My emotional reaction to this word when it is used to describe the “Web 2.0″ and “the Valley” leaves me frustrated, annoyed, and irritated. This environment is not about echoing what is cool and what everyone else is saying - this place is about freedom of thought. It’s about having an idea that changes the way people live. It is about Innovation. The ecosystem that enables this to exist is vital and critical and should be protected not abused.

Stop the Echo chamber:

Have an Opinion. It does not have to be right, but it must be your own. An opinion that you have developed, not because you heard something, but because you took the time to analyze the information and come to a thought /feeling about the issue / product. Do not offer up information that you have “heard” as your own opinion.

Offer value. This comes in so many forms; listening, connecting one person to another, and giving real honest feedback…you get the idea.

Provide insight. Be a critical thinker and take a real look at things and when capable provide relevant insights.

International aspects. Try and remember that while Silicon Valley is the “end all be all� in our minds there is an entire world. And fortunately for us technology is rampant and widespread. Travel and seek out others in other markets and learn from them.

I have no idea what sparked this rant or this above list. I have a strong notion that it’s because people building companies and businesses need to have the right environment around them, and Silicon Valley is far to valuable to loose.

This could be classified by some as a rant, yet another angry girl banging on about the injustice against females within the technology industry. However, I think it’s more just my desire to start a conversation around why is this behaviour of celebrating men so accepted?

So what has put me off? This lovely article in Business Week “Tech’s Next Gen: The Best and Brightest - Here’s the latest crop of techno-wonderboys, from widget-wranglers to playlist-parsers. So let’s see, perhaps it’s the idea that in order to be great in tech and part of the next generation you must be a Wonder Boy. Where are the Wonder Girls? I also like this little snippet that comes after the title -
“Each year, BusinessWeek.com scours the tech landscape for those entrepreneurs, aged 30 and under, most likely to shape the world’s digital future.”

It’s classic political correctness and it makes me sad, angry and more determined to make a place for women in technology. I know of plenty of women that are attractive, smart, successful under thirty that sould be on that list. Where are they? Yes, the list is complied of great guys like Mike Cannon-Brookes from Atlassian and Jared Kopf from Adroll, but for everyone of these guys there has to be a great girl out there making things happen.

Instead of inserting the names of all of the women that should have been included, I challenge Business Week to work a little harder, and find something other than our current acceptable picture of the poster child of technology.
While I love and adore them, I’m over celebrating men and entrepreneurship. I want to change our picture of what is acceptable, and that means writing posts like this to make us all aware of how we participate in this.

If you are a parent you will have heard of Club Penguin, this second life for tweens(eight to eleven year olds - still can’t believe that eight year olds and eleven year olds are grouped together). So some background: As most of you know I have an eight year old daughter Isabella. We have a no TV household, meaning we don’t have cable TV. Gasp! I know unreal. However, I firmly believe that little ones need to be out and about not sitting in front of the TV. But on the other side we have three Mac’s in our house, and Isabella loves adding stuff to her Wiki. Add that to my strong interest in social media and social networking, it was only a matter of time before we came across Club Penguin.

At first I was curious more than anything. Isabella a huge animal lover really liked the idea of being able to have her own penguin. So online we went to search it out. We created our account, as a parent you have to create the login and password so your child can not log on without you, very cool. You get to choose from several servers in various countries, nice. Isabella could also play with her mates in the UK as well as here. So then came the part that made me go hmm…Become a Member. Isabella being the curious sort asked, “What is a member? Do I want to be one of those mom? What do we get if we are one?” I said, “Let’s just see how it goes first.” So here we are in Penguin world roaming around and looking for stuff to do. Well, in Penguin world things cost money. And you are only given 100 coins to start out with. So Isabella said, “Mom, we need to find out where to make money.” Well in Penguin world you don’t really know where to go to make money, and then we realized we could make money playing games. Hmm…earn money playing games, not sure about this.

Isabella determined to stock up on coins went to work. Then came the question from the other room “Mom, I don’t want a big screen TV, can I buy another Iigloo instead?” “Or, Mom can I lend some of my money to another Penguin like Max so he has some too?”(have to inject a side note here: Isabella and I are very active on Kiva, so i think that is where she thought of the lending idea, still not too sure since I’m still trying to fully understand the eight year old mind)

Then I got to thinking, having your child waddling around in a virtual world where they play games to earn money, can only buy material things with their earned coins left me seriously disheartened. So being the active sort, I said, “Isabella why don’t you send an email to customer support and ask what else you can do with your coins.” So Isabella said, “Ok that is the place that fixes stuff right, Mom?” too funny. So Isabella and I sent her note to customer support and waited. Have to say the response was not totally unencouraging basically - It’s on our product roadmap and we need to make sure bullying won’t occur.

So Isabella is waiting to see what they come up with and Club Penguin has lost it’s glow, not sure it would be the same for other kids. But for Bella she’s waiting. As she says, “I just don’t have much to do besides, play the games to get the coins and buy stuff, it’s not that fun, I like the making friends part though.” I’m hopeful that they add a new way for kids to earn coins and other things to do with your coins. Have to say though the big parent discovery is that you now get to be a parent in both the real world and a virtual one, talk about a HUGE job…

definition found on Wikipedia - The word itself has obscure origins, pertaining as to when it was first used, but the roots are fairly clear, as Richard Lederer wrote in his book Crazy English: super- “above,” cali- “beauty,” fragilistic- “delicate,” expiali- “to atone,” and docious- “educable,” the sum meaning roughly “Atoning for extreme and delicate beauty while still being highly educable.” I’ve been searching for the right adjective that can describe a smart beautiful woman and I believe I have found it - Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!