Report from Women Who Tech... and a new baby in the family

Quite a day today: Mixed it with 650 other women online at the Women Who Tech (WWT) telesummit and my new Apple MacBook Pro arrived.

The telesummit was excellent. Sessions were held using ReadyTalk, with slideshows online and a free phone-in number. There were some glitches with the web side, mostly due to misunderstandings and broken links. I found the ReadyTalk support people very helpful in response, and the WWT women were equally helpful and flexible. There’s room for improvement in helping newcomers understand how a combined phone-in/webinar works, but hundreds of women managed to participate very happily.

I noticed some overlap in sessions from last week’s NTEN Non-Profit Technology Conference. That overlap wasn’t necessarily a disadvantage: I found it useful to have some concepts and material repeated with the slightly different slant required by a webinar. The 75-minute sessions zipped past at an amazing rate and were stuffed with good information and useful resources. I attended sessions on Get Your Local Campaigns On; Build an Online Campaign; Women and Social Capital; Firing up your Online List; Everything you Wanted to Know about Tech But Were Afraid to Ask; and Web 2.0 sessions. I used Twitter to tweet all the sessions I attended, while following those I couldn’t attend via others’ tweets. Very effective but definitely a multitasking stretch, what with several other background tasks requiring my attention.

A few highlights: Beth Kanter’s Cute Dog Theory of Web 2.0; listening to the panel field all sorts of questions in the Everything You Wanted to Know session; hearing some of the personal tales behind the highly successful ventures of some very high profile women.

Women Who Tech will be publishing the sessions online for those who couldn’t attend, so keep an eye on their site. And keep an ear out for the next time around: it’s a high-value, high-intensity day.

Crossing over 

In fact, so high-intensity was it that I didn’t get a chance to open the box containing my brand new Mac. It’s sitting here, beckoning. I plan to leave it under wraps until tomorrow, when I can do it justice. As this will be the first Mac I’ve spent time with for well over 15 years, I plan to blog the experience.

The abundance of very happy Mac users at the NTEN conference and the ability to run Windows on the new Macs has lured me into this new realm. While I’m not planning to plunge into the ranks of the blinded-by-the-Mac fanatics, I think Microsoft is becoming more of a lumbering behemoth with each passing year and it’s time to look at alternatives. I intend to load up the release version of Ubuntu 8.04 when it’s launched in 24 days, so it should be an interesting time.