today is Ada Lovelace day.

this day has been organised to celebrate and draw attention to women who excel in technology. you can find out more about ada or other women in tech on the ada lovelace day collection and their twitter account

i wanted to highlight a woman who has been instrumental to the internet industry – particularly in the early days. perhaps someone who worked with tim berners-lee in developing hypertext. someone at BBN or USC/ISI who helped develop the domain name system (DNS). but all the internet history sites, like this one from the computer history museum, talk about the men – vint cerf, bob kahn, tim berners-lee, ray tomlinson, etc.

i tried to think of other internet women and came up with a few… esther dyson, kim polese, meg whitman, and even carly fiorina.

but it was really hard to find the names of any women who worked on standards, protocols, etc. do i need to search thru RFCs to find them? academic journals? they must exist!

so after spending a good chunk of time this afternoon searching, here’s 2 women i’d like to highlight:

Joan Margaret Winters
while i could barely find any information about her – it seems she was an early advocate for what we now call ‘user experience’ but then ‘human factors’. She worked with/at IBM from the mid-1979s on both software & hardware human factors projects.

slightly more info here.

Judith Estrin
Judith has co-founded 2 networking companies – Bridge which merged with 3Com and Precept which was acquired by Cisco. She has been on Fortune mag’s list of the most powerful women (3 times!) and was inducted to the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame in 2002. Last September, she wrote the book: Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy .

i haven’t been posting to this blog – work has been overwhelming but the project i’ve been working on for about 8 months finally went live this past week – so pulling out a few items i had socked away…

cisco & musion teamed up to create this holographic video conferencing. how insanely cool!!

i do a fair amt of work over the phone. while we have a video conference with one of our other offices – it’s not very good. the video doesn’t show body language very well but the biggest issue is the audio. wonder how these 300k systems sound?

more here:
http://www.humanproductivitylab.com/archive_blogs/2007/11/15/cisco_experimenting_with_an_on_1.php

and an article on other systems

Science Daily has an article re: use of IM is good for reducing interruptions (which we know is good for productivity).

It seems IM created conversations which were shorter than if the person had called or had a face to face conversation. People who used IM felt they were interrupted less. Finding out when people were available to have a longer conversation or to get quick answers were some of the IM uses mentioned.

Quite a great finding for those companies who still block IM b/c it’s seen as a productivity drain.

The study, by researchers at Ohio State U & U of California, has been published in the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication. It involved 912 randomly selected participants from 12 metro areas who worked at least 30 hours per week in an office and used a computer for at least five hours in a workday.

carolin horn’s mfa thesis project was around visualising information. out of her research came anymails.

it is a very cool way to both visualise and think of emails. every email is represented as an animal (ameba looking but cute). the colour and shape of the animal tells you what sort of email it is (ie filtered – friend? family? work? spam?).

For instance, all received emails from school are blue and look a bit like croissants.

very cute!

the colour also determines the age of the email – it fades as it sits in your email. knowing whether you have read/not read/replied to an email is also important and visually represented by the motion of the beast (it pulsates faster when it needs attention) and how many hairy little feet it has (hairs fall out as you go from unread -> read -> replied).

it looks fantastic but IMO would fall apart if you had more styles of animals (ie more categories). i receive a lot of email and i filter a lot. i also sub-filter (sure it’s a friend but which friend?). the critters could be images of my friends faces or icons representing each mailing list but i think it might go into visual overload fairly quickly.

will be really interesting to see if this gets developed further.

a couple new tools i’ve found recently

skrbl is a within your browser whiteboard. you can sketch or do text in a limited range of colors and print or email it. i couldnt figure out how to erase a scribble which was annoying. good for when you need to share a quick sketch.

a new GTD tool, nozbe lets you run 5 projects for free, list your to-dos & next stops and categorize them. nice ajax interface.