Eric Meyer: 'Diversity is Not of Itself Important'
I was disappointed to read this morning that Eric Meyer, organizer of the An Event Apart series of conferences, doesn't think it's important to take proactive steps to recruit more female speakers at tech events:
In my personal view, diversity is not of itself important, and I don't feel that I have anything to address next time around. What's important is technical expertise, speaking skills, professional stature, brand appropriateness, and marketability. That's it. That's always been the alpha and omega of my thinking, and it will continue to be so the next time, and time after that, and the time after that.
You'll note that nowhere in that list do you find gender, race, creed, or any other such parameter. Those things are completely unimportant to me when organizing a conference.
The fact that he's addressing the issue at all is a step in the right direction, since conference organizers are starting to realize they risk a public flogging when their speaking roster's a men's club. I wrote last year about the Spring Experience, a Java event organized by NoFluffJustStuff that was 0-for-38. Jason Kottke plays the same numbers game on his blog and finds more 0-fers.
Whenever someone in Meyer's position claims that he's running a meritocracy, I check the bios of the speakers at his event and find reasons to doubt it.
An Event Apart Seattle in June has nine announced speakers, all male. Though a couple names are so big you'd have trouble finding replacements of equal stature and marketability, the total absence of women says more about his recruitment process than the pool of potential speakers.
I spent an hour looking into the companies and projects associated with his speakers and found 10 women well-qualified to appear:
- Rachel Andrew, the author of 11 books on CSS and web publishing and a steering committee member of the Web Standards Project
- Kimberly Blessing, colead of the Web Standards Project and the manager of PayPal's web development platform
- Elizabeth Castro, author of the HTML, XHTML, and CSS and XML for the World Wide Web books in the Visual QuickStart Guide series
- Heather Powazek Champ, founder of JPG Magazine, Flickr community manager and recipient of a Bloggies lifetime achievement award
- Janice Fraser, cofounder of Adaptive Path, interaction design teacher at San Francisco State University and frequent speaker on user experience
- Kelly Goto, founder of the strategic design firm Gotomedia, author of Web Redesign: Workflow that Works and a speaker at SVEF
- Molly Holzschlag, author of 30 books on CSS and web design, Web Standards Project steering committee member and an invited expert for the World Wide Web Consortium HTML and GEO working groups
- Laura Lemay, million-selling author of the Teach Yourself books on HTML, XHTML and Java
- Dori Smith, Web Standards Project steering committee member, author of Macromedia Dreamweaver 8: Visual QuickStart Guide and a frequent conference speaker
- Cynthia Waddell, executive director of the CSS-promoting International Center for Disability Resources on the Internet, Santa Clara University School of Law lecturer and frequent speaker on accessibility
A couple of people I knew already, but most were found simply by browsing the bios of Meyer's chosen speakers. He could've found these people by asking his own invitees. On Shelley Powers' blog, Meyer made this comment in defense of his position:
... if it's a marketing failure, the conference will fail, crater my bank account, and endanger my ability to feed my wife and daughter.
If his daughter follows his footsteps and runs into the stupid self-perpetuating belief that women interested in tech are outside the norm, I wonder if he'll still find the issue completely unimportant.
Eliot Spitzer Files UDRP to Take EliotSpitzer.Com
New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer appears to have begun legal proceedings to take the domain names eliotspitzer.com and eliotspitzer.org away from Eric Keller, a New Jersey online candy retailer who registered them in 2001.
A Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) arbitration began today regarding the domains at the National Arbitration Forum. Arbitrators will decide whether the domains were registered and used in bad faith, whether Keller has legitimate rights in the names, and whether Spitzer has used his name as a trademark in commerce. He must prevail on all three to take the domains.
The domains are parked today, but archived web pages from the Internet Wayback Machine indicate that eliotspitzer.com was used for several years to direct traffic to eBulkCandy.com LLC, a candy retailer based in Trenton, N.J.
eBulkCandy, which also operates stores at JordanAlmonds.Com and HometownCandy.Com, has been the subject of numerous consumer complaints with the Better Business Bureau and the complaint site Rip Off Report.
On Dec. 5, Keller was indicted by the Department of Justice on 10 counts of mail fraud for allegedly bilking UPS out of charges for candy shipments:
From September 22, 2001 through February 2005, Keller created a series of bogus UPS shipping accounts for the purpose of shipping candy to ebulkcandy customers, and failed to pay UPS for the shipping. The indictment alleges that at the time Keller opened the UPS accounts, he had no intention of paying UPS for shipping services. According to the charges, defendant Eric Keller defrauded UPS of approximately $154,581.
He faces up to 200 years imprisonment and a $2.5 million fine.
In 2003, Keller was sued in Illinois by Brach's Confections for cybersquatting and trademark infringement over nine domains that incorporated Brach's into their names: brach.us, brachcandy.com, brachs.net, brachs.org, brachscandies.com, brachscandy.net, brachsconfections.com, brachsoutlet.com and brachswholesale.com.
One filing related to the suit alleged that Keller dodged a process server:
... Keller repeatedly tried to avoid service, ranging from refusing mail service to refusing to accept service through a car window when confronted by a process server. In the last instance, the process server left the two sets of summons and complaint for Keller ... by the car containing the defendant on May 16, 2003. When the process server returned a short while later both Keller and the summonses and complaints had left the side of the car.
Fuzzy Zoeller Sues Over Libelous Wikipedia Page
Golfer Fuzzy Zoeller has sued a Florida company for libel over edits made to his Wikipedia entry from one of the company's computers.
Although I reported one of Wikipedia's best-known gaffes -- project founder Jimmy Wales edited his own page to remove credit from a former colleague -- I'm a defender of the project. I think it's an amazing experiment in collective fact-gathering that deserves to be nurtured, no matter how many different ways Seth Finkelstein proves it should've been smothered in infancy.
Wikipedia's response to the Zoeller suit has become another one of those gaffes.
Wales often touts Wikipedia's transparency as a virtue because the site maintains a public edit history of changes made to each page. Last September, in a game of mine's bigger between Wales and Encyclopedia Britannica Editor-in-Chief Dale Hoiberg in the Wall Street Journal, Wales made this observation:
Britannica doesn't display its rough drafts, or the articles before being checked by a copy editor; Wikipedia does. We think this sort of open transparency is healthy and results in greater quality than doing everything behind closed doors.
In response to Zoeller's suit, Wikipedia has removed all edits he claims are libelous from the history of the page. No one can go back and review the drafts that are central to the suit.
The following paragraphs, which are still in the Answers.Com mirror of Wikipedia, are the material that sent Zoeller's lawyers into attack mode:
Zoeller went public with his alcoholism and prescription drug addiction, explaining that at the time he made those statements, he was "in the process of polishing off a fifth of Jack (Daniels) after popping a handful of vicodin pills". He further detailed the violent nature of his disease, recalling how he'd viciously beat his wife Dianne and their four children while under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol. He also admitted feigning a ruptured spinal disc in 1985 so as to be prescribed a multitude of prescription medication. [4]
He sought professional help and mended his fractured familial relationships. In May 2006, Zoeller said in an interview with Golf Digest magazine that he hadn't beaten his wife in nearly five years.
The lawsuit, which Zoeller filed as "John Doe," called these paragraphs reckless, false and defamatory and asked for $15,000 in damages. For 13 days, Wikipedia said he was a drunken pill-popping wife and child batterer.
Zoeller's target may be easily found, since the person's edits reveal an '80s hair metal aficionado who can't be hard to ID at a small company.
It's pretty clear that Wikipedia's only as good as the ability to identify and punish encyclopedic wrongdoers. One dirty Ratt fan might have ended the era in which anonymous cranks could edit the 12th most popular site on the web.
Was the First Blog a .Plan File?
The 10th birthday of Scripting News April 1 is likely to usher in a bunch of "blogging turns 10" press coverage, since Dave Winer hasn't been shy about staking his claim as an originator of the medium.
Though he didn't call the site a weblog until February 1999, Scripting News employed a link-heavy, short take, reverse chronological style adopted by hundreds of web publishers, especially after UserLand Software began free hosting on EditThisPage.Com later that year.
The first blog I recognized as a different kind of web site was Harold Stusnick's Offhand Remarks. When Stusnick began his blog in September 1997, he credited Winer and Michael Sippey.
While doing some research on the finger protocol for a networking project in Sams' Teach Yourself Java in 21 Days, I found a site that ought to be mentioned among the earliest blogs: Blues News.
Blues News sprang from the PC game programming community, which had a lot of coders spreading news via .plan files read over finger in the mid-'90s. The first posts from the site, which date back to July 1996, follow all of the characteristics of an early blog.
I've never thought of finger as a precursor to blogging, but .plan files share several things in common with early blogs: reverse order, tech-heavy content and an emphasis on personal activities.
For my book, I had trouble finding anyone who's still updating their .plan file. The last active person in the fingosphere may be Id Software programmer Timothee Besset, who posted on Feb. 2 about a new release of Doom 3.
The Game Ain't Over 'Til the Fat Lady Showers
Michael Medved, the film critic who's become a right-wing radio host, is spending a lot of time thinking about naked athletes taking showers together:
Tim Hardaway (and most of his former NBA teammates) wouldn't welcome openly gay players into the locker room any more than they'd welcome profoundly unattractive, morbidly obese women. I specify unattractive females because if a young lady is attractive (or, even better, downright "hot") most guys, very much including the notorious love machines of the National Basketball Association, would probably welcome her joining their showers. The ill-favored, grossly overweight female is the right counterpart to a gay male because, like the homosexual, she causes discomfort due to the fact that attraction can only operate in one direction. She might well feel drawn to the straight guys with whom she's grouped, while they feel downright repulsed at the very idea of sex with her.
I would be uncomfortable taking a shower with Michael Medved.
Iraq Poll Touted by Drudge Doesn't Add Up
There's a word curiously absent from Matt Drudge's story about a new poll of 800 Americans on the Iraq War:
In the wake of the U.S. House of Representatives passing a resolution that amounts to a vote of no confidence in the Bush administration's policies in Iraq, a new national survey by Alexandria, VA-based Public Opinion Strategies (POS) shows the American people may have some different ideas from their elected leaders on this issue. ...
The survey shows Americans want to win in Iraq, and that they understand Iraq is the central point in the war against terrorism and they can support a U.S. strategy aimed at achieving victory, said Neil Newhouse, a partner in POS. The idea of pulling back from Iraq is not where the majority of Americans are.
By a 53 percent -- 46 percent margin, respondents surveyed said that Democrats are going too far, too fast in pressing the President to withdraw troops from Iraq.
The word Republican's never used to describe Public Opinion Strategies, a polling firm whose pro-GOP sentiments are made clear on its web site, where the company responded to the November election with a press release titled "Public Opinion Strategies mourns Republican losses."
For some reason, the partisan nature of POS isn't being mentioned by Drudge, Rush Limbaugh, the New York Post and popular right-wing blogs such as Power Line, WizBang and Outside the Beltway. The last one's the most glaring omission, since Outside the Beltway blogger James Joyner is married to the company's chief operating officer.
When you examine the actual polling questions and results, POS made some interesting choices in the language for question four:
Which one of the following statements regarding the U.S. involvement in Iraq do you MOST agree with...
17 percent: The US should immediately withdraw its troops from Iraq.
32 percent: Whether Iraq is stable or not, the US should set and hold to set a strict timetable for withdrawing troops
23 percent: While I don't agree that the US should be in the war, our troops should stay there and do whatever it takes to restore order until the Iraqis can govern and provide security to their country.
27 percent: The Iraq War is the front line in the battle against terrorism and our troops should stay there and do whatever it takes to restore order until the Iraqis can govern and provide security to their country.
Even in a poll crafted by a GOP firm, only 27 percent believe Iraq's the "front line in the battle against terrorism," which is the rationale most consistently offered by President Bush over the 1,436 days of this war. Amomg the slim majority who oppose withdrawal, 23 percent wish the war hadn't been started in the first place.
Defending WordPress MU from Splog Abuse
Over the weekend most of my new WordPress MU weblog servers were hit by splogs -- spam blogs created by bots and filled with links to commercial sites.
I added a WordPress hacker's unofficial patch that requires users to fill out a captcha to create a new blog. The patch modifies wp-signup.php and adds a new file, wp-valid.php that generates the captcha graphic using code from the Quick Captcha PHP script.
The first two active blogs to spring up on these servers are Political Fretwork and the Ad Whisperers.
Update: I don't like how captchas break accessibility for visually impaired people, so I'm looking for a way to prevent that.
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