Recently I was interviewed by a graduate student who was working on a thesis about representations of female sexual empowerment in popular culture. Much of our conversation centered on women's usage of the internet. One of the first questions she asked me was whether I thought there was still a stigma against women being openly sexual online. After stumbling over my words because I couldn't get the "yes" out fast enough, I gave her an example that shows just how much of a problem this is.

I go to a lot of conferences, unconferences, and all variety of social media-oriented events. Frankly, I'm feeling a little conferenced out at this point. Anyway, at each of these events I go to, there's almost always a panel or session or discussion group focused on the question of how to "present yourself" online – usually framed in a business context. And even if there isn't a session nominally devoted to this topic, it ends up coming up sooner or later. It's obligatory, just like the incessant "bloggers vs. journalists" debate.

These discussions can get quite heated, with people becoming very earnest about not wanting to look "unprofessional" online. Women in particular tend to get very worked up about it (which isn't surprising; there are expectations placed on us that men won't ever experience). Without fail, the ultimate example of "unprofessional" is always something sexual. Someone will be ranting about the presentation of their professional demeanor online and attracting new clients and blah blah blah, and it's only a matter of time before they make an offhand remark like, "So, I'm not going to go around posting naked pictures or anything!" Such comments are usually received with much laughter and nodding in agreement.

So, YES, if one's sexuality is the ultimate representation of what it means to be unprofessional, then absolutely we have a problem here.

A February 21 New York Times article ("Sorry, Boys, This Is Our Domain") states that teenage girls far outnumber teenage boys in the creation of web content such as blogs, web sites, and original graphics. Some of these teens have created viable businesses out of their online efforts, such as Chloe Spencer of The Ultimate Neopets Cheats Site and Martina Butler of Emo Girl Talk.

In the working world of adults, however, the number of women in computer-related fields is still very small, with women holding only 27 percent of such jobs. In the next decade, will we see vast changes in the gender balance of the tech industry?

The New York Times piece holds the less-than-optimistic view that while girls outnumber boys in web content creation, those same girls are not trending toward advanced programming classes, undergraduate majors in computer science or math, and the like. It attributes this to girls being attracted to creative use of existing technology, rather than the invention of new technology.

I'm not so quick to wring my hands, though.

With each passing day, I think it makes less and less sense to draw a dividing line between what constitutes a computer-related field and what doesn't. We're very rapidly coming to a point where such lines are not only arbitrary, they're downright moot. As technology, and especially web technology, moves into more aspects of our lives, we can see it fitting comfortably into jobs that never before would've been considered "technical" -- such as teaching, healthcare, real estate, public relations, food service, and countless more. A fundamental tenet of social media is that it connects people and enhances our ability to do what we already love doing.

Maybe the real question, then, is not whether the blogging/coding/podcasting girls of today will grow up to become software engineers, but to what kinds of interesting and innovative uses they will apply their skills in their chosen field. We'll just have to wait and see, but my sans crystal ball prediction is that we won't be disappointed.

With everyone and their cousin busy idea farming for the next monster Web 2.0 social media community site, there are going to be some oddities. And Product Clash, despite the "sounds good on paper" concept, is shaping up to be one of them.

The idea is this: you have a bunch of products like game consoles, cameras, or mp3 players and match them up against a similar product in a 1-on-1 "clash." After registering for a Product Clash account, you can then vote for your favorite item of consumer merchandise by clicking on a link called "clash this!" You can also leave behind comments and blog about the clashes or click an affiliate link to order the item.

Right. But there are some obvious problems. For one, if the site is attempting to break into the comparison shopping niche by disguising itself as a social media site it's in trouble because it isn't any good at either. Besides a rundown of technical data, it has very little information on the products. That, and outlets for fanboys/girls of virtually any product are countless.

The Internet already saturated with resouces on consumer electronics, the future of Product Clash looks like a long uphill battle if not outright grim. Even though it is still in beta, a large problem remains: "clashing" products just isn't very much, well, fun. And a glossy Web 2.0 interface is not going to help.

[via TechCrunch]

There's no doubt that Facebook is the 'most' popular social networking site to hit the scene. This one, unlike LinkedIn (although it has a whole other target, however users seem to be sliding towards Facebook recently), MySpace, and Friendster, seems like it could quite possibly be here to say. The proof is in the numbers.

Shrel Israel, social media guru, picked up the phone and contacted the corporate communications people at Facebook to get some numbers straight, here are some interesting tidbits he found out:

• Over 150,000 registrants daily since January.
• 35 million current users.
• In September there were no users from outside colleges, today that user base consists of over half.
• Average visitor stays for 20 minutes.
• 47,000 Facebook groups.
• More than 2000 applications.

The numbers speak for themselves. Facebook has grown in extreme popularity in such a very short time. If they keep this up, and keep users happy, they will be the leader for quite some time.

[via Web-Strategist]

Gen Y, a term sometimes used for those 20-35 years old, are old enough to be (some of) our kids but more importantly make up our next generation of clients. This generation, defined more by popular culture than by age, is an Internet-hungry and online-casual bunch. Currently, there are about 76 million of them in the U.S., not a bad market slice.

They communicated first via Instant Message and made the sport popular. After webcams were affordable, dating sites emerged. By the time YouTube opened up the face-to-face world, research as we knew it had changed permanently. Then social sites like MySpace, and Facebook blew onto the virtual landscape. Television is becoming secondary to seeing what you want when you want it (this is the ongoing theme) and BitTorrent (among others) is the way to find preferred media, not TV Guide.

If your business is looking for its next generation of customers, what kind of online presence do you need to attract and keep the techno-oriented Y'ers who spend big bucks online? Although neither exhaustive nor scientific (my sample was everyone I know under 35), here is a list of popular places where young folks come together online. If you market, you should consider these sites.

Download Squad and its cousins – people want to know what's out there as soon as it's launched. DLS not only tells you what's there but also make it easy to find plus they let you know if it's worthwhile. With so much information out there, DLS and its cousin sites offer today's specials so you don't have to bother with the entire menu.

Gmail, Google News Reader, Google Docs – free online services by King Google are the prime haunt of many 20-35 year olds. Make sure you know how they work so when you build apps on your site you try to mimic the look and feel. When they want world news, they often use the links at the top of the pages.

The News Empire – the business-oriented target group seems to enjoy CNN's plethora of sites including cnn.com for news, cnnsi.com for sports, and the new CNN video area. They find news at their local paper's site as well as at the major news sites including The NY Times, WaPo, Google and Yahoo!.

Things Technical – if the users are geeky (a term I use with respect), they're likely to grab the most current news available from sites like Slashdot, Digg, Techmeme, Engadget and Reddit. Never heard of them? Each is a field-leader and they all use a blog-like or RSS-like updating system. Ease of use and consistent uptime can be more important than design. (A site is successful when its name becomes a verb, like, "Google that..." or "My review was slashdotted...")

Sharing Socially – social networking sites are more than just a "what's new" news item. Facebook and MySpace connect this international generation like virtual glue. Many users consider these sites to be their homepages and include links to other sites they want to visit (like Twitter, Google Reader, Pownce, their favorite blogs) right from those pages.

Photo Share – Got a shelf full of quaint photo albums? Today's shelves are online on a Flickr, Picasa or other photo site's servers. With the rapid availability of fast bandwidth, pictures go online instantaneously and can circle the globe in less than a morning. Others can comment and you can share all the photos you upload from your digital camera or more likely from your phone. In the olden days, we taught people how to attach a photo to an email. Today, we read the Flickr feed to see a picture that might interest us.

It's All in the RSS – most everyone who leans toward the technical has an RSS reader, whether it's Google or FeedDemon or others. The younger online group gets the feed for whatever interests them and checks that feed several times a day. It's neater and cleaner than browsing all over the Web and they get what they want when they want it (the ongoing theme) and have time to read it. If you don't yet have an RSS feed, what are you waiting for?

Share, Share, Share – the definition of social sites is sharing. We share not only photos and text but also we expect sharing in return. It's almost as if the Web has come full circle. From the olden days of the early 1990s to the mid-first decade of this millennium, the Web has evolved from open and free (when I started) to pay-as-you-go (when they expected you to pay to get news) and has grown into freely shared spaces that are your own. The mantra of sites is "Twitter/Pownce - Digg - Flickr" for the younger and clued-in audience.

Whether you consider this generation of Internet users to be egocentric and instantaneous gratifiers or open-minded and savvy, the proof of the online pudding is in the feed. Click a few links and see how they are coming to the knowledge that will make them – or keep them – from becoming your future customers.

If your fav site was omitted, please add it in the comments. You'd be surprised how many great sites we find out simply by asking others who are slightly more geeky than we are.

If you have always wanted to be a film titan and you love team work, (that ole collaborator in you), Your Broadcaster puts you in the director chair. Your Broadcaster is a Web 2.0 project where everyone (like you) contributes material for 5 full length feature films in these genres: Bollywood, Thriller, Comedy, Drama, Horror.

Members' participation is primarily through the upload of scripts, auditions, characters, cartoons and stunts among others, which are voted on by other members. Uploads of the most successful member will be used as the basis for the final film.

If you don't want to collaborate on the film project, but still want to show your stuff, you can join Your Broadcaster for free and upload your content such as videos, photographs, audio or video mash-up. Currently, the upload limit is 2 MB per individual data, e.g., video, photo, etc. You still get to vote and you can create your own web page, blog to share, view or post information.

If you do want to collaborate on one or all of the films, the fee is $10 for each, or $35 for however many you want. If you so desire, there is a $10 copyright fee to protect your work.

It's interesting to see how the crowd sourcing trend is impacting our world. Who would have thought Joe Public might get a shot at Oscar night? We're not saying Your Broadcaster will garner that type of success. It could very well share the same fate as the Million Penguins wiki novel, an experiment to publish a crowd sourced novel.

How do you herd edit a million voices, plots, characters, sub-plots, in a novel? The same question might be asked of creating a film with a million directors. Whatever the outcome, you can be sure it will be um, extremely unique, possibly establishing a new film genre altogether.

[via TechCrunch]

Wis.dm is a relatively new social-driven bookmarking and publishing site which describes itself as, "A platform for creative people to publish their own work and store and share links and comments on a wide variety of web content."

Part Del.icio.us, part MySpace, Wis.dm has one solid thing going for it; A fresh and dedicated community who seem to be finding quality content without quite so much noise as some other popular sites. You won't find an overwhelming flood of new content every moment on Wis.dm but, what you find is mostly a cut above average.

The wisdom of a crowd is a debatable phenomenon. Love crowds or hate them, their collective wisdom is defining more and more what we read and view on the Internet. Social bookmarking and link voting are a great example however, we have a long way to go before we're done shaping and defining the ways and things crowds can decide. Cheers to Wis.dm for giving us one more choice, and another model with which to compare.

If you've ever had the good fortune of having one of your websites or blog posts dugg to the point of showing up on digg's homepage, you've enjoyed a huge traffic boost to your site. This is wonderful for web publishers, and I'm not going to lie and say that we don't care about it here at Download Squad; in fact, since the success of a given post is measured in large part by the traffic it drives to our site, it's certainly a goal of ours to have our posts make the homepage on digg.

But how valuable is digg traffic, really, and is the digg community one that we should even care about? Unfortunately, after observing the digg community for about a year, I'd have to conclude no, it's not. Now, at this point I should point out that AOL owns Weblogs Inc, who own Download Squad, and AOL also owns Netscape, recently converted into a social news and media voting site that is in many ways similar to digg. So if you don't think I can be objective about this, you might want to just skip this post. But I'm not here to sing the praises of Netscape over digg either. Overall, I'm not certain that social media sites like Netscape, digg, reddit, del.icio.us, or even the granddaddy of them all - Slashdot - will have any relevance whatsoever in five years.

Okay, so now that I've condemned a whole class of website, or really a whole class of online community, I should point out that while digg drives the largest amount of traffic of the bunch, the community at digg is actually rotting from the inside out.

This is a very inflammatory statement to make, but all it takes is to browse through the comments on few random frontpage posts at digg, and you'll see what I mean. The sheer level of superiority, sarcasm, and general negativity is overwhelming, and makes digg a place that is not only not fun to visit, it's certainly not a place to "share, discover, bookmark, and promote the news that's important to you", as digg's tagline optimistically claims.

While social media sites seem to be the future of web site aggregation, at least one element of it, there's one aspect of these sites that is starting to get annoying. Have you noticed some of your favorite sites adding a row and sometimes multiple rows of links to social news sites, ostensibly to make it easy for visitors to bookmark or save the site on del.icio.us, digg, netscape, reddit, furl, or any number of other sites of this ilk. Of course, there's also a myriad of service-specific RSS links, so that users of Bloglines, Google Reader, NewsGator, Netvibes, etc. can click on one link and subscribe to the site in the reader of their choice. The thing is, I'm not sure people even use these buttons, particularly when they're all grouped together; they've simply become litter online.

Well, if you're someone that wants to offer your users the ability to easily subscribe to or bookmark your site, but want to avoid littering your site with all of these site-specific icons, check out Add This. Add This allows you to put a single image link on your site to take your readers to a dedicated bookmarking site page, and another for feed readers. Once there, they can choose the service they'd like to use, and perform the function they're looking to do. On one hand, all this seems to be doing is cleaning up your pages by putting all the site-specific links on an intermediate page - something you could arguably do yourself. But there's more to the Add This service, which makes it more compelling.

Add This aggregates statistics about which pages and site features your readers are collecting in their bookmark collections the most, and provide that data back to you. Assuming the web viewing population uses these links more than I think they do, this could provide some very valuable information as to what people are truly finding interesting on your site. Personally, I'm still a bit skeptical as to the need for all of these site-specific links. If this trend continues at the rate it's been going, ad blocking software will also be blocking social media bookmarking links just to provide a cleaner interface for web users. Hey, it's a thought.

If you have an interest in podcasting, blogging, or any of that other "social media" hooey, then you'll want to be in Atlanta, Georgia on February 10th, 2007. That's the date of the as-yet-unnamed social media conference being organized by Sherry Heyl, the Atlanta Media Bloggers, and a bunch of local riff-raff. (If you have any bright ideas for a name, feel free to share.)

For I don't know how long, Yahoo! News has provided the means to rate (aka recommend) news stories. It's not a simple "thumbs up/down" but a five-star scale. At the top of each topic page at Yahoo! News you can find links to "Most emailed," "Most viewed," and "Most recommended."

The most recommended stories bubble to the top at several places (along with their respective RSS feeds):

• All news stories
• All news photos
• World News
• Business News
• Entertainment News
• Sports News
• Technology News
• Political News
• Science News
• Health News
• Opinion