Kim Bach . Org

March the 24th 2009 is Ada Lovelace Day, the brainchild of Suw Charman-Anderson. Suw pledged to write a blog-post about a woman in tech that she admired, if at least 1,000 would make the same pledge, and since I’ve admired and been fascinated by Ada Lovelace since childhood, and especially after I read the wonderful book The Difference Engine, so I embraced the project, but at the same time I knew that it would be difficult for me to find just a woman in tech that I admire, that is because the list is long, and I’m happy to say that it’s actually getting longer.

In the end it turned out to be quite simple to name one single woman in “tech” that I admire, a woman that I’ve admired for 2,5 years since I met her at the wonderful BlogForum 2 – an initiative that we really need to revive – and almost did at Copenhagen Twitterfestival.

Since 2006 the woman I have in mind has become quite the celebrity, due to her uncompromising and relentless pursuit of the truth in the murky waters of the Danish tech-business, and this year she’s the natural selection, she’s the woman behind the mainstream breakthrough of the blog-media in Denmark, she is – of course – Bizzen/Toften: the journalist and blogger par excellence Dorte Toft.

Love/hate relationship with “tech”
I have a love/hate relationship with my field, the field known as “tech”. Tech is definitely one of the places where change is happening today, and I feel blessed that I’m involved in bringing this change.

But “Tech” is a field that is riddled by paradox. On one hand it’s crawling with greedy snake-oil salesmen, on the other it’s home to the most revolutionary, idealistic and altruistic people ever as well as some of the most wonderful concepts that humankind has ever come up with.

The problem with the snake-oil salesmen, is that, until now, they’ve pretty much got away with cheating their customers, the authorities, the business community and worst, their employees, and a lot of the snake-oil has been sold under the heading that Denmark is number one in tech.

It’s been a constant embarrassment to me, and I actually left the business four years ago, and it took me two years of “repenting” before I felt that could return to “tech”, and today I’m luckily to be employed by a tech-company that doesn’t carry any snake-oil.

Emperor’s new clothes
I’m just going to, briefly, mention the fact that Dorte Toft was the woman that noticed that Stein Bagger and IT Factory didn’t wear any clothes, thus exposing one of the biggest scams the Danish tech-sector has seen to date, but thank you Dorte for exposing these people, so that we can be protected against these predators and making it possible to feel proud about working in “tech” again.

Feminism isn’t “low-status”
What I’d rather celebrate today is that Dorte Toft is a self-proclaimed feminist, even though it’s – in her own words – a field that is “low-status”, and her labour of love “Nærmest Lykkelig I Nørdland” (”Almost happy in Geekland” – something got lost in translation sorry about that), where Dorte Toft has been writing and writing and writing about the benefits young women would have if the choose to join the so-called “though” fields, technology and science, a very noble cause.

I noticed that Dorte Toft also wrote a blog-post in observation of Ada Lovelace Day today. In this blog-post Dorte is pledging to return to “Nærmest Lykkelig I Nørdland”, I’m so, so happy to hear that, Dorte Toft has been toiling away, trying to ease young women into the fields of tech and science, and her work deserves so much more attention than the perpetual Stein Bagger saga.

To all the wonderful women that I’ve worked with, am working with and will work with in the future, thank you so, so much for putting up with us, we need you, and remember how far you’ve come.

When I mentioned to my father how much I loved having female managers, he simply said that he could never ever imagine have a female manager, I was appalled.

Women, “tech” is too important to be left to men
Women please don’t stop now, so that next time I’m in a position where I’m hiring tech-staff, I hope that I’ll receive applications from women. Looking at the number of students at the IT University in Copenhagen I’m quite optimistic that that would be the case.

DORTE TOFT: Please go work on “Nærmest Lykkelig I Nørdland”, I’m waiting for it, unlike the book about “Banditterne i habitterne” (”The Bandits In Suits”) – and remember feminism isn’t “low-status”!

YOUNG WOMEN: We really, really need you in the tech-sector. Tech is far too important to leave to us men, and listen to, and get inspired by Dorte Toft!

Celebrating the Enchantress of Numbers
I’ll close this post with these wonderful quotes.

We may see aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves
Lady Ada Lovelace

Forget this world and all its troubles and if possible its multitudinous Charlatans – everything in short but the Enchantress of Numbers
Charles Babagge, inventor of the Analytical and Difference engines

Notes
If you want to learn more about the fascinating life of Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, by many considered the inventor of programming languages, I’d strongly recommend “The Bride of Science: Romance, Reason, and Byron’s Daughter“, “Zeroes and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture” and “The Difference Engine“.

I’m also building a “shrine” to Ada Lovelace on Algorim.dk, a result of “mellemrumssingulariteten” which was inspired by a young woman I know, this woman is, BTW., working in the purest field of them all

When “Sergei and Larry” approached Yahoo with a brand new concept of a “search engine”, they discovered, to their dismay, that Yahoo wasn’t really interested in “search”, but in selling ads. So Google was born.

How I discovered Google

In 1998 I was doing a search of myself, e.g. ego-surfing, using my preferred search engine, Lycos, and I was stunned to see that the top hits were Usenet groups that contained my name, several of them in fact, but worse: they had names like kimbach.slut.slut.slut etc.

I was a bit upset, especially since I, at that point, was being sued over violation of the marketing law by a former employer – a case that was later thrown out – but I assumed that they might have created those groups, to slander me, and I was quite sure that it wasn’t me that created those groups .

I took a look at the content of the groups, and they had very low traffic, I only found some spam, which was rare in 1998, and someone who asked the question “who is Kim Bach” – a question I’ve pondered myself, but it didn’t look like it had anything to do with me.

Eventually I contacted the hotline of my ISP, Image Scandinavia, and they referred me to…GOOGLE.

Doing a search on Google, I realised that it had nothing to do with me, but that the groups had been created by a disgruntled husband, and Kim Bach was his ex-wife!

I also believe that using Google for the first time, immediately made me drop Lycos. At that point Lycos actually yielded what I’d label “better results”, but that changed quickly.

Google, originally, cracked “the search code”, and the world changed.

How I discovered Wikipedia

This I also remember clearly, and it’s quite interesting, I googled it – indirectly!

3-4 years ago I was trying find the English word for the type of dog, that is called “gravhund” in Danish, I somehow knew that a literal translation wouldn’t do, since that would have yielded “diggingdog”, “digdog”, “gravedog”.

So a Google search let me to the English Wikipedia article for Dachshund, and that was what I was looking for!

Seeing Wikipedia was an instant eye-opener, and at that point it hadn’t even dawned upon me, that Wikipedia was pure user-generated content!

Google isn’t interested in “knowledge”

Google won by doing a better job, but now “we, the people” are approaching the world with a concept of a “knowledge engine”, only to discover, to our dismay, that for instance Google isn’t really interested in “knowledge”, but in selling ads.

The difference: “we, the people”, will, surprisingly, transform Google from a “search engine” into a “knowledge engine” as well, no matter what Google does. The algorithm Google uses will give preference to “quality”, at least in the long run, and since “we, the people” are so numerous this will happen sooner rather than later.

Case in point, the best SEO strategy I know of is to create a Wikipedia article, try googling the terms I’ve created Wikipedia articles for (for instance: Kim Schumacher, DB03 and DB07).

You’re brainwashed

Google and the big companies have had us, pretty much, brainwashed to think that we have no say. This is reflected by the response to the launch of the Wikia Search engine, on the historic day, January 7th 2008.

Everyone is trying to compare Wikia Search to Google, and that’s missing the point COMPLETELY, and people should read what Wikia Search are writing:

WE KNOW THAT THE QUALITY OF THE SEARCH IS: “PRETTY LOW” (a polite way of saying that it “stinks”)

The way to help change it, is simply to get involved.

Every-time you do a search on Wikia Search, you’re offered the option to edit a “Mini Article” on the search. A “Mini Article” is just a Wiki article, that explains the search term. The “Mini Articles” will be used to improve the search index.

“Unfortunately” people seems to have been using a search on themselves as a benchmark, meaning that a lot of the “Mini Articles” are links to private and small web-sites, but that reflects the community.

Ego-surfing was also one of the first things I did, and the first hit that could be attributed to me was result number 8, and that yielded the photos I’ve taken, that are in the Flickr pool I created for Sjakket, my former place of work.

Is that my major contribution to the world? Well it’s not that far from it, bordering that I believe that it could be.

Getting involved – choose a community to “work” for

My criteria are:

Not for profit, open, free, strong community, sustainable.

The beer isn’t free however, so you’re allowed to make money, but take into consideration how the money is being made, if it is sustainable etc.

Personally I’ve chosen these organisations

• Kim Bach . Org – My personal Internet presence with community support (some call that a blog )
• Netværksgruppen i Mjølnerparken – Volunteer to help inner city kids, of non-danish descent, with their homework
• Æbletræet.dk – A Wiki-based community site dedicated to serving Apple users with content in the Danish Language
• Wikipedia – The open encyclopaedia
• Wikia Search – The open search engine

Currently I’m mostly involved in Wikia Search, I’ve found it really intimidating to be a contributor to an Encyclopaedia, so my contributions to Wikipedia have been quite limited, Wikia Search is much less intimidating, and right up my alley.

Where would you put your money (e.g. time)?

In ten years, Google has gone from no to 16.000 employees, but “we, the people” will, in ten years go from no to 6,5 billion, or how many it is that “we” are in 2018.

Where would you put you money (e.g. time)? It will only cost you time, and you’ll be involved in building a beautiful shrine to knowledge and human achievement.

Together we’ll do Google one better: crack the code of “knowledge”, and the world has changed forever.

Free at last, free at last, oh God almighty we’re free at last.

And “we”‘re hiring! No need to submit a resume, come join the fight!

Read more here:

• Your “Pyramid” is beautiful, but we’ve just invented the “Arch”

The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project

I really need to “get out more”, since I’ve only just now discovered the Friend of a Friend project (FOAF), and I LOVE it!

The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is creating a Web of machine-readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do.

Say what?

FOAF is an important part of the so-called semantic-web, and FOAF is just a so-called RDF specification of who you are. RDF (Resource Description Framework) is one of the basic technologies of the semantic web, and it’s nothing more (or should I say less) than an XML schema condoned by the W3C for describing resources.

Think of RDF as “the mother of all links”, RSS and Atom actually uses RDF.

The problem with links

So what is that RDF does better than the tradtional link?

When you create a link, you rarely remember to provide important information about what it is that you actually link to. At best you provide an ALT attribute (description) to an image tag. Google actively uses the ALT tag when indexing images, but if the link to an image contained more information, eg. semantics, Google could do a much better job.

Semantics means that you provide information about content and context, not just a link to it. You could call that metadata, abstracts or just “data”.

Many CMSes uses the URI of posts to provide some semantics, it’s often called SEO (search engine optimisation), the URI of this post has FOAF in it, meaning that a link to this article indeed contains some semantics.

A common standard for the WordPress CMS is that it uses year, month, day and the title of the post to generate the URI.

The problem is that this information should be provided in a structured, machine readable and – most importantly – open format, in order to make it possible to provide semantics.

I actually despise the concept of SEO, since it amounts to cheating, the only valid SEO is:
“provide interesting content”

A semantic “you”

A number of standards for providing semantics exists, one of the most interesting, especially in this day and age of social media, is the FOAF format.

FOAF is a format that describes you and your connections to provide semantics about people (you) and your connections (friends), in a standardised way, using RDF.

The FOAF file contains information about who you are, how to contact you, but most interestingly it contains links to your friends, and their FOAF files.

The beauty of FOAF is, that all you have to do, is:

1. Create a FOAF file, for instance using FOAF-a-matic
2. Put it on a server
3. Provide the URI
4. Make sure that it can be found by others (e.g. by posting a link on a page you know is indexed)

Chances are that the FOAF spiders will have a feast on your FOAF, sooner rather than later.

Create your FOAF file

It’s quite simple to create a FOAF file, all you need to do is go to FOAF-a-matic, fill in a number of fields, generate the FOAF file, copy it to a text-editor, publish it on your web-site.

Below is a screenshot of the FOAF-a-matic page.

Take back your profile, it’s…YOURS!

No need to register with social networking sites, your profile is YOURS.

Who owns the information about “who you are”? You do! Should that information be made available in an open format? You bet! RDF and FOAF is the way to go.

And don’t take my word for it, just take a look at the people who are promoting and developing RDF and FOAF…

So how did the chicken cross the road

I’ll provide you with the story about how I found FOAF, since it’s interesting to say the least.

My good buddy Sebastian Lund just recently set up his blog, Silence is deafening, and I’m looking forward to following it, he’s using a beautiful theme, the Dilectio Theme, developed by Design Disease.

Design Disease has a number of free WordPress themes available, and you can test them, when I tried that, their “Lorem Ipsum” turned out to be an article by no other that TBL, timbl, Tim Berners-Lee, Mr. Web himself, and he was writing about blogging and FOAF…

So:

• I follow Sebastian Lund using Jaiku
• I noticed that Sebastian has created a new blog because I’m indirectly subscribed to his RSS feed through Jaiku.
• I check it out
• I like his theme
• I jumped to the theme developer, Design Disease
• I stumbled upon an article by TBL
• I jumped to TBL’s blog
• I jumped to FOAF-project.org
• I made my first FOAF file using FOAF-a-matic

What an untangled web we’re weawing.

Now I need to think of a good URI for my FOAF file, TBL suggests this:

A lot of people have published data about themselves without using a URI for themselves. This means I can’t refer to them in other data. So please take a minute to give yourself a URI. If you have a FOAF page, you may just have to add rdf:about=”" and voila you have a URI http://example.com/Alan/foaf.rdf#ABC. (I suggest you use your initials for the last bit). Check it works in the Tabulator.

Ready, steady FOAF

So what are you waiting for? Create your own FOAF file, and start sharing.

And now I’m moving on to explore Tabulator, more on that later…

Today I realised that it’s been a year since the wonderful blogforum2, and I knew that I’d have heard about it if there was going to be a blogforum this year, but feeling the urge, I went looking for the usual suspects, and it so happened that I stumbled upon The Copenhagen Project – a recent brain child of Jeppe Kabell and the “notorious” Thomas Madsen-Mygdal – and if Thomas is involved you better listen up:

We are building a catalog of media building bricks in order to reinvent the services we use to understand and keep up to date with what happens in the world.

(notice that I changed “building bricks” to “building blocks” – I find that more correct).

Their ideas seems to be related to a lot of the ideas that I have, for instance regarding collective intelligence, and how to put the computer to more use when sharing knowledge.

They also picked up on a great crowd-sourcing idea – which I’ve been considering myself, and it’s simply to tag posts with a magic tag – in this case tcp2007 – and they should show up on the reactions page automagically – Gentlemen: start tagging (let’s see if that actually works).

I’ll be following The Copenhagen Project closely in the future, now if they only had a Jaiku channel – hint hint ?

So what about the blogforum?

I suppose that someone has to organise the blogforum if it’s going to happen again, I’m not much of an organiser – but I’ll sure lend a hand if someone picks it up, because it was nothing short of inspirering, and it made me blog up a storm.

Blogforum2 had some spin offs, one was a survey, BlogTjek 07, that got press from big media, the other is the Blogfond – an attempt at creating a foundation to support the blog community (and then I just discovered that the board is considering pulling the plug – if we do, let’s at least have a party ).

O’Reilly Radar > Draft Blogger’s Code of Conduct

Tim O’Reilly vil gerne være blogosfærens Emma Gad, derfor har han foreslået at der indføres en “code of conduct” dvs. et etisk regelsæt for bloggere, det jeg vil oversætte til “god blogskik”.

Overskriften er (oversat fra det første udkast):

Vi hylder blogosfæren fordi den omfavner ærlig og åben samtale. Men ærlighed behøver ikke at betyder mangel på god skik. Vi fremlægger disse “Retningslinjer for god ‘blogskik’” i håbet om at det kan hjælpe med at fremme en kultur der støtter både personlig udfoldelse og konstruktiv dialog.

Umiddelbart synes jeg det lyder som en god idé, og Tim O’Reilly er jo ikke en Hr. Hvemsomhelst, så man skal da lytte til det manden foreslår.

I forbindelse med forslaget, er der også blevet udviklet nogle udkast til nogle “advarselsskilte” (badges), og desværre har debatten på O’Reillys Radar handlet lidt vel meget om dette, i stedet for en debat om retningslinjerne.

Baggrunden for forslaget til god ‘blogskik’ skal bla. søges i en høj profileret sag hvor der blev fremsat trusler mod den kendte blogger Kathy Sierra.

Første udkast foreslår følgende retningslinjer for god ‘blogskik’ (kun overskrifter):

1. Vi tager ansvar for vores egne ord og for de kommentarer vi tillader på vores blog
2. Vi siger ikke noget online som vi ikke ville sige personligt.
3. Vi taler sammen privat før vi svarer offentligt.
4. Når vi føler at en bliver uretmæssigt angrebet, handler vi.
5. Vi tillader ikke anonyme kommentarer.
6. Vi ignorerer “troldene”.

Det meste af dette er jo sund fornuft, og jeg kan specielt godt lide, at der tages udgangspunkt i, hvordan man opfører sig i den virkelig verden, punkt 1 er jo ikke meget andet end §77 i grundloven (ja det er den paragraf der omtaler ytringsfriheden, som er uindskrænket men under ansvar overfor domstolene).

Jeg synes at man som blogger skal tænke over god ‘blogskik’, personligt tillader jeg anonyme kommentarer, men alle kommentarer bliver modereret, jeg tror faktisk ikke jeg har tilladt ret mange anonyme kommentarer, men det burde nu ikke være nødvendigt at at udstyre sin blog eller sit forum med en “advarselsskilt”, men igen det er fint at have retningslinjerne i baghovedet.

For en månedstid siden overtrådte jeg selv god blogskik, ikke på min blog, men i et forum. Jeg fik en henvendelse, og jeg reagerede på den. Belært af den erfaring, ville jeg nok tilføje et ekstra punkt til det etiske regelsæt, om at blogindlæg bør være eksempler på seriøs debat, og være underlagt samme etik som journalister er underlagt.

Det afhænger naturligvis af bloggens karakter, men der er vel ingen grund til at opfinde sit eget etiske regelsæt, når der nu er århundedvis af erfaringer at trække på.

Se også:
Wiki-based review process on blogging.wikia.com

Bloglæseren er en kvinde – Politiken.dk

De danske medier, herunder Politiken, har fattet interesse for BlogTjek undersøgelsen, som bla. jeg har været med til at udarbejde.

Det har været fantastisk inspirerende at være med til at udarbejde denne rapport, og det har fløjet med mails og wiki-opdateringer de sidste 48 timer – FANTASTISK.

Jeg glæder mig allerede til de næste projekter i BlogForum regi.

BlogTjek 07 – Undersøgelse af danske bloglæsnings vaner – Velkommen
Resultaterne af undersøgelsen af danske bloglæsningsvaner er nu blevet offentliggjort.

Det har været utroligt dejligt at det danske blog-miljø har været i stand til at gennemføre denne undersøgelse, og som tidligere skrevet så var Blogforum 2 i 2006 nok det mest inspirerende arrangement jeg nogensinde har deltaget i.

I forbindelse med offentliggørelsen af undersøgelsens resultater, er der blevet udsendt en pressemeddelelse:

Pressemeddelelse: Fra de danske bloggere til den danske presse, 3. april 2007

Undersøgelse af bloglæsere i Danmark

Den typiske bloglæser i Danmark er 34 år gammel, kvinde og bosiddende i København. Hun læser 2-5 forskellige blogs og foretrækker at de handler om noget personligt. Til dagligt beskæftiger hun sig med IT og/eller kommunikation og hun har en længevarende uddannelse. Det er nogle af konklusionerne i blog-læser-undersøgelsen Blogtjek, der blev gennemført som frivilligt projekt i marts måned 2007. Ikke mindre end 440 blogs deltog i undersøgelsen og over 3.500 bloglæsere tog sig tid til at besvare undersøgelsens syv
spørgsmål.

BlogTjek undersøgelsen er udviklet af en gruppe bloggere, der gerne ville vide mere om, hvem i Danmark der egentlig læser blogs. Undersøgelsen er ikke videnskabelig, men giver et fingerpeg om, hvem det er, der har taget blogs til sig.

63 % af bloglæserne i undersøgelsen er kvinder og 37 % er mænd. Mændene læser flere faglige og politiske blogs end kvinderne. Og flere af de mandlige bloglæsere har selv blogs. Halvdelen af de mænd der læser blogs, blogger også selv, mens 40 % af de kvinder, der læser blogs, også selv har en blog.

Ca. 440 blogs blev tilmeldt undersøgelsen undervejs (det var åbent og gratis for bloggere at deltage) og de fik i gennemsnit 14 besvarelser hver. Den mest læste blog fik mere end 700 besvarelser, mens der også var blogs med i undersøgelsen som kun modtog ganske få svar.

Flere af bloglæserne svarede på spørgeskemaet på flere blogs og i alt fik undersøgelsens spørgeskema 6.339 besvarelser.

For yderligere information om undersøgelsen og data fra undersøgelsen kontakt venligst Trine-Maria Kristensen på www.hovedetpaabloggen.dk / 2729 1704 / trinemaria@socialsquare.dk eller René Clausen Nielsen på www.shevy.dk / 3126 8084 / rcn@shevy.dk.

Læs mere om undersøgelsen og se flere data, samt en undersøgelsesrapport med grafer osv. på hjemmesiden: http://blogtjek.blogforum.dk

M.v.h.
BlogTjek07-gruppen

Referat af stiftende generalforsamling for Blogfonden.dk-foreningen : Blogfonden

Så er Blogfonden officielt stiftet.

Du finder blogfondens fundats her, men nedenfor er indledningen gengivet (som den ser ud i skrivende stund):

FUNDATS

Fundatsen lyder som følgende:

Blogfonden.dk er en forening med formål at indsamle midler til projekter, der fokuserer på udbredelse og udvikling af sociale og dialogiske medier, offentligt tilgængeligt software, blogudvikling, webpublicering og forskning indenfor samme som omdrejningspunkt. Blogfonden.dk uddeler ubeskåret alle midler indsamlet til disse projekter. Blogfonden yder ikke penge til kommercielle projekter samt administrationsudgifter.

Og som det fremgår er jeg en af de “sædvanlige mistænkte” .

Blogfonden er et resultat af Blogforum. Blogforum er nok det mest inspirerende event jeg nogensinde har deltaget i.

BlogTjek 07 – Undersøgelse af danske bloglæsnings vaner – Velkommen

Som et resultat af BlogForum 2006, der var et af højdepunkterne i 2006, er BlogTjek 07 gået i luften.

Jeg er naturligvis tilmeldt undersøgelsen, så hvis du har tid og lyst så kan du gå til undersøgelsen ved at klikke her.

Det tager ikke ret lang tid at udfylde spørgeskemaet.

Blogfonden

Hurra, Charlotte er kommet videre med Blogfond projektet, og har fået en WordPress Blog, hmm. jeg havde vist lovet at hjælpe hende, ups.

Jeg er også kommet videre med en hel ting jeg fik startet i løbet af 2006…Man når faktisk noget i de dage der er mellem jul og nytår.

Mere senere, der “skal” jo gøres status når året er omme.