Fun Friday - CNET says "The only good girl geek is a dead girl geek"?

As the last slice of pumpkin pie vanishes and the pot of turkey soup slowly simmers on the stove (and yes, I do make turkey soup - it's good for you), a few items for post-holiday tech cheers and jeers...

A guest columnist on Matt Marshall's VentureBeat, in an attempt to appear Internet-saavy, made a slight mistake - he called Vinton G. Cerf, Google exec, Turing winner (among other honors), ICANN chairman, and co-inventor of TCP/IP, a man who has also served on the Board of one of my companies, InterProphet, "Vince". So naturally I pointed out this slight error. And you'd think that would be the end of that since anybody can google Vint - he's all over the Internet for goodness sakes!

But alas, assuming someone will use the power of the Internet to avoid looking the fool is just silly I suppose...

Or perhaps I'm just too "snarky" (no, I don't think it's a compliment) according to a would-be Internet commentator who scribbles that "Vince" is an acceptable way of abbreviating "Vincent" and I shouldn't get all worked up about it, which might be OK if Vint's full name wasn't "Vinton". So back into the breach to correct a shill who's fingers are faster than his brain cells: "After all the work he and the other Internet pioneers have done to provide "instant access" information, it seems it takes very little effort to google "vint cerf" and read his official bio". The moral of the story: even when you're obviously, completely and utterly factually correct, there's always an idiot awaiting a debut.

Speaking of debuts, CNET, a tech news organization that I used to enjoy until it went downhill about a year ago (option scandals and cheap hires will do that) has made my 2006 top-ten idiot in journalism award, and that ain't easy. And Dru Lavigne, who took them on, has made my "top ten smart tech women" list for her Top 10 Girl Geeks list for women in technology. Dru put this list together in response to CNET's completely disingenuous list consisting of five long-dead women scientists, a non-existent cartoon character, a long-dead novelist, a non-tech living "social" newsreader for the BBC, and two non-tech living celebrities - signalling pretty clearly to girl geeks everywhere that CNET believes the only good girl geek is a dead girl geek.

Wisely, Dru split the list into "influential females in open source" and "influential females in the IT corporate world". Also wisely, I made the open source list (#7).

Dru notes that it took her a half hour to create the list "...mostly because I have a terrible memory for names and had to use Google to jog my memory". [I'm gratified that someone else uses google to look up folks - given all the difficulty over the spelling of Vint's name, I was beginning to worry Google wasn't used by anybody except trackback spammers]. Dru also notes that these names aren't exactly star-quality in the tech press, adding "Be honest now, how many of these had you heard of before? How come these aren't household names within the geeko-sphere?".

I can answer that question easily - the so-called tech journalist crowd has always been, shall we say delicately, a mite hostile to real technologists, male and female, perhaps because most of them hated their middle school math teacher and lived in fear and loathing of chemistry and physics (if they even took the class). As such (and I swear to you this is true), many of them can barely type their name into google for vanity searches, much less interview a technologist or scientist, and they get all intimidated reading anything deeper than Reader's Digest "Humor in IT" (well, maybe they don't have a "humor in IT" column yet in RD, but if there was humor in IT, I'm sure RD would publish it).

Because of this anti-science bias coupled with the demands of editors to produce "tech-stuff" (yep, I've heard it that way), a smart woman technologist is the most unnerving interview of all to these folks - unless, of course, she's already dead. Yes, yes, I know - I've written a lot of articles in the trade press myself, so it can't be all bad, right?

Seriously, most editors are very cynical about the intellectual capabilities of their readership. And paradoxically, most bright technologists are poor communicators and writers. So as media is undergoing a tremendous paroxysm while transitioning from print to online, the desperate pursuit of eyeballs through celebrity (or as Dru succintly puts it "...in which universe does the word geek bring up images of Paris Hilton, Daryl Hannah, and Lisa Simpson?") and ranchiness prevails (the SF Chronicle's "Open Source Sex" column comes to mind - not that I object to the content of such a column if you like that kind of thing, but does it have to exploit "open source" in the title when it has nothing to do with open source? Isn't open source exploited enough as it is by companies like Microsoft and Oracle? Can't women write about real open source issues without appearing like common sluts?).

I'm afraid that the open source community just hasn't been that supportive of its women members over the years, and our own internecine ideological wars - especially in operating systems - has led to a very hostile environment and a tremendous loss of talent, especially among women (not to mention caregivers of children and parents). A lot of men and women would say this is starting to change for the better. So to see the more mainstream press moving towards a disparaging view of women in tech just as we're starting to see a resurgence of talent in open source is disappointing. But there is hope - Dru says she didn't have to work very hard to create a very creditable list. So maybe things are starting to look up. After all, hope springs eternal - even in Silicon Valley!