- Share This Post
- submit
- 4
-
Sparkle (0)
In the ten years since 2000, things changed rapidly in the technology field. We get used to them day by day, adopt changes and never look back. When you do take a moment to look back, you realize how much really has changed in the last 10 years. As part of BlogHer's 10 in 10 series, here are ten things about the last ten years of technology, starting with women in tech.
Two Women
Marissa Mayer is Vice President of Search Product and User Experience at Google. She started with Google in 1999, with a computer science degree from Stanford in her hand. Ten years later, here she is in action at Web 2.0 Summit 09.
Marissa Mayer is responsible for many of the changes in how we conduct an online life, how we search, how we interact with technology. To my mind, she is the most influential woman in tech for the last 10 years. Fortune Magazine placed her a 44 in a list of the 50 most powerful women, but as far as I'm concerned, she's number 1.
Dori Smith runs a close second in influence behind Mayer. It's not because Dori Smith is an important public face for a big corporation. She's much quieter and less public. Here she talks about JavaScript programming. Don't be afraid—go ahead and watch it!
Dori she did something years ago, the ripples from which are still spreading through the tech community. She created a web site called Wise-Women with a tech oriented discussion list: an old fashioned listserv. For all these years, the focus in that list has been women (and men too, but mostly women) helping other women with technical issues. Scores of people have learned much of what they needed to know from conversations on the Wise-Women list. The focus has never wavered, the information sharing has never stopped.
Dori Smith is not spending all her time on listservs, however. She written a number of books on topics like JavaScript, was a founding member of the Web Standards Project, and produces all sorts of information on programming. She has helped a great many learn about technology.
Two Websites
It's hard to narrow the list down to two influential websites from the last 10 years, isn't it? So many important sites get left out. Surely BlogHer has been significant for women. Here are two I think have had huge general impact.
YouTube tops my list. YouTube changed the way we learn, the way we share, the way we teach, the way we play. It's often the first place we look for something—a video of Marissa Mayer speaking at a conference, for example. We go to YouTube for news, for music, for tutorials, for interviews, for everything.
My second choice is Facebook. In a way undreamed of 10 years ago, Facebook has changed our lives. We use Facebook to keep in touch with friends, promote our work, find jobs, support causes, and play games. Facebook pulls in information to your personal page from other social media sources such as Twitter. It's the ubiquitous social network.
Two Innovations
Beginning the decade with the Y2K bug and moving through literally hundreds of technological innovations in the 10 years since the meltdown that wasn't, plenty of new tech has claimed a place in our lives.
Mobile phone technology changed the decade, starting with clunky and limited phones and advancing to the iPhone (released in 2007), mobile technology has altered lifestyles in numerous ways. Using myself as an example, I no longer have a home phone, just a cell phone. I whip out that phone 50 times a day for one reason or another, but seldom to make a phone call. If I want to tell you something, I'll text it or tweet it. If I want to learn something I'll search for it or find it with an app especially designed to give me the exact information I want from a weather forecast to a movie time to a map.
Wireless everything is now standard. Even 30,000 in the air. Smaller and smaller computers that connect wirelessly to the Internet from everywhere. Netbooks, iPads, tech innovations that grow more and more portable while doing more and more of your daily chores. iPods that don't just play your tunes, but connect wirelessly to get your mail and let you
