Last week I went to the Women2.0 Conference in San Francisco. The conference, geared towards female entrepreneurs, was one of the most inspiring events I’ve attended. Everyone I met was smart and accomplished. The highlight of the show was the pitch competition where startup founders pitched their businesses to a VC panel. The pitches weren’t for small little businesses – these were serious ideas looking for capital investment of 500K and up. Case in point, the winner, Angaza Design, is bringing pay as you go solar power to East Africa.
The day also had many speakers, including crowd favorite Lynda Weinman, founder of lynda.com. Fran Maier, who was a key player in the shaping of match.com gave a speech “Embracing the Female Consumer”. In many ways women have achieved parity or have surpassed men in their engagement with the internet. Women are the shoppers (no big surprise there) and spend 33% more time on Facebook than men. With our natural inclination to network, social media is a natural to entice more women online. Just look at the popularity of Pinterest.
The “she” economy is now reckoned to be 5 trillion dollars, so Fran’s call for companies to embrace the female consumer is not one to be ignored. For me however, this raised more questions that it answered. What should businesses be doing differently? If anything? Take this blog for example, I hadn’t realized this until now, but it’s mostly men that comment on this blog. I had never given this matter a second thought. Like many women in technology, I’m used to being surrounded by men. The Women 2.0 conference was the first technology oriented conference I had attended where my gender was in the majority. So much so that the hotel converted a few of the male restrooms for our use.
I had just accepted that the topics I blog on were of more interest than men. I’m not sure there is anything I can do to attract more women readers. And no I’m not going to change the colors of this blog to pink. But am I thinking too small here?
No one like having their content stolen. It’s even worse when it ends up on low quality spammy sites that drag your backlink profile down into Penguin target territory. If the website in question is scraping a significant portion of your content, like entire articles verbatim, filing a DMCA takedown compliant with Google can be effective way to get it removed.
First, attempt to contact the site owner and tell him that stealing content violates The Digital Millennium Copyright Act and you will file a DMCA takedown with Google if the content is not removed. If you don’t get a response, then file the DMCA takedown request. If it is a Google properly, such as a blogspot blog it can get completely removed, otherwise it will be removed from Google’s index. For non Google properties, select the “web search” option.
Reporting spam, such as paid links and malware is a different procedure.
On a recent trip to Europe I took over 200 pictures with my Android HTC Incredible cell phone in Germany, Istanbul (Turkey) and Prague (Czech Republic). The idea was to not only share snapshots as I travelled along, but also to create an online album to share with my friends when I got back. Here some tips on how to upload photos from your phone that I picked up. Note that this post tends to be Android specific.
You don’t have to have a smartphone to share pictures. Most cellphones today can take pictures and send them via SMS (the protocol used for text messaging). You usually have the option to send a “picture message” to an email address as well. You can do this with a smartphone as well. With Android, if you email the picture it appears to be coming from your gmail account.
As an aside,the Android OS is tightly integrated with your gmail account, for example sharing contacts … in some ways this makes life easier when you are emailing from your phone, but in other ways it junks up my phone with a lot of contacts I’ll never email again. This also can impact your uploads as I discovered.
I’m into the third week of traveling in Europe. As mentioned in my previous travel in Europe post I’m also working part-time while traveling. The first week I spent in Munich, including a visit to Oktoberfest and the second week in Istanbul, Turkey. Now I am visiting Prague, a beautiful city which I highly recommend.
One of the main attractions of the work I do is that I can do it from anywhere. With a laptop and a cell phone and an internet connection I’m work ready and have worked from a variety of locations in California and Texas.
Well now I’m taking it to the next level with a 3 week trip to Europe. Oktoberfest in Munich has been on my bucket list forever and now I finally get to experience it next week!
Other than the obvious problem of mixing work with pleasure, there are some challenges in working from Europe.
I leave in 2 days, we will see how successful I am at mixing travel and work! Stay tuned.
It’s always sad to find someone who appears to have something good to say, and then end up having to opt out of their email list. Often it’s due to the barrage of emails. But it’s also because of the annoying “tricks” they pull. Here’s my 5 annoying things Internet Marketers say and do
What’s annoying to you?
No matter how much I emphasize how important it is to keep them safe, inevitably I get an email from a present or past client asking me to resend their passwords to them. Often it’s the hosting password that is forgotten as it is not used as often as the WordPress admin password (or some other CMS admin password). Since I’ve observed confusion on what each password is for, I decided to write this post.
Content Management Systems (CMS) such as Joomla or WordPress make it easier for non web designers to edit their websites, not only do users get easier to use WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) interfaces, but you are often skipping the step of having to upload your work from your local computer to server (using the dreaded FTP that seems to stymie a lot of people). So where does the two passwords come in?
Systems such as WordPress, can be thought of their own little eco-systems. The web server and hosting account doesn’t really know about your website, it just serves up files to browsers as they are requested.
And writing them down on scraps of paper is not a proper password management system. We all have passwords, we have to remember. I have hundreds. I don’t recommend using the browser to remember your password (when it asks whether to remember the password for a given site I say never). I use different browsers and computers and it’s not particularly secure. If you are looking for a password manager, I use Password Safe but RoboForm is really good too.
Many systems today have indicators telling you whether your password is weak or strong as you create one. Some enforce “strong” passwords, you have seen these I’m sure: eg: has to be at least eight characters, contain 1 digit, 1 uppercase character and 1 special characters. These restrictions are not there just to make your life miserable, there is a reason for them – the more you can adopt these guidelines for all your passwords the more secure you will be.
I’ve been doing some mass unsubscribes from the IM guru’s lists. Too many hyped promotions, too many people cross promoting. And the worst thing of all, it completely distracts me from getting real work done. Seems like I’m not the only one.