Bb RealTech

Expect breakage...incorporating bunches of stuff...

Virginia DeBolt did me the honor of interviewing me for her first Women in Technology series at Blogher. If you're curious about my early years, my views on the semantic web, women in technology and how to modify the computer tech curriculum in order to obtain greater diversity, whether I like animals more than people, as well as some of the tech folks I read on a daily basis, you might want to check it out.

Warning, though, it is all about me, me, me.

And you will be tested.

How not to attract new semantic web readers, especially among the women. Write the following:

I just thought that this is a smart strategy to make video tutorials about the Semantic Web more appealing to female* or otherwise not so super-tech-savvy* audiences: Just put a Lolcat in it!

Though the author wrote that she matches the "stereotype", which I guess means women who aren't tech and like LOLcats, by the time I followed the asterisks, I'd already passed from astonishment to loathing. FYI, I wrote the first book on RDF, babes.

A reference to females was unnecessary. Surprising, too, from the same company featuring an interview with Corinna Bath, author of the thesis, "Towards a De-Gendered Design of Information Technologies".

Last week, Danny Ayers made a request to the semantic web community at large: that we take turns publishing our own version of This Week's Semantic Web. I volunteered to start, and hope that others follow, though in comments to Danny's post, the suggestion about the Gem of the Week sounded better (and a lot less work).

However, I decided to add a slight twist to my own version of This Week's Semantic Web, focusing not only on the stories, but how I found them. After all, the real purpose of the semantic web technologies is to make information easier to find. How are we, in the semantic web community, doing in this regard?

To start, I subscribe to various feeds including Planet RDF, as a way to keep up with most of the semantic web news. This week, the stories from Planet RDF that caught my eye were the following:

I noticed a correlation between my last two posts on the lack of women at Ajax Experience and the seeming lack of RDF or semantic web applications. Both are based on perennial questions: Where are the women in technology? Where are the semantic web applications?

Next time I'm asked either, I think I'll answer that the women in technology are off building RDF-based semantic web applications. Yeah, that's the ticket.