Jessica Guynn at SFGate reports that Natali Del Conte has left Mike Arrington’s blog TechCrunch, at least partly due to sexist and annoying comments on her blog posts. (Also, she’d gotten a new job and hoped to keep blogging at TechCrunch from her new job, but Arrington wanted her undivided attention.) But also, Guynn writes:

The diplomatic Del Conte says she got more than she bargained for at TechCrunch, both in learning about Web 2.0 from Arrington and in the crude, rude or just generally sexist remarks from some in the TechCrunch community.

“She’s never had that kind of direct, anonymous feedback, and it’s clear it got to her to some extent. I’m very sorry for that,” Arrington said

I was curious, so I looked up one of Arrington’s recent own blog posts about a DVD swapping service, which had 19 comments. Here’s a sampling:

“Barter does work in certain areas. In the Uk there is something called Barter card and its a B2b service.”

“These people need to take an Econs 101 course and learn the foolishness of replacing a solution (money) with a problem (barter).”

“Michael, there is a factual error in your article.”

“Michael - I think you are dead right.”

OK, so that sounds like “direct, anonymous feedback,” sure enough. And then I looked up comments on one of Del Conte’s recent posts, about a streaming music video site, and they weren’t quite as helpful, let’s say. Looking back, it seems as though the comments were about half relevant to her blog posts and about half personal attacks on her for being “cute” but not smart. Even some of her supporters say idiotic things like, “She is a smart girl. Just give her some time.” Blurgh!

It just gets back to the idea (courtesy of the New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus) that women simply don’t write about “hard” subjects like science and technology, because we’re just too focused on being cute and writing about daisies. Or something.

One of the areas where women are most underrepresented in the computer industry is security. This also happens to be one of the fastest-growing and highest-paying fields as well. Now there’s good news for women in computer science who want to get trained up in network security issues: Carnegie Mellon University is partnering with the Executive Women’s Forum and Information Networking Institute to offer a full scholarship to one woman who wants to get a master’s degree in Information Security Technology and Management at CMU’s CyLab.

If you’re interested, you can find out more about the scholarship here. Deadline is Feb. 15, 2007. Pass it on!

Rather belatedly, I read the Business Week article about Web 2.0 companies that featured Kevin Rose from Digg.com and various other young entrepreneurs. A sidebar in the article was called “Valley Boys,” and featured a bunch of up-and-coming tech companies (including BitTorrent, Facebook, and LiveJournal) run by BOYS. No girls allowed. Who cares if people like Mary Hodder (Dabble) and Di-ann Eisnor (Platial) are raising good chunks of VC and angel money for their cool Web 2.0 companies? They aren’t BOYS. The worst part was that in a couple of the pictures of the “valley boys” they had women’s bodies in the images as eye candy. My favorite (pictured above) is of Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook, staring at the rack on a headless chick. WTF?

It’s so frustrating to be reading an article about a tech space that I’m actually interested in, and discover that the people covering the space are so frakkin clueless that they couldn’t even be bothered to take the “no girls allowed” sign off their clubhouse. Wake up, dorks. There are women in the tech industry, including entrepreneurs and VCs, and they are not amused.

Valley Boys [Business Week]

Does sexism in communications and information technology contribute to violence against women? Can women use information technology to help prevent violence? Now’s your chance to share your thoughts on these issues with others. GenderIT.org is organizing “Take Back The Tech,” in which women bloggers and writers take control over IT and communications technology and “consciously use it to disrupt gender relations.” GenderIT is hoping to see a debate about the connection between communications IT and violence against women. You can sign up to take part in a 16-day blogathon:

ka-BLOG! is a 16-day blog fest for the Take Back the Tech Campaign. It is open to anyone and everyone - girls, boys, everyone beyond and more — who wants to share their thoughts, write poetry and prose, post graphics / pictures, rant, rave, heckle, make snide remarks, stick their tongue out at violence against women, and how online communications can exacerbate or help eliminate VAW.

Read more at TakeBackTheTech.Net. Thanks to Beth for the link.

Slashdot has linked to a C|Net UK article that purports to list the top ten girl geeks. No mention of the book, and for some unfathomable reason it mentions Paris Hilton. I have no idea how to react to this trainwreck. While I’m encouraged by the mere existence of such a post, I cringe over some of the choices. Lisa Simpson? Darryl Hannah? Ooookay. Wither Willow Rosenberg, then?

Also, I’m completely in agreement with those comments nominating Hedy Lamarr and Mythbuster Keri Byron instead.

Who would you add to the list?

• Madsciencemama highlights a New Yorker excerpt about Virginia Apgar, who became a doctor in 1933 and revolutionized how doctors looked at newborn children.
• You should sign this petition encouraging Congress to end “drive-thru mastectomies.” Notyourwoman has the details.
• The National Center for Women and Information Technology unveils “turnkey” (I hate that word) best practices for companies and institutions to mentor and support women in IT.
• Women inventors registered three patents for military technology, 11 electrical patents and 633 mechanical patents from 1808 to 1895, according to this handy index.

Ever since Phil Torrone showed me how to use a bluetooth dongle to take control of my Roomba – a little round vacuum cleaner robot — I’ve been following the growth of Roomba hacking. Roomba manufacturer iRobot released its specs earlier this year, thus making it clear that people weren’t breaking some obscure copyright law by taking their vacuum cleaners apart and turning them into fighting machines (or whatever). In fact, the relatively simple controls on the Roomba make it an excellent device for beginners to get into robot hacking.

Now there’s a book devoted to Roomba hacking, which is great for those of us who still enjoy the form factor of this venerable but vanishing print medium.

What’s interesting to is the way Roomba hacking has turned what was once a “woman’s thing” — the vacuum cleaner — into something that has very little gendered subtext. Sure, hacking is associated with boy’s play. But hacking a vacuum cleaner? Not so much.

Robotics is also a less male-dominated area than computer science, and one of our era’s most famous roboticists is Cynthia Breazeal. Now if only we could create the perfect artificial womb, we could all get together and hack childbirth too.

From Feministe:

You can check out HBO’s special Hacking Democracy in its entirety on Google Video. (The total run time is about an hour and twenty minutes, just so you know.)

The documentary covers a lot of the known problems with electronic voting and focuses on how much of what’s going on is hidden from public view. You can read HBO’s synopsis here.

Also, check out Salon’s coverage and a good round-up of links from Bruce Schneier.

My own extremely brief two cents: How long do we think Diebold would stay in business if their ATMs had the same kinds of gaping security flaws that their voting machines do?

A new study by Oxygen Media shows that men and women have similar habits when it comes to shopping for technology. But the study ascribes some fairly stereotypical reasons for why women spend so much money on technology. Women are using tech to — you guessed it — stay “connected” to their friends and loved ones. From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

The study, aptly titled Girls Gone Wired, presents some insights into the way women react with technology — including their buying habits. According to Karen Ramspacher, vice president of research at Oxygen, men and women are more alike than different when it comes to technology. But they have different motivations that spur the use of various technology devices. While men are often attracted to technology for technology’s sake, women see technology as a means to an end. It’s the function of the devices they crave, not necessarily the fun. While a greater percentage of men use technology for fun pursuits — such as listening to music and watching videos, women are more likely to shop online, edit digital pictures and access health services online.

It seems pretty obvious that Ramspacher is imposing her own reading on the study’s findings, especially when she says at one point that women use Digital Video Recorders — but they only use them to watch shows that they will discuss with their friends. Women aren’t allowed to like technology because it’s cool, everything has to be communal. Extra dumbosity points for categorizing women tech consumers using terms like “Techs in the City,” “Techcessorizers” and “Mrs. Doubtwires.”

It’s a daily morning ritual between First Cup of Coffee and Brushing Teeth: Check Livejournal Friends List. When habits get thrown off-kilter, a kind of disconnect develops. It’s like an older pair of glasses you keep around as your spare. When you put them on, they still bring everything into focus, but you get a little dizzy trying to adjust.

Livejournal is down (or running extremely sluggish) at the moment, and the void it left in my life is tremendous. Where will I read my RSS feeds? Where will I find the latest fanfics? Where will I complain about my NaNoWriMo wordcount? What will I do while my main social network is missing?

Users flee to other networks in the interim. We have our usernames reserved on GreatestJournal and JournalFen and even Vox, and you know what? It’s not the same. The vibes of online community and discussion and yes, even the flame wars and the wank don’t feel right on these other sites. And that’s because the communities and the friendships were forged on LiveJournal. The people and the source code might be the same, but not the URL. For some, that’s enough to make any other site a shallow knockoff of the original.

Users complain about LiveJournal “selling out,” and yet when crashes occur, we miss it. Livejournal is not only a major social network; it’s a measure of Intarwebs Zeitgeist, of what’s on the minds of thousands of people at a particular time. Load up a random community’s friends page and take a snapshot of the thoughts and lives of dozens. Ultimately, it’s voyeurism. Unfortunately, I’m addicted. And desperately waiting until those guard monkeys report no problems.