we respond to situations, especially genders. Data and sizes of differences certainly speaks in the business world (whether it's even valid or not).

Sites for Women over 40 - My point exactly!

See, see, the momentum is building and women are doing it for themselves! A new website for women over 40 because the founders (including the famous: Whoopi Goldberg, Peggy Noonan, Lily Tomlin and Candace Bergen, and the financial backers: ) didn't think the web was designed for people like them. The site is called WoWoW .

I have visited the site a couple of times and as yet haven't been wooed into WoWoW. The site is pretty sparse of real content as it appears to be dependent upon questions being posted by the site and is then riding on comments from viewers, and an editorial style comment on the comments. Also the design of the site seems to be lacking (see attached graphic)- it seems a mash of styles with whitespace and times-roman font - however that could be me having a browser problem. Must make a note to check it out in a different browser.

I think the founders are correctly identifying a niche that needs a substantial filling but I'm not convinced that this site is the site that's going to do it. The backers have put in $1M, and they have some ad-support from Citi and Tiffany, but not sure that will do it, according to a blog post.

Take a look at WoWoW and tell me what you think of the site? Future hit site or flop?

Finally a Quick Moment!

While going through my news alerts looking for interesting topics on women and technology I can across a posting that was talking about women's sites, although I work at a technology company I'm always behind when it comes to what's getting hot. Have you seen Cafemom? It's apparently a very hot site and has an extremely large following. It's recently been able to secure $12M in funding - now that's a decent fund.

I have just taken a peak, and while the front page of the site didn't seem overly unique or engaging I clicked around a little and then found the Thought Bubble (bottom part on this page link). It was mesmerising to watch the twitter like comments come across the Americas - comments that I might make - about family, kids, home, sleeping, being me. It really was spellbinding for a few minutes reading the comments and seeing the photos - now it is bedtime and so there were a lot of 'getting them off to sleep' comments, it kind of had a digital Walton like feel to it, 'Good night Jim-bob'.

Women Community Sites Growing Faster than Other Categories in 2007

While most of the attention these days seems to be on what the latest thing teens, tweens, or y's are doing, looking at recent research from ComScore, it is reported that the Political, and Women community were the largest growing categories for 2007 with an increase of 35% each. The actuals of unique visitors were higher for Women with that number being close to 70M.

Glam Media was one of the biggest gainers (213%) in the Women's category, helped by the acquisition of Quality Health Network, MyYearbook.com and LifeScript.com.

iVillage.com: The Women's Network also made gains with the addition of some sites like checking out exactly what they are and what I'm missing out on - expect to see more shortly on the experience. I've already peeked at iWin.com and think I'm about to lose an hour or two exploring the site. (Yet again, an experience that let's me get started before it slams with me passwords and usernames - take note website creators, let us experience first before we sign up, try before you buy works as well in the web world as any other), MakeoverSolutions.com and iWin.com. Having never been to these websites I need to do some