cruel to be kind

Update: You shall not post when you are tired. Especially not in another language. And especially, especially not if you can’t tell a Y for an X. Gina is right, she did do something about it, but I misread it. Instead of deleting the post (which I hate to do), go see my glorious failure, laugh about me, and then go think about it anyhow under the premise “what would be a typical female posting behaviour you know about and how could the world change, if women did more using their networks? Because the premise of my posting is not that far away of reality. But apologies to Gina, again.

I was just reading the comment on misbehaving.net about Philipp’s new service Forty Faces, let me quote it for you in full:

Hey XX chromosome bloggers, how about showing your beautiful face on FortyFaces.com? The current grid of photos is saturated with testosterone.

Which is an ab-so-lut typical example of a female blogpost. Instead of doing something about it whinging about being left out as a woman.

Let’s face it: Women are in general not on the cutting edge of using technology. I can tell, because the flack I get from women (about me being weired because I can’t cook, but consider computer to be a fine replacement in my skill set) is quite telling. Yes, I am considered weired to spend time on this ‘dead thing’ with ‘bad ions’ or stuff.

But back to that posting. Misbehaving calls herself “misbehaving.net is a weblog about women and technology. It’s a celebration of women’s contributions to computing; a place to spotlight women’s contributions as well point out new opportunities and challenges for women in the computing field.” As it seems, there is especially one challenge for women – connecting the dots. And let me guess, it is supposed to be a success to have brought Philipp to his knees in including more women in that list?

What I find telling is how bad she uses her audience, or let’s say how bad she is fulfilling the purpose she has for this blog. Why? Is she telling her network to claim their share? Nope. She is whining to Philipp about not being included. About him having a boys club full of testosterone. That is the same kind of whining about being not included at the technorati table.

Because while she obviously does notice that there are only few women on there (I demand more smiling people btw!), she obviously finds it more attractive to blog about that instead of doing what I did: See it, check it and send Philipp the mail with my data for him to include it.

Not everybody is interested in this kind of display, so I figured everybody who would want in would do what I did. But that was male thinking. Female thinking seems to be whining about it.

What would clever female behaviour have been? See it, check it, and realise that you have something the boys don’t have. Working networks. Go to your blogs and mailing list and say

Hei Girls, there is an interesting new service. Check it out and if you like it, go to the about page and send him a mail with your feed address

(Really, really clever would be to collect those information as link to the photo, link to the feed and send him this as a list for easy importing.)

Shouldn’t Phillip have come up with at least 50% women on his list? Who knows if he has not? Because to show up there, you need to post something and have a working RSS feed – something some female bloggers neglect to have. Second many female bloggers don’t have a picture they could show (I am waiting for the rants about reducing people to how they look).

So if you know there is something out there which you don’t like: Do something about it, especially if you have all possibilities at your hand.

And if you know your readers are women who obviously do not know how to play the game, don’t give them breadcrumbs, but serve them a meal and tell them how to cook.

Oh btw, Philipp is a typical one dimensional kind of guy. He only took one of my blogs as a source. :)

Tags: cruel to be kind