Well done folks. Over 2000 pledges this year, and hopefully most of those turned into posts.
One post that caught my eye was at the official WordPress blog. The folks at Automattic wanted to celebrate the works of the girl geeks on the WordPress team. Given that I use WordPress just about every day, I too am very grateful to these ladies.
On the other hand, the BBC managed to get completely the wrong end of the stick, somehow coming away with the idea that people were voting for their favorite woman geek. If that was the idea, we’d see much less variety, which would defeat the whole object of ALD. Ah well, all publicity is good publicity, I guess. Sad that the media has to turn everything into some sort of American Idol style popularity contest, though.
And finally, those of you who missed the live webcast of the London event can see the whole thing here, including presentations by Maggie Philbin, Suw Charman-Anderson and Sue Black.
(I am, by the way, very impressed with the quality. Either UStream has upped their act significantly since last year or the ALD event had a really good connection.)
With my usual efficiency, I forgot to sign the pledge, but I did post on my lj. It’s an idea I like, although as a historian, I’d like to honour all women of achievement more widely — it can be equally hard for to achieve in the humanities and to be recognised for it, but because history, English etc are seen as ‘girls’ subjects at school, I think people tend not to notice how poorly reported their achievements in those fields often are. I can’t think of an obvious female equivalent of Ada Lovelace in the arts — Jessie Weston isn’t well-known enough and most of the other ‘artistic’ women are letter-writers or viewed as the inspirers of more famous men. Hmmm. It needs thinking about.
Of course, being me, I’d like Ada Lovelace day to be Annabella Millbanke Day — Ada inherited her talents from her mother, not her abuser of a father, but references to her still insist on name-checking Byron, even though he had little influence.
Better connection, most likely, if you’re comparing it to my Baycon broadcasting. There, I had a highly marginal wifi signal at my disposal, and the connection, I freely admit now, was probably not suited to doing what I was trying to do.
In all honesty, that’s the thing that slows down most of this webcasting stuff — fast enough connections to push the data.
-kat