Look out all designers and developers: Gen Z girls are tech savvy and ready to step up to the plate! At least that’s what a day at the Technology Takes You Anywhere summit where Reading Room Brisbane hosted a workshop seemed to suggest. Girls today no longer need to fear the social stigmas attached with being a geek as those born into the digital age pretty much had no choice but to embrace it. The summit is an annual event aimed at increasing girls’ interest in technology and their confidence with using it. Through these events, girls will be exposed to a range of different technologies and female role models who work successfully in the ICT industry. Girls will also discover the diverse range of challenging and rewarding pathways that exist within the industry.

We held a digital design workshop for groups of girls in their tweens and the skills they brought to the table would make most tech savvy individuals cringe with inadequacy! Our presence seemed like a natural step for an organization where the myth of males dominating a tech based business are debunked entirely with significant leadership positions held by a multitude of talented and very switched on members of the female web industries here in Oz and the UK markets.Our new designer Suzanne Conkas delivered some brilliant templates complete with a web browser screen grab to assemble the layout within and another page of wireframe  elements to use in the process. Worries about whether the task of copying & pasting would prove too challenging completely eroded as we were grilled with questions like “why aren’t we using Photoshop?” and “how come I can’t make this page go live?”.

Once we assured them that the next time they’d get to do actual web design our Australian CEO, Sarah Vick, introduced each group to our organization; the roles that women lead in and the types of jobs that are needed for this industry. Afterwards we had them choose a favourite topic for their websites, develop a user group, establish the user’s needs and finally sketch up some wireframes prior to launching into the design work. Unfortunately our example slides showed what we thought were typical topics of interest for this demographic and as soon as they saw the Bieber’s lack of a hairline all bets were off for sites about cute animals, families and world peace.

Providing them with the creative commons shared flickr search engine compfight.com they went to town downloading, copying & pasting and generally getting their geek on over topics ranging from strange girlish sounding boy singers with no visible foreheads to the love of the great Aussie pie. The results were surprising and more surprising was the after lunch group who almost needed the riot squad to disperse them once the bribery lollies were brought out for the Q & A session – close call but we all survived finger tips intact! All in all it was truly eye opening to see how dialled in the kids of today are regarding all things tech and great to see that the future of this industry will never be a boys club again.

With ICT  (Information and Communications Technology) becoming more and more ingrained in our daily lives why is there still a disproportionate number of girls coming into the industry and taking up education courses at university in ICT subjects? According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, women comprise between 15 and 25 per cent of ICT employees.¹  In 2006 in Queensland, only 0.9 per cent of all female year 12 graduates chose information technology as their post-school field of study. A total of 5.5 per cent of all year 12 graduates chose it as their post-school field of study.²

For me as a child of the 80’s a typical stereotype of an IT role was someone sat in front of a  computer all day generating code to make software, something that definitely didn’t appeal to me. I would have thought this stereotype would have moved on considerably by now with the internet, games consoles, mobile phones etc, and that with a range of more diverse roles many more women would be in ICT roles. However looking at the statistics and research this doesn’t seem to be the case, so I thought I’d ask someone I know why this might be happening. She is 25 and has a computer science degree and was the only girl on her course and her answer absolutely shocked me:

It’s not socially acceptable for girls to do techie stuff.  You are discouraged from doing it so much that it’s not worth the effort to argue.  And trying to get a job is a nightmare, I was turned down for an interview for a coding position because the guy said “he didn’t think I’d fit in with the other guys”

So now counting my blessings that I work somewhere as open and non-discriminatory as Reading Room I am even happier (was already quite proud) to say we have decided to support this year’s Technology Takes You Anywhere event by running a workshop about digital design. This is an annual event aimed at increasing girls’ interest in technology and their confidence with using it. Through these events, girls will be exposed to a range of different technologies and female role models who work successfully in the ICT industry. Girls will also discover the diverse range of challenging and rewarding pathways that exist within the industry. We hope to share what we do at Reading Room so that girls get to see the exciting range of possibilities there are within a digital consultancy, and to get them interested in an industry which is only going to get bigger and more exciting. Maybe one day one of those girls will come and work for Reading Room, now that would be cool!

1 Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Australia, Building Australian ICT Skills – Presentation to the Australian Council of Professors and Heads of Information Systems – 26 September 2006, Commonwealth of Australia, 2006, p.5.

2 Polesel, J. & Teese R., The next step report 2006 on the destinations of Year 12 completers in Queensland, Department of Education and the Arts, Queensland Government, 2006. p.15.

This intrepid intern returns from her hibernation with a confession. I spent the last week with someone. We met through a friend after lunch one day.  I apparently had to meet this guy.  It was a torrid affair – I only found out his name today – The Most Interesting Man in the World 2.0 Isaiah Mustafa.

That’s right.

I (like many of you) spent possibly too much time with the Old Spice Guy.

He’s a brilliantly conceived character, attractive, articulate and very funny. He’s made plenty of us laugh over the past few months (the campaign started in February).  The genius was not in just having a great character – but also in playing to the strengths of the channels it used. He played up to morning news shows. I could I tweet to my new friend and eagerly await his reply on YouTube. The campaign even retained a sense of authenticity with one video response to his daughter. I was also able to enjoy that oddly voyeuristic experience of watching him respond to celebrities on YouTube. I could share easily and effectively this entire whirlwind affair via Facebook.

The campaign has been a phenomenal success in brand awareness – they stayed bang on message for their product. However I wonder if that will translate into actual sales. I’m hyperaware of the brand Old Spice. I can identify their logo and will now even identify the whistle to the man and to the brand. I don’t know that I’ll hand over any of my hard earned cash to buy Old Spice for my guy – not without smelling it first. To me – the perfume section of any major department store can be like running a gauntlet. Eager immaculate perfume sprayers jump out like obstacles in a video game – it takes wits, cunning and agility to reach the other end smelling the same as when you entered.  I’ll admit this campaign might just convince me to run that gauntlet to find a bottle of Old Spice and have a sniff.

The most striking thing about this campaign though – and I suspect the element that will ensure its lasting success – is its end. The saturation point for any new fad or thing can hit exponentially faster on the internet. The sheer volume of channels available to get a message through can turn us against an otherwise lovely/funny/ OMGWTFBBQ! /fascinating  viral campaign.

We bid farewell to our Old Spice Guy just a few days ago. Like any holiday romance – it was short, sweet and leaves us with the hope of perhaps returning for more – later.

Donna Hogan is an intern with Reading Room. You can find her on twitter, or send her an email.

We concur.

Late Wednesday night, I (like many others) noticed something ‘up’ on my facebook news feed. We all caught on of course, it was nigh on impossible to miss the news that Julia Gillard had challenged Kevin Rudd for the leadership and Kevin had asked for a special caucus the next morning to address the matter. Yesterday was a media maelstrom of updates and commentary from Capitol Hill – I expect nothing less from my fourth estate. This isn’t the first time we’ve woken up to a new PM. Keating challenged Hawke for the leadership (and won) in ‘91. I have no doubt newspaper sales, and radio/television ratings spiked heavily then as they did yesterday.

What is new this time is the public’s voice.  I (as I’m certain many of you) heard not only the considered expert opinions of political correspondents in Canberra, but we also engaged in a massive dialogue online. Thanks to social media the public sphere was not censored by news directors or radio producers. ‘Julia Gillard’ remained the top trending topic on twitter for most of yesterday and as press conferences were broadcast they were blogged and microblogged live across a number of social media platforms. We’ve blogged before on public events, certainly. The last federal election saw social media become a legitimate channel for political commentary. But the almost instant decrease in use by (most) politicians after the votes were counted made many wonder if they took it seriously.

We also saw the change in the way we seek and find our credible sources. 19 years ago I imagine press conferences were just as hastily announced. Releases and statements rushed to the hands of journalists nationwide. Ordinary citizens like you and I had to wait. We either turned on the radio to hear the (predictable) opinions of the shock jocks. We waited for the 6pm news on TV. We waited for the newspaper to be delivered. The ‘fallout’ was mediated by news directors, editors and producers. Yesterday we could follow any stream of opinion we liked. Links to blogs and news reports flew thick and fast across the internet as particular witticisms were ‘shared’ and retweeted countless times. The once silent majority found their voice – uncensored, unmediated and authetically theirs.

While there’s no sure-fire way to know (short of asking the office of the PM) if someone in Canberra was monitoring facebook or twitter – I suspect they were. The ‘de-friending’ of Kevin Rudd on Julia Gillard’s facebook is a hint ( the event has it’s own page).   It’s even harder to know if anything we said got through, (I’m confident Ms Gillard knows her hair colour and gender already).

I do know for certain, they couldn’t miss it.

Donna Hogan is an intern with Reading Room. You can find her on twitter, or send her an email.

I miss newspapers.

When I was a kid, my parents owned a coffee shop in Adelaide and every morning before school, I would put out the papers while they were still warm.  I miss the tactile sensation of the paper beneath my fingers as I once flicked through pages. I miss the typography, I miss the columns and I miss the mastheads next to each other on the news stand like flags asking you to pick a team.

I haven’t purchased a newspaper in some time now. There doesn’t seem much point, I read my breaking news on my phone as I ride the bus in the morning and browse news sites through the day. It seems I’m not the only one to have shifted mediums.

I heard The Australian would be the first Aussie masthead to launch an app for the iPad and I was very eager to try it out.

I had some joy in staking out the overly busy Apple store in Sydney. Since I had already hooked up an appointment with an iPad benefactor I was mostly there to hear what Apple had to say. Perhaps there was something about my manner (perhaps Apple just has pathologically attentive customer service) because I was whisked upstairs by staff member who talked me through some of the apps. Sadly The Australian app isn’t part of their showcase, however the Times online is – so we had a look through that instead. Since this was a showcase app I’m told it didn’t have full features for me to play with.

Dropdown menus to select sections and the touch screen means navigating digital news in a traditional format. Breaking news sweeps in just as it might on your PC browser or your iPhone. The ‘Front page’ looks much more like the digital edition than the hard copy – however the transition is in the functionality. The contents fall from drop down menus and a single tap brings up the new section.

While looking at world news, a tap on the lead picture enlarges a high resolution image. I can imagine photojournalism taking on a whole new element as suddenly I have an enhanced tactile experience with the images of the day.

I was disappointed to find Letters to the Editor has yet to include (what I thought was) an obvious functionality. I had hoped the application would plug into my email automatically. At this stage it seems you still need to exit, open your email, enter the editor’s email address, write your letter and send – exactly as you do now. This seems a missed opportunity for the Fourth Estate, I had hoped writing in to the Letters section to be streamlined, and (although I anticipate comments on articles will function much as they do on my current online edition).

Later that night I had a play with the iPad and ‘The Australian’ app. The Front Page matched the digital edition, but not the hardcopy.  A quick look through Business – I found it frustrating to not be able to enlarge tables or polls. I can appreciate the feeds for stock indices and markets being a hit – but not so different from the data we already receive on a mobile device.

My benefactor was even kind enough to allow me to stay up to see if news changed with the overnight editions. It seems the browser will ‘check’ for breaking news, however it seems it is still up to the newsroom to file at their discretion. For now, overnight news still follows the traditional deadlines and the page updates at around 6 am.

I was concerned about rumours that full page ads blocking readers from accessing articles. When I accessed the International section a ‘full page’ ad appeared – however a single tap turned the page. If this had been hard copy I’d still simply turn the page. Certainly less invasive than animations which jump around while I’m trying to navigate from my PC.

I’m hoping to reclaim my newspapers, the format I first fell in love with. I hope the iPad will restore the tactile sensation of discovering the day’s events.  With the ability to interact with the actual text and content – the iPad holds a lot of promise for the user experience.

I guess now it’s up to the publishers and their developers to deliver on that promise.

Donna Hogan is an intern with Reading Room. You can find her on twitter, or send her an email.

Social Networks are a well established part of our everyday digital lives. The available flavours of networks range from general purpose mainstream networks like Facebook, MySpace or Twitter over business oriented networks such as LinkedIn or XING up to networks catering for specialist interest group like CouchSurfing.

While all of these networks have a slightly different focus and vary in their functionality, the core idea always stays the same: Create yourself a profile, connect with other people, communicate and share information. The more you connect, communicate and share the better. (This proposition needs further research but I am sure that it holds at least for the network provider…)

But are all your friends, colleagues and business partners using the same social network? And does this network suit all your needs? Does it offer a level of privacy you are comfortable with?

A “No” to any of these questions will lead you to set up your second, third…twenty-ninth account. It’s always a simple process: A sign-up form, a double opt-in email, a photo upload and short description about yourself, your dog and your sexual preferences and you have yourself a brand new empty network. Now, you start connecting again. Probably mostly with the same people from your existing networks.

Is that really necessary? Why do I need to have multiple profiles in order to communicate with people from different networks? Why is there so much socialising going on within the networks but hardly any in between?

Social networks like to feed on the user’s data and then keep this data within the well defined perimeter of the network. While this makes a lot of sense from the individual network provider’s point of view, the effects for the user are less than desirable.

Networks have started to open up their systems by exposing APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) and allowing the interconnection of profiles from other networks. Tools are also available to aggregate feeds from different networks in an attempt to make the information more manageable. But these APIs are always created and tailored for specific networks and the tools have to implement these APIs. No accepted open standard for social networks exists.

So while I can use my phone to ring anyone in the world, regardless of country, type of phone and network provider, and sent an email to anyone with an email address using my preferred email client, service provider and internet access type – for social networks this is still a long way off.

Christian Luebeck is a Solutions Architect at Reading Room Australia. You can talk to him on Twitter or by email.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has admitted that the company have “made a bunch of mistakes” in the recent privacy changes to the social networking platform.

While the developments announced at the f8 conference represent an exciting new phase for web developers and advertisers alike, the ability to “socialise” your experience across the web has some serious repercussions for users and our expectations of, and rights to privacy.  By ’socialise’ we really mean ‘connect everything to Facebook’ – offering unparalleled amounts of trackable, measurable data about your online behaviour, your likes, dislikes and those of your friends.

For marketers, it’s a tantalising prospect – but it’s also a tie that binds us, a large share of our marketing activity and our target demographic to a single privately owned platform which currently pretty much does as it pleases and waits for us all to stop grumbling and adjust – which we do, time and again.

Influential people like Robert Scoble are loudly announcing their beliefs that privacy is dead.  In a nutshell, Scoble’s stance is that the benefits of sharing information in this way outweigh the drawbacks, the onus is on users to think carefully about how to ensure stuff they don’t want shared can’t be shared- and that ultimately, the world has already moved on and privacy as we previously understood it is gone – largely thanks to Google and Facebook.

Zuckerberg’s most recent statement on Facebook’s privacy policy is as follows:

• You have control over how your information is shared.
• We do not share your personal information with people or services you don’t want.
• We do not give advertisers access to your personal information.
• We do not and never will sell any of your information to anyone.
• We will always keep Facebook a free service for everyone.

The tricky part of this is that many users find the changes downright bewildering, often not realising that previously ’secure’ areas are now wide open, and that their logged-in behaviour is now being recorded with greater accuracy than ever before. While Facebook may not give your personal information away, it certainly allows advertisers to create extremely targeted ads based on that rich seam of data.
So what? Well, there’s no opt-in – and in Australia, especially, we have a fine tradition of democracy, holding dear the idea of choice. You could argue that a certain level of web-savvy should be mandatory before people go blundering around the internet, like being obliged to wear a crash helmet before taking your push bike onto the roads, but the reality is that there are no safeguards, no handy how-to guide issued to all web users.

Sen. Conroy asked today whether users would prefer “a corporate giant who is answerable to no one and motivated solely by profit making the rules on the internet, or a democratically elected government with all the checks and balances in place?” Zuckerberg’s stance is that users can define their own levels of privacy, whereas Conroy thinks we need saving from ourselves.

I’m all for empowerment, not control – and I’m not sure I like all this power being held in the hands of a few, whether that’s Zuckerberg, Schmidt or Conroy. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

As a user, I was startled to learn that what I’d though of as my locked-down Facebook profile was unsecured in parts – and given that I’m an über-nerd, I can only imagine how much worse these breaches would be for less ‘expert’ users.

As a marketer, I find the idea of this wealth of knowledge exciting, though I have reservations about being obliged to use one platform to reach consumers – monopolies make me nervous.

Cathie McGinn is Marketing Communications Director at Reading Room Australia.  You can talk to her on Twitter or by email.

We’re delighted to see ABC’s Hungry Beast has finally set to music some of the many things we enjoy about the fine city of Canberra.

Canberra: The Musical.

It’s Canberra! There’s no traffic in
Canberra! Because no one lives in
Canberra!
Meet a soldier or a spy from ASIO
Or high court justice William Gummo.
It’ll make you want to sing
Because there’s nothing more excit-ing… than Canberra

Well, here’s an animated gif to cheer you up.  You’re welcome.