It is a little known fact, that for my undergraduate degree, i earned a major in Women studies and minor in Labor studies- not women in labor but two unique majors- one in Women's Studies and one in Labor Studies. It is not known because it hardly has anything to do with what i "do" which is what people are mostly interested in versus the "how" and "why" i do and approach things in a specific way. I think a lot of who i am is because i grew up with very strong women around me- my mother and grandmothers specifically- but the choices i have made for myself have also helped shape who i am today and how i continue to develop as a woman in the business world.

I have been meaning to post a reference on my blog to a recent article in Business Week Online titled Don't Cry For Us Silicon Valley by Sarah Lacy about women advancing in technology because it is articles like this that remind me that there is progress being made (although many of us think that it is not going fast enough!) . The articles provides some good highlights on some of the established corporate women as well as the positive news from women in the start-up sector.

One of my favorite resources online to stay aware of what other women are doing in the business world is the blog 'News on Women' which provides almost daily updates on women who have been promoted and/or move to new companies. You can also browse by industry, C-level positions like CEO and CFO and Board Appointments and sometimes aggregated reports are published which are interesting.

Every once in a while i get a comment about the image of the glass on the right menu of my blog- you can also get your own "Smart Women Thirst for Knowledge' glassware if you are so inclined. cheers!

Like i have said before, if i am not planning and organizing some sort of event (personal or work related) i am not happy- perhaps i missed my calling as an 'events coordinator' or something.

On September 22nd from 2-6pm in Palo Alto, CA - Christine Connors the Director of Semantic Technology Solutions for Dow Jones and the Business Champion for Synaptica, will be leading a roundtable discussion on the subject of Semantic Technologies in the Enterprise.

Many of our Enterprise Customers have been asking us about semantic technologies and since Christine will be in town to present at Taxonomy Bootcamp in San Jose, we thought it would be a great time to schedule a roundtable discussion on the subject since our May scheduled one had to be canceled due to last minute scheduling conflicts.

Some of our previous roundtable events that i have coordinated have been very successful and have covered subjects such as Social Media Measurement and Folksonomies and Taxonomies in the Enterprise. This event will be at our Palo Alto office that also houses the local printing plant for The Wall Street Journal. This means that afterwards we get to do a special guided tour of the printing plant which is always a highlight for the attendees (and no matter how many times i do it - for me as well!).

The roundtable portion of the event will cover topics such as:

• What can Semantic technologies do for your organization?
• How can the Semantic Web help you in your job role?
• Where do you start and what are best practices?
• How do you “sell” Semantic web investment concepts internally?

I still have a couple of seats left at the table- so if you an individual at a company that is looking at using or are already using semantic technologies in your enterprise and are interested in coming to meet some of your fellow Bay area colleagues that are working on similar projects- please e-mail at daniela.barbosa@dowjones.com or visit our registration page. {please no vendors or consultants at this time, the aim is to make this a BoF (Birds of a Feather) type of roundtable}

If you know of someone that might be interested in the topic please feel free forward this post to them.

Also- if you are interested in just the tour part of the printing plant i might be able to squeeze in a couple of additional people- please drop me a line.

This morning i asked my Townes if he wanted a biscuit- i forgot that he isn't the smartest dog in the world and that he can not make the automatic association that a biscuit is a cookie. (read: it really isn't that he is dumb just that he wasn't trained).

So i told him he was like a search engine without a taxonomy and then he looked even more confused. Then we made this video. he is a bit bored because it is the second take so the intial reaction is not 100% but hopefully you get the idea!

As humans we easily make associations between words- machine and dogs can't unless they are "trained".




He is a 4 year old Great Dane in case you are wondering

Another technology does good story, this time from Chris Albrecht a GIGAOM in a post titled CAPTCHA’s Can Be Useful, Don’tcha Know that describes the use of the CAPTCHA technology. A CAPTCHA is a type of challenge-response test used in many sites when users are doing things like making a reservation or a purchase or leaving comments to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer.

The Effort is to help digitalize print and is quite interesting use of the technology that many people just find annoying (i tend to enjoy the challenge!):
Efforts to digitize (really) old books and newspapers were being hampered by faded ink that confounded OCR software. The solution Luis von Ahn came up with was to use the words that the software couldn’t recognize and insert them into these so-called reCAPTCHAs and use the power of human brains to decipher them. CAPTCHAs serve up two words, one is the security word, the other goes toward the book digitization effort.

The New York Times is using this service to digitalize their archive that goes back to the 1800s (and paying for it). This ReCAPTCHA service as been a project at Carnegie Mellon where the CAPTCHA technology was born (but is being spun out as its own company) . The project is also doing work for free for the Internet Archive’s project to digitize every book published before 1980 which is pretty cool. If you are using sites like Craigslist and TicketMaster among some other 45,000 sites that use the technology you are also helping the effort.

Last night i was reading through Erica Smith's excellent monthly wrap-up post with July's data on Newspapers outlets that Twitter (for Twitter newbies that means newspapers that have a Twitter account and broadcast news via the microblogging platform that sends updates to those that follow (otherwise known as tweets) which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length). In these monthly posts she provides an overview of the biggest gainers and losers including data on all the newspapers that she is aware of that have Twitter accounts. She also highlights new services that might be interesting to newspapers that are built on Twitter including things like TwitterLocal which filters messages based on location which could be useful for various reasons like picking up local 'scoops' (useful in other ways as well!).

This morning over on Techmeme, i followed this link over to the PBS MediaShift Idea Lab to Five Ways to Gather and Report News with Twitter that outlines some ways that media outlets could benefit from being on Twitter that i found interesting especially in the use of 'investigative' reporting. Even though i am not reporter or responsible for any media twitter account i certainly find this conversation compelling and as a user have been finding myself using Twitter more and more to be 'updated' on news following news sites like @marketwatch or new media sites like @techcrunch but i still find the most compelling news alerts on Twitter come from messages that my 'trusted' twitter friends push out my way before i have a chance to read it in my in-box or on a news website that i have to visit. Maybe i am just not following the right Twitter accounts but thanks to Erica's list i can be fully aware of what is available and i can keep an eye on the newspaper industry's adoption of Twitter as another publication push channel.