Ada Lovelace Day - Shelley Powers
Ada Lovelace Day, "Bringing women in technology to the fore", is an "international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.". This is belated, but here's a short participation post.
I'll pick Shelley Powers, who is living proof that the A-list is far less of a meritocracy than it tells itself, and very much an old-boy's club
Point of fact, if you follow the thread of this discussion, you would see something like Dave linking to Cory who then links to Scoble who links to Dave who links to Tim who links to Steve who then links to Dave who links to Doc who follows through with a link to Dan, and so on. If you throw in the fact that the Google Guys are, well, guys, then we start to see a pattern here: men have a real thing for the hypertext link.
Whoever thinks "hyperlinks subvert hierarchy" is severely mistaken.
By Seth Finkelstein | posted in cyberblather | on March 25, 2009 11:59 PM (Infothought permalink)
Sorry I missed Ada Lovelace Day. And I second your endorsement of Shelley. But why speak in the present tense about (what I take to be) alleged sexism by male "A-list" bloggers by pointing to a pair of posts from 2005? Do you find anything in what I'm posting *now* to support the characterization?
Doc, I haven't been reading you as regularly these days as I once did years ago (bad risk/return for me, given our very different worldviews). So I can't comment about you personally. You're a nice guy, then and now. But overall, with the consolidation of blogging (in the sense of punditry, not diary/chat) into a social media business, and the relative stifling of the "unedited voice" in favor of the "personal brand", I'd say the general situation has gotten worse than 2005.
Note the problem is not sexism in the personal sense of a prejudice against women. Rather, the "power law" indicates per-topic, attention is dominated by a very small group, and sociologically such a group tends to consist of those with the most power in society (which here means older white males).