Dyepot, Teapot

I’ve been trying to think of ways I can keep people coming back to the Yog’s Notebook site between new issues, and also do more to build a reader community. This week we launch a weekly blog for reviews, links, and other fun content. The first feature is a post from Lucas about Kurt Vonnegut and Cat’s Cradle.

On a related topic, I’m going to be lazy and refer to a post by Elisa Camahort from last fall (this is lazy because I agree with her and it’s easier to quote what she said than give my own version, which would use different words but have the same content).

I have worked in several industries in my checkered past, and I have yet to work in one, blogosphere included, where it was only the best and brightest who rose to the top while the less talented and less skilled were kept back. This was true when I was in the arts; it was true in high tech; it’s true in blogging.

Now, I can understand why people who are already at the top would love to believe they got there on pure merit. And I can understand why other people would also like to believe talent will win in the end. Believe me, I did my time living in New York being a starving artist…I really really wanted to believe it was a meritocracy. Because you have some measure of control over your own output right?

… In the real world many factors contribute to one’s success and failure. If you care about amplifying your voice, extending your reach, persuading the masses to share your political opinions, then trying to improve in all of those areas is smart. … If you want to have anything that really resembles a meritocracy, then you better thoroughly examine and, if necessary, pull down, those who would present themselves as superior authorities.

[That's just a part of what she said, and not the whole context, so you should go read her whole post. I tried to not alter the meaning of her words with my excerpt.]

So now that I’ve posted something a little more personal and honest (not that I’m lying to you guys on here, but I’m more hesitant to talk about things I feel this strongly about unless I’m really angry or think I’ll get a helpful response), I feel a little embarrassed, thinking about people actually reading it. A while back I saw a similar comment, with someone asking if anyone else tended to quick add a few more trivial posts to push the personal one down the page. So I think this is a common problem in blogging unless you never talk about anything personal ever (which would completely defeat the point of me having a blog, IMO).

But honestly, while the internet is wide-open and public, who am I worried about seeing these things? My mother? My boss? (Hi.) Random strangers I will never meet? The person I quoted? (Given that I really like her blog, I hope this wouldn’t be an issue.) The worst that could happen is that I lose my job, no one in the local tech community will talk to me, and people start writing nasty letters to the editor. Right? Okay, I’m done now.

Anne had a thought-provoking post Wednesday about her experiences at Adobe Engage, which is a show-and-tell event where Adobe demos interesting things they’re working on. She relayed a quote from one of the VPs there, about needing to “fight against the architecture of the space” because the event was held in a formal lecture-style room, instead of one where the participants face each other and are able to interact more easily.

Then Anne says, “As the only non-Adobe woman in attendance, I felt like I was fighting against two architectures: the physical space, arranged auditorium style, and the social space, a monoculture of mainly white and Asian men.”

I like this way of describing things. It appeals to my inner geographer. Blogging is a space. The tech industry is a space. They are structures with particular characteristics. And like I was saying in my last post, once you know how something is put together, you can start looking for the place to push to enact change.

(As an aside, my attempts to analyze the structure of things sometimes get away from me. This morning I decided that work reminds me of playing in a Camarilla LARP in college. If anyone from work is reading this and thinking “WTF?” ask me and I’ll try to explain. I can’t say that it’s useful information, though, just really funny inside my own head.)

Anyhow, to get back to the topic, Anne also says, “The world of technology blogging is an architecture of non-participation for women.” As in, the way people gain prestige and attention (and income) through blogging seems to be constructed in a way that tends to work against how women (often) do things.

I’m not going to argue nature vs. nurture on the gender and technology issue, because I think it’s a stupid argument and completely pointless. I don’t have any issue with the idea that I experience the world differently than Robert Scoble, and for all sorts of reasons. (No link. Google it if you don’t know who he is.)

I’m also willing to accept the idea that women tend to blog differently than men (we post less often. We’re less willing to post unless we feel we have something new to add to the conversation. I saw something today about similar gender differences in the publication of academic articles). And if we experience the world differently (in general, on average, etc) it makes sense that we encounter technology from a different angle too. I like to code because I like to build things, but I wouldn’t write code unless I cared about the end result. I think maybe this is what Kathy Sierra is trying to explain when she talks about her daughter and peers, about wanting to play with the product, not be stuck working on the low-level machinery.

Then, if we agree this far: it’s not a leap to say that environments that foster only one way of engaging with technology have a negative impact on diversity. I experience this, I believe it. And I don’t think we need to work with the architecture of the space, I think we need to rebuild it. Maybe not the whole thing all at once. But I’m looking at my own projects, and trying to find clues to what an inclusive architecture looks like. Does everything associated with blogging have to be built like a search engine, complete with page rank? After spending the last several weeks on magazine layout, I’m starting to wonder why everyone’s in such a hurry to ditch print–there’s a lot you can do with the publication as a whole product that’s diminished when you break it up into searchable text online. I’m involved with several local user groups, and I think there’s a lot of opportunity there. I’m sure I could come up with a whole list if I were more awake.

Maybe it’s enough of a starting point just to say “environments without diversity are toxic. What can we build that works differently?” But I’ve been poking at this long enough that I don’t want to just ‘work with’ the space. I want to create something else.

Back to Anne one more time: “I do want to work within this space of blogging and technology and influence. I don’t want to fight against it and be labeled shrill or out of touch or difficult.” This is perfectly reasonable. I think it’s stupid beyond belief that it can reduce one’s opportunities and access to say ‘hey, I’m having an unpleasant experience over here’, but that’s not her fault, and I’ve encountered it plenty myself (not just on the gender issue). What I’m trying to say is that working on a zine has started me thinking about how to carve out my own space. Could I build my own little area of change?

Work is exhausting. In addition to Rails programming, I took on some of the page layout work, and the project management tasks for the site I’m working on, because essentially we’re understaffed. I really enjoy all of these kinds of work, but because I like what I’m doing, it’s easy to spend so much time on it that I feel worn out. I am trying very hard to keep work from creeping into my weekend and evening down time.

Lucas and I are taking a long Thanksgiving holiday in Arizona and Las Vegas starting on Saturday, and the timing could not be better.

It’s already over a week past the other fall holiday, but here’s what we went as for Halloween:

Lucas is Wayne Rooney. I’m Rincewind the wizzard (but not one person asked why it said that on my hat).

It’s been a good (but too short) weekend. I got two pairs of Doc Martens super cheap at a warehouse sale. I’m listening to a recently purchased copy of Bowie’s “Heroes” album. Sputnik is napping. The whole apartment smells like gouda because I just made a batch of cheese biscuits. In a week I’ll be in Vegas (or at least Laughlin, having flown into the Vegas airport, after which we’ll hang out in Arizona for most of the week, see the Grand Canyon, and come back to Sin City for two nights of cheap drinks, roulette, and taking pictures of drunk tourists and neon signs). And I’m going to a Blazers game tonight.

I’d like to encourage everyone who’s reading this through some kind of aggregator (like Bloglines) to switch to the Feedburner source at http://feeds.feedburner.com/DyepotTeapot. There are a couple of reasons for this: it will give me better feedback on whether anyone is reading even when they don’t click through to the post, and there’s a good chance I’ll be moving away from Blogspot at some point, so this will make it easier for everyone to follow the blog even if the actual site address changes. If you’re not sure how to make the switch, leave a comment and I’ll try to help.

Also, I think there’s a Livejournal subscription to redirect. Erin, do you still manage that?

Tags: feeds, syndication, blogging