Infographic Friday: IP addresses are increasing worldwide and connection speeds are faster than ever.
The big eye-opener in this infographic is the year on year growth of IP addresses and who the big winners were: Brazil, clocking in at 27% and China at 26%. This leads one to wonder how effective the Great Fire Wall of China will be in the future in terms of blocking inappropriate content.
Presented By: OnlineUniversities.com
The new trend in Silicon Valley is the "brogramming" movement: programmers devoted to fighting the nerd stereotype with binge drinking, hot tub parties and sexism
There is a new trend in the tech world, and it's gathering both opponents and proponents faster than Apple releases new iPhones. "Brogramming" is the hot new trend, a new breed of coder that discards the pasty-faced geek stereotype and instead relishes his testosterone while boasting about being invited to naked hot tub parties.
How big a deal is brogramming exactly? Hard to say, as it's an emerging trend, which is more pronounced at tech startups than at more established organizations. A few examples to give you a general idea:
For more details, MotherJones last week published a great post on the brogramming problem and also has a Storify summary of the biggest brogramming Tweets, videos and posts to date.
I attended a session on the brogramming trend at BarCamp Seattle last weekend, and the discussion became quite heated. (Take a look at Alyssa Royse's fantastic slide deck and talk here.) While valid points were made on both sides, what became apparent is that this was the first of many discussions on this growing trend. Most of the polarized points of view centered around personal anecdotes ("I'm not offended if someone belches, so this is just an overreaction to boys being boys" or "I used to have other female colleagues; now I'm the only one") rather than comprehensive views of the effect of this cultural trend as a whole, which indicates that we are still at the knee-jerk-reaction stage of this topic.
While brogramming may simply appear to be a case of the testosterone-heavy just being themselves and light-heartedly proclaiming a new self-identity for coders who work out, engage in binge drinking and are hip enough to attract sexy women, as Business Week pointed out,
"There’s also an audience that feels left out of the joke. Women made up 21 percent of all programmers in 2010, down from 24 percent in 2000, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Anything that encourages the perception of tech as being male-dominated is likely to contribute to this decline," says Sara Chipps, founder of Girl Develop It.
So what's wrong with boys being boys in the workplace? Same thing that was wrong with whites being whites in the workplace: having a self-identity is perfectly acceptable, as long as it doesn't create a hostile or unwelcoming work environment for another gender, race or religious group. What is unacceptable about Klout's job pitch is that it entirely excluded one gender, and bro or no, that is not cool in the workplace.
Try out this analogy. The brogramming culture is inappropriate for the same reason that it's inappropriate to bring a crying baby to your cubicle: both are acceptable in your personal life as part of your personal life decisions, but neither is appropriate in the workplace. Creating a culture that celebrates one gender while alienating and marginalizing another is not acceptable, productive or ultimately sustainable.
And now, I have a confession. I was terrified to write this post. I mean truly fearful. Even now, I actually have butterflies in my stomach, and I'm only writing the draft, for Pete's sake! I'll admit that I am afraid of the label "feminist" as well as the polarized controversy that may erupt as a result of addressing this topic. I am generally a fan of moderation, and I have never enjoyed being at the center of any type of confrontation or controversy. However, this is something I feel strongly about.
The best companies create a corporate culture that encourages creativity, independence, respect and wackiness for all its employees, no matter their gender. Is it okay for guys to identify with and talk about more testosterone-oriented pursuits? Absolutely. Go to those naked Malibu hot tub parties on the weekend and use the word "gangbang" to talk about how the baristas made your coffee. Just keep it out of the workplace.
In Page Analytics provides nifty visual context for clickpaths
Last month, Google launched a new Analytics feature. It's the shiny new hammer in the Analytics toolbelt. That hammer is In Page Analytics, and it's my new very best friend.
From the Google blog:
In-Page Analytics is a report available from the Content section of your Google Analytics reports. It enables you to visually analyze your website pages in order to assess how users interact with those pages, and helps you understand the answers to questions such as:
Let's go find a nail to try out our shiny new hammer, shall we?
That is, with a simple click, the admin can see which menu items and visual elements visitors are clicking on, using percentages in quick visual bubbles for every element on the page. At a glance, designers and marketers can tell exactly which page elements and content are attracting clicks.
At Spoken Communications, we just revamped the corporate website to more closely align with our updated brand message and value proposition. And we took quite a bit of time to create a visual layout that would be both attractive and suggest the most informative path for visitors, according to the relative popularity of each product.
In Page Analytics gives valuable feedback not just on how visitors are using the site but also on the path that the largest percentage of visitors follow. (In the case of Spoken, it provided verification that visitors were following exactly the path we thought they would.)
The information is especially useful for the deeper pages of the site that fewer visitors see; it provides insight as to, two or three pages in, which content is most compelling to visitors. From the second most popular page, the admin can see at a glance which products are getting the most clickthroughs:
A few possibilities I can see for taking advantage of this tool:
For someone who maintains several content-rich sites, this tool is a gem! No more guessing as to how visitors got to which page and why. No more estimating likely click paths based on general page views. Maybe I'm a little too excited about this, but it gives a busy marketer so much information at a glance that I see this tool not only as a shiny hammer to play with, but also one that is going to give me the information to let me use the nail gun more often.
It's still in beta, but to find In Page Analytics for your account, log in to your Analytics account, click the Content Overview report and then In Page Analytics.Google produced an overview video:
What do you think of this nifty tool?
When the client asked me to seek out open source webinar platforms last week, I was skeptical. Open-source is part of the foundation's mission and philosophy (and mine, too, for that matter), but I had my doubts as to how well an open source webinar platform would actually work.
Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the meeting software that I'd used just a week before for a national leadership summit was in fact DimDim, an open source meeting and software solution. After digging around for a bit, playing with the demos and in general making a pest of myself to the DimDim staff, here's my initial evaluation (and Heather Ross, my buddy and instructional design expert, this is the answer to your question of how exactly DimDim is different):
DimDim is a free web conferencing service where you can share your desktop, show slides, collaborate, chat, talk and broadcast via webcam with absolutely no download required to host or attend meetings. There are a few versions: open source, professional and enterprise editions. The free version allows up to 20 participants in a meeting; more than that, and you'll need to upgrade to Pro for up to 100 participants.
Features:
My evaluation:
When this software was being used live, we did lose audio about every hour or two (this was for all all-day conference), but we did get those participants back quickly. The participants were able to see all the slides that the live attendees saw, and they heard the audio just fine as well. When I did a video demo, there was a bit of latency, but that is undoubtedly because I was logged on using wifi and not hardwired. If all video hosts have hardwired connections, I suspect the latency would be minimal (and Kevin at DimDim confirmed this--thank you!).
So far, my experience with DimDim has been fairly positive. What about you? Has anyone else tried this?
A few final commentaries on the show. My additional pick for cool product--OmniFocus, personal task management system based on David Allen's Getting Things Done, both for the Mac and the iPhone app (full disclosure: they are my client for the show, much to my Geek Girl delight).
Also, best booth ideas: Google's installing an iPhone charging station guaranteed a captive audience. Brilliant!
Links over coffee for Monday, August 11th: all geeks, all the time!
Links over coffee--what caffeinated me today?
Links over coffee, Wednesday, August 6th:
I've got my latte and thousands of feeds in my Google Reader. What jumped out at me today?
Today, I'm trying out Cuil.com, the new search competitor to Google, claiming to search over 120 billion web pages. Michael Arrington reports in TechCrunch:
Cuil also claims to have better search results than Google and others based on how they index websites. They do not simply catalog keywords on a site and then rank the site based on its importance. They also work to understand how words are related (France - cheese - wine, for example), to return more relevant results to users.
So I did a quick vanity search to see what came up. As with Google, my podcast and blog sites did come up first, but with odd photos of random strangers attached:
I'm just really wondering who that old guy listening to my podcast is. And who's the blond setting the table next to my website? The Jaiku photo almost looks like me, but it's not.
Was it just me? I did a search for the internet-famous Shel Holtz, out of curiosity, and got better results:
His handsome visage is connected to every one of his sites. So perhaps it's just the plethora of "Heidi Miller"s that gave the wonky photo results on Cuil. And just because I've been trying out 12Seconds.TV:
OK, well, I did it. My new iMac arrived this weekend, and once we got everything hooked up and I stopped ooohing and aaaahing over just how big the screen is and just how bright and sharp everything looks on it, I created an avatar and wandered around Second Life.
My avatar? Maia Sucettes. I'm the one in the middle wearing jeans and a sweater.
So far, I've managed to drop a beach ball onto a table, bump my head a lot, whoosh/teleport to Podcast Island, fly around a bit, and generally be rather confused. I met the Island Manager, who was incredibly helpful and drove me in his car to go skydiving. Kinda fun! I didn't quite have the coordinates to visit Lee Hopkins' space, so I just wandered around and tried not to hit my head.
My preliminary comments:
