Tag Archives: women’s communities on the Net

Shall We Talk? Easy Blogging For Blog Newbies

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Ok. This post is not for all you bloggers on the Jedi Warrior level. We know you know how to blog. This is for all those out there, and particularly women, who have a lot they want to say and just haven’t gotten the hang of blogging yet. ( We’re telling you this because, as you know by now, if you have been reading this blog, we are encouraging women to jump on to the Net and develop their own communities and blogs in support of other women.)

Maybe you haven’t started your own blog yet because you’re intimidated. Maybe you’re just discovering the blogosphere. Whatever the reason, we can almost guarantee there is such an ease and an immediacy and a sense of shared community with similarly minded bloggers, that once you start, you’ll be hooked, like the rest of us.

Whether you want to start a business or a women’s community or a news magazine, you can blog.

The start up is the hardest part – which is probably true of most things – and it is not so much hard as detailed.

If you want to spend a lot of time weighing your platform options and strategies, Choosing a Blog Platform at ProBlogger will walk you through all that. You may want a hosted blog at a company like Blogger or a stand alone platform powered by WordPress.org or MovableType or one of many others. You may want to build your own brand ( highly recommended) , and if you do, you will need a stand alone platform. Personally, I prefer WordPress.org. It is feature rich, continuously updated, with thousands of man hours in development time. It boasts communities of developers offering plug ins which automate hundreds of the most useful tasks imaginable, from SEO ( search engine optimization so your blog can be found) to spam catching to putting in Google Adsense or Yahoo ads on every post. New plug ins are offered almost daily and there is ample support for whatever your needs are. There are many ways to customize the plugins, widgets, and themes or change them with a single click. And did I mention, it’s free?

There are several ways to set up your WordPress.org blog.

WordPress.org offers its own Quick Start Guide, which, incidently points out the advantages of self hosting. It’s pretty straight forward and intuitive, with a well known “5 minute install”, but if you’re not comfortable with mildly techie tasks, such as using ftp, this is probably not for you.

Making A WordPress Blog adds screen shots to the process of walking you step by step through the set up of your blog, using a hosted platform at WordPress.com. Simpler, ( since there’s no ftp or techie tasks involved) but still, possibly not what you want if you are trying to build your own brand, which, one day, you hope to sell.

Paying a pro WordPress guru a couple of hundred bucks to install your blog is simple, stress free and a good investment. We Fix WP Blogs is one example of a provider who can perform this task for you, simply, seamlessly and relatively inexpensively. I just used We Fix WP Blogs for a pretty extensive installation of mine – 3 blogs – so I can personally recommend them. And the bonus is that you will have a WP guru already familiar with your blog, should you ever need help, an upgrade, to migrate servers or simply some quick advice on the fly. There are a number of WP gurus out there, some mentioned on the WP site and others you may have to Google to locate.

Once you’re at this point, you just have to be able to write in plain English ( or French or German or Spanish or whatever language you speak.) Although the program is really intuitive and very simple to learn you can return to Quick Start Guide or Making A WordPress Blog with screen shots, to walk you step by step through the process of writing your content, saving it, then publishing it to the Net.

Whatever moves you or stirs you, motivates or inspires you, we want to see it on the Net, in your blog. When you fulfill yourself, we are all one step closer to fulfilling ourselves and to creating real progress on the Net. So start your blog. And please do share your story and experience with us.

For more, see these:

Yes, Some Blogs Are *Very* Profitable – And Some Of Them Are Women’s Blogs

Community on the Net – The Platform To Network, The Power to Mentor

Women Power: From The Ballot Box To The Blogosphere

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Women Power: From The Ballot Box To The Blogosphere

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Gretchen Glasscock, AdvancingWomen.com

Ok.  So some of women’s power is illusory.  Our foremothers not only got us the vote, we now have more women voters than men voters in the U.S. but we don’t have a single, monolithic voting bloc that can swing elections, although we can tip them.  Women have been successfully split along the lines of ideology, frequently by those who would use wedge issues to divide us, precisely so we don’t pull together as a decisive force.  (Remember: divide and conquer)  Other differences splinter us as well.  Some women who’ve clawed their way to the top don’t want to challenge the “old boy’s network” or “old media network”, because, essentially, they have become part of it.

But AdvancingWomen.com believes, for whichever women out there would like to challenge the status quo, you have to start from where you are with what you’ve got.  Wherever women are right now in our society and with whatever tools are at our disposal, we need to make a commitment to work for change and improvement in the lives of women.  In our government, women make up 18 percent of governors, 16 percent of senators and 16 percent of representatives. Not good enough!  There is one CEO of a Fortune 50 company.  There are another 11 women CEOs in the Fortune 500.  Not nearly good enough!

So that is where we are.  And that is where we have to start.  The ball is in our court.

Susan Estrich, first female president of the Harvard Law Review, first woman to run a major presidential campaign (Dukakis) wrote a book Sex & Power in which she questions whether women are ambitious enough or want power enough to do what it takes to get it. Her answer seems to be: “We don’t want it, or we don’t want it enough to pay the price, push up the mountain, do what it takes.”  And Estrich goes on to say: “You can’t change the rules if you’re not in the room. You can’t finish a revolution without getting in there and fighting. . . .”

Well, I’m not sure I agree with that.  The women I know are plenty ambitious.  Some are a little weighted down by having to work twice as hard as men to earn salaries which are not equivalent but, none-the-less, needed to support their families.  Often they are the primary care givers for children and elders at the same time.  But they are plenty ambitious and that’s why they frequently put in long hours and multi-task to a degree that might drop some men to their knees.

I think, perhaps, in the past, one major road block has been that women have always had to try to work from within a male dominated infrastructure, if they wished to effect change. If they wanted to be a journalist, they had to be accepted by a male publisher, their work approved by, frequently, a male editor.  Same with writing a book.  Or doing a TV show. Whether they wanted to create ripples in the media, academia or in corporate America, there were always male gate keepers and males in control and in charge.  Now, however, the Internet allows women to route around the male power structure and pursue their own objectives, however they choose.  We don’t have to ask anyone’s permission.  We just have to do it.

Today, women stand at a watershed moment facing a meaningful opportunity  to make their voices heard and exert more influence and dominance over their lives and future. The Net today with its enormous reach, its free platforms, automated tools and low cost of entry, combine to form an ideal platform for women to communicate, to build their communities into a powerful voice for change and women’s equity in many different arenas. They can also create businesses, write for profit, share knowledge and strategies, dispense advice and create their own platform on the Net.

Back in 1995, in the infancy of the Net, Australian author,Dale Spender, wrote a clarion call to arms in her book Nattering on the Net, urging women to stake their claim to power on the Net; to seize control and help write the rules of the new platform with its virtually unlimited potential. “In the real world men dominate communication. Men talk more often, they talk for longer periods, they adopt ‘centering positions’ (forcing females to hover around); men define the topic, assume the legitimacy of their own view, and override women who do not see the world in their terms. Much of this dominant status is achieved by interrupting and correcting. …Women are being kept out of cyber-communication with an electronic version of interruption and intimidation … women are being silenced on the net.”  In that long ago, but in many ways seminal book, Spender basically urged women to jump in and start the communication revolution on the Net to assure women would have the same voice and power as men.

The results have been dramatic.  As Cath Elliott points out in Women’s move from the ballot box to the blogosphere: ” Where we once had a very real fight on our hands to get our voices heard above the masculine fray, women have now created a space where we not only can be heard, but if we choose, we can shut out the brouhaha coming from some of the more unreconstructed men on the net. As attendees at the recent Blog Nation ( Ed. in England ) debate discovered, not only is the feminist blogosphere enjoying rude health, but women bloggers and writers are a growing force on the web.

The fact is there are now more women blogging than men. There are those, like ( the author,Cath Elliott ) who have opted to engage in some of the more male-dominated corners of the blogosphere, and there are others who have chosen to create more women-friendly spaces – virtual sanctuaries where women are free to debate their issues without having to worry about being shouted down by men, and where any would-be trolls and harassers are swiftly and mercilessly dealt with.”

But let us be clear.  Women-only spaces online are fine.  They may be as relaxing as a day at the spa or as warm and cozy or arch and competitive as one’s high school reunion.  They may be transcendent in their contemplation of women’s issues or perspective or philosophy.  But AdvancingWomen.com believes women can not afford not to engage in the rough and tumble of real-world debates involving all genders, all ethnicitys, all ages, straight, gay, pro-choice, pro-life, whatever. It’s a big diverse world out there and however much of a Mulligan stew it might be, every one has a vote in the future and we are all going to share it together, so we need to make our voices heard by all, not just the believers.

As Cath Elliott notes, ” In the same way that women have had to jump in to other male-dominated arenas in order to get our message across and to ensure our involvement in public and political life, we can’t afford to ignore the enormous potential the blogosphere affords us for both communicating our experience and making our voices count. And while there will always be a place for (women only) spaces which I cherish — what we can’t afford to do is isolate ourselves completely, and shut ourselves away in a virtual world where all we’re doing is preaching to the converted.

The blogosphere is the biggest public space we’ve ever had; we owe it to the women who fought so hard to secure us the vote 80 years ago to make the most of the opportunities a forum like this gives us, and to ensure that women are and always will be playing an equal role with men in the political and public life of this country, in all its manifestations.”

AdvancingWomen.com agrees wholeheartedly.  Now go out and start writing that blog or signing people up for your own community.

For more, read the following:

Community on the Net – The Platform To Network, The Power to Mentor

Yes, Some Blogs Are *Very* Profitable – And Some Of Them Are Women’s Blogs

“Rumors of Our Progress Have Been Greatly Exaggerated”


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“Rumors of Our Progress Have Been Greatly Exaggerated”

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Feminist Law Professors » Blog Archive » Inverview With Congressional Rep. Carolyn Maloney About Her New Book, “Rumors of Our Progress Have Been Greatly Exaggerated”.

This is exactly the kind of coming together and collaboration of women’s communities of interest that AdvancingWomen.com has been talking about and, hopefully, encouraging.

Part one here. Part two here.

In this instance, Feminist Law Professors and The New Agenda are focusing on the same themes found in “Rumours of Our Progress Have Been Greatly Exaggerated” and reflected in this Interview With Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney by MadamaB, Crossposted at The Confluence and MadamaB’s own blog

Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney is described by author, MadamaB, as a “gracious, intelligent, fiery and fabulous feminist.” Among the many points Congressman Maloney makes is that real progress will come “when there is a critical mass of women in government. Once 30% of our representatives are women ( Ed. some say 50%) , women’s issues begin to be addressed. The United States is nowhere near that critical mass yet.”

What is important, in the context of women’s emerging communities on the Net, is not the specific point a women’s activist makes, but the fact that she is taking a pro-woman stand in a society where there is a systemic bias which diminishes women and results in limiting their progress.  What is significant in this instance is that Feminist Law Professors , The New Agenda, The Confluence and MadamaB’s own blog have all come together on the Net to reinforce each other’s perspective on the themes in Maloney’s book.

AdvancingWomen.com‘s position is that “it is important that a meaningful part of content on the Net be shaped and produced by women and offer new paradigms to support women’s advancement…. Our first task is to foster a sense of inclusive community among women’s groups with many different agendas and ideologies because that is the catalyst which will drive open communication among them and form the foundation for both networking, and its further evolution into a support system….
To achieve women’s advancement in many areas – business, law, politics, academia –  we need a critical mass of women and women’s organizations to share their knowledge and strategies.”

When AdvancingWomen.com sees women’s groups like Feminist Law Professors , The New Agenda, The Confluence and MadamaB come together to share their knowledge and strategy, we feel very encouraged that the first steps towards that synergistic nexus of women’s communities on the Net has been taken and its evolution in growth and influence has begun.

When we look at the tools women have created or managed on the Net, a common theme runs through them: “Tina Sharkey at Johnson & Johnson’s (JNJ) BabyCenter ( networking and sharing information about child care and child raising); Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr (photo sharing); Mena Trott, co-founder and president of blogging powerhouse Six Apart ( connecting and communication through blogging); and Gina Bianchini, CEO of Ning, which lets users build their own social networks ( do it yourself, customized social networking)”.  In one way or another, all these women have addressed the technical “how to” part of the equation of women’s communicating and networking on the Net.  Other groups, many just now forming, are driven by the need to fill this new engine for thought and dialogue with their own passion, to level the playing field for themselves and other women.

In the beginning,  many purposeful and committed women may have found themselves a bit put off by the jarring disconnect of the techie culture, in contrast with their own more reflective styles. Very young men in tight T shirts with screaming logos or rebellious, clever or obscure quotations, slumped in bean bag chairs for an all night “hackathon” until some got leg burns from their lap tops, amid crumpled, empty pizza boxes, crushed Red Bull cans and blaring music pulsating through a giant open space, frequently a loft or run down office. Was there a flash of genius there?  Definitely, sometimes.  Mostly they could have produced the same work from 9 to 5 but the crazy hours and adrenalin high were all part of the exuberant experience for them.

For equally driven women, either in their corner office, having fought tooth and nail to get there, or who might have met at Starbucks for a latte or a caramel frappe, or be sipping oolong tea on their deck or multi-tasking in their home office, Blackberry in one hand, baby on a hip, stepping over the tennis shoes of their son, roughly the same age as the founders of some of the new Net companies like Facebook….there may have been a sense that they didn’t belong in this new Net frontier.  Not that the wonderboys were swinging open any doors for them.  But women have long ago learned no one is swinging open any doors for them.  If women want to walk into the tech scene and become powerhouses on the Net, we have to step up, open our own doors and “make the path by walking on it.”

AdvancingWomen.com has no doubt that women will go for it and stake our own claim to our sphere in the Networked world, particularly now that the social networking era with all of its new, automated tools is upon us. We have a hunch that “our” Net, the “women’s communities’ Net” will be different.  It will be less about technical wizardry…..not that we don’t appreciate every ounce of that as it makes our work easier….give us those WordPress plug ins by the barrel full; it will be more about solving deep rooted problems woman have faced.  It will be less about reaching out for new Net frontiers to conquer, than working together to reshape attitudes and stereotypes from the past that have prevented us from crossing old frontiers.

This time, we don’t have to ask permission to join the “old boys’ game”.  ( Many of the old boys got “kicked under the bus” by the wonderboys anyway.)  This time we have the tools and the ability to use the Net to route around the existing power structure, bypass the gate keepers, and ignore the often condescening “talking heads”  to speak directly to each other, each from our own community of interest reaching out to like-minded others.

Also see:

Community on the Net – The Platform To Network, The Power to Mentor

Don’t Cry for Us, Silicon Valley

Don’t Cry for Us, Silicon Valley

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Don’t Cry for Us, Silicon Valley.

You already know, or should, that AdvancingWomen.com is hard at work leveling the playing field for women in careers and business, and in the political arena.  What you may not know and what we will tell you now….Shhhh…is that our hidden agenda is to get women’s communities to step up, get on the Net and start mentoring other women in the fields nearest and dearest to them.  That is why we hope women will start exploring some of the new and easy tools available to them and the new breed of women at the helm

So… as a start.. we want to share some of Sarah Lacy ‘s writing with you:

” The fact is, there is a dearth of women at the CEO level in techdom. But make no mistake: There’s a solid core of female leadership right near the top of such companies as Oracle (ORCL), Google (GOOG), and Hewlett-Packard that will no doubt set the tone in tech for years to come.

What’s even more exciting to me is the base of newly empowered and scrappy women working their way up at the startup level. You’ve never heard of scores of them, but these women you have: Tina Sharkey at Johnson & Johnson’s (JNJ) BabyCenter; Caterina Fake, who co-founded Flickr and sold it to Yahoo! (YHOO); Mena Trott, co-founder and president of blogging powerhouse Six Apart; and Gina Bianchini, CEO of Ning, which lets users build their own social networks. And no, Google’s no longer a startup, but there’s good reason to keep an eye on Marissa Mayer, the company’s vice-president for search products and user experience.

Finally, their impact on other women in the Valley has been profound. Dozens of women gather at monthly events put on by a group called Girls in Tech,(an organization that focuses on the collaboration, promotion, growth and success of women in the technology sector)…..The number of women milling around the Valley and talking about starting their own business is increasing dramatically, even if we haven’t seen many hot startups emerge yet. When they do, they’ll have plenty of smart-women role models to follow.”

I met Sarah Lacy a few weeks ago at The Austin Tech Happy Hour at The Marq (6th and Congress) .  Amidst a packed and increasingly noisy crowd of techs, VCs, entrepreneurs, Austin boosters, money guys, climbers, aspiring bloggers and the occasional real Web success, Sarah was sitting quietly at a table in the corner, chatting with whoever approached and signing copies of her new book “Once You’re Lucky Twice You’re Good — The Rebirth of the Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0 ” . She was very approachable and quite engaging.  When I got home and had a chance to read her book…almost in one sitting… I found it riveting… fascinating insider stuff, quite knowledgable, well researched with plenty of one on one meetings with the Valley icons and wonderboys: a rare window into the entire chaotic ambiance, Red Bull and pizza nights of the start ups, the quirky personalities of the very young founders, and a spot where a $30 million deal is considered small potatoes. All in all a great read.  Sarah has a hip, Valley Girl writing style and sensibility that I think almost anyone would enjoy. I know I did.

Sarah writes the Valley Girl column for BusinessWeek and co-hosts Tech Ticker on Yahoo! Finance.

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Community on the Net – The Platform To Network, The Power to Mentor

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AdvancingWomen.com

Community on the Net has a transcendent role as , simultaneously, the beginning, means and end product of networking and the development of community, specifically women’s communities.

Back in 1996 when AdvancingWomen.com was one of the first women’s sites on the Net, joining the scientists, engineers, government workers, and a few bold pioneers, we were just entering a whole new world and a new era, and much like the dinosaurs crawling out of the swamps, when we saw the light, we must have blinked.
I remember writing articles to explain to women what “Cyberspace” was, what emails and chat rooms were, and how to use them. But, since then, in our new networked world, we have all gotten up to speed and gone on to become prolific users of YouTube,  Facebook, Tweet and the entire blogosphere and  social networking panorama.
I look back and see how remarkably prescient some of those early  articles were.  Somehow we knew “As consumers grow familiar with the Net, their appetite for real time information, delivered in the most convenient and accessible way will continue to increase voraciously. People will want news, weather, the ability to order books or cars, to get a map, access a how-to site, or ring up a sale on an antique listed on eBay, all from their cell phone, Palm Pilot, Blackberry or even their watch.”
Probably it was Bill Gates or possibly Steve Jobs who foresaw that future, even then.
But, even then, AdvancingWomen.com knew two important things:


1. There are unique characteristics of the Net which make it an ideal vehicle for community formation and networking


2. Women’s communities on Net in could play a pivotal role in establishing a electronic networking structure to support other women.


The quintessential experience on the Web is the formation of communities of common interests. This capability of the Net to break down masses of people into communities of interest is a critical factor. AdvancingWomen.com believes it is important that a meaningful part of content on the Net be shaped and produced by women and offer new paradigms to support women in their attempt to advance. The Internet has empowered us to become a nation of citizen journalists,  sending in our videos of hurricanes to CNN, and writing on our blogs about what matters most to our communities of interest. The Net today, particularly with its new, free communication platforms such as Workpress, and the many automated blogging and social networking tools available, opens up the potential for an historic landmark in serious communication. It advances women’s hope that women around the world will accept this challenge and choose to use the advantages they have been blessed with — their education, talent, abilities and determination — to advance women everywhere.
Our first task is to foster a sense of inclusive community among women’s groups with many different agendas and ideologies because that is the catalyst which will drive open communication among them and form the foundation for both networking, and its further evolution into a support system. Ideally, a support system requires cohesiveness. A group with common goals can build on a shared history, shared experiences.  We do not have to share all our beliefs and ideologies.  We just have to share the belief that there is still work to be done for women to advance, and share our binding common commitment to that goal.
To achieve women’s advancement in many areas – business, law, politics, academia –  we need a critical mass of women and women’s organizations to share their knowledge and strategies. We need ” to use more of what (women already ) know, to create opportunities for private knowledge to be made public and tacit knowledge to be made explicit” . Communities of interest foster teamwork, nourish social forms of learning and provide a means to capture, synthesize and formalize knowledge, to marshal its use into action plans.  All of this can be captured and put forth on the Net.

Perhaps the most exciting part of the Net are the new communities being forged with new perceptions, new alliances, new agendas and a focus on communication as a means to achieve their goals. Site by site these women’s communities are forming a nucleus of a women’s support structure on the Net, not just to address a single issue, but to support women in all their multi-faceted challenges, from careers and education to seeking family friendly legislation and more women legislators.
AdvancingWomen.com is one such community, which fuses the power of the Net, as a communication, networking and information tool, with the compelling agenda of women seeking the most effective means to advance their careers or business.
The New Agenda , a non-partisan women’s group, seeks to bring about a systemic change in the way women are treated in the media, by the government, at the workplace, and at home, working towards parity in the government and in the workplace.
There are  many such women’s groups working on the Net to advance women.
But there is much which remains to be done. The Net is not a passive experience in which you are fed news or entertainment; the Net is an interactive medium which encourages participation and response and features two way communication, forums, group discussions, debate, voting. You can get on the Net and , by participating, help shape it into what you want it to be.  You can choose to harness the power of the Net to make progress for women so their voices will be heard and they will have equal access to pay and power and benefits. The Internet is very much like democracy in that ,even if you are entitled to vote, you must still get out and do it yourself. You can’t assign it and you can’t delegate it . You must do it yourself.
As an old proverb says, you make the path by walking on it. And you put the Web to Work for women by networking on it. Who better to shape the future of the Net, than you?

AdvancingWomen.com

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