MeyerBros

Interesting (and, not surprisingly, somewhat fiery) conversations in the blogosphere recently about diversity, gender, exclusion, and affirmative action in the web-geek world. Our favorite Meyerbro homonym web-geek Eric Meyer started things off by posting his personal manifesto about why he doesn’t care about diversity, and why when he plans conferences he chooses speakers based purely on “merit” and without considering gender or race. (To borrow liberally from the pithy genius of the other Eric Meyer: “Race and gender are irrelevant. That’s what I (white male) always (white) say (male).”)

(update: I shouldn’t have given Eric Meyer credit for “kicking things off” - he was responding to this Jason Kottke post where he simply lists the percentage of female presenters at various recent “webby” conferences.)

Tantek quickly weighed in with his thoughts, in which he a) blames women for not taking enough initiative to promote themselves in the industry, and b) wonders why nobody is concerned about including enough green-eyed people. (”It’s women’s fault for not working hard enough. And anyway, gender doesn’t make any more difference than eye color. That’s what I (male) always (male) say (male).”)

Then Anil Dash jumped into the fray and chastised Eric Meyer and John Gruber for “defending the boys-only nature of [their] treehouse,” and followed it up by offering a list of “the essentials of Web 2.0 your event doesn’t cover”, following which he notes “Where are the men? Don’t worry - the door is open to them. As soon as one of you has done something with the impact of Flickr…”

Today things took an interesting twist. Apparently Eric Meyer (the non-Meyerbro one) is doing some serious soul-searching about all of this, which is great. (Though apparently there hasn’t been sufficient soul-searching yet for him to stop trying to defend the innocent goodness of what he was “really trying to say”).

In all seriousness, wrestling with privilege — with the stupidity and blindness it sometimes causes us to display, even with the best of intentions — is really gut-wrenching stuff, and I wish Eric all the best. I hope he can come to a place where he might even recognize that “what he was really trying to say” itself might have been coming from a place of privilege and ignorance, and that “who he really is” is a good person whose identity, like all of us with privilege, has been deeply warped and shaped by the blindness of privilege.

This video from an Anthropology professor in Kansas takes a breathtakingly quick sweep over the new world of Web 2.0 in a video that BoingBoing describes as “deeply moving and incredibly smart.” I’m not sure if I was moved or not, but watching the video left me with a sense of being part of something new and bigger than myself. Maybe sitting in front a computer 8 hours a day and fiddling with code is worth something after all.

Its enough to make me want to pull out my old Anthropology text book!

i’m playing with a new online word processor called writely. thanks to a wired blog for the link.

currently i use writeboard for my e-documenting. from 37signals, writeboard is super-clean and efficient, but has almost no layout power (even bold and italic are sketchy prospects). i do love that simplicity - but i wonder about moving even my more layout-heavy documents to the web.

this one offers a link called: publish post to my blog, so i’m giving that a try here. it also has collaboration, sharing and publishing features - as well as the obvious version tracking. tagging, exporting to various formats, styles, tables, etc. and you log in with your google account which is nice on the easy hand and freaky on the google owning my life hand.

downside: what information do i want to trust to someone elses server? this is a general web-document dilema, not specific to this app. i want an online app that will easily backup to my hard drive as well as some random server somewhere.

also - this is soooo GUI, i’m not sure i can handle it. i have to use the *mouse* of all things, just to add bold or italics to my document.

i wonder what happens if i include XHTML tags in my writely docu-post…

the XHTML worked, but some of the formatting can get sloppy GUI-style, such as the code above for italics (CCS based, but inline and not semantic):

<span style="font-style: italic;">as well as</span>

and this code which accomplishes nothing at the end of my document, but it the remnants of some testing and deleting:

<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 102, 0);"></span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></span>

how sweet is this?!?

(i thought you might need the exclamation points to give you a hint. the answer is pretty darned sweet. sweet enough to build a new design around, you’d almost think)

some more about reflections