ReadWriteWeb

Doing research to attract more women to our Mobile Summit on May 7, 2010, I revisited some of ReadWriteWeb's past articles on gender and tech. In January, we discussed "'Sexy Girls,' Smart Women and Tech" in an open thread where we asked for readers' opinions and had an open discussion on women's issues, like whether it's true that some good-looking women get flaunted as sex symbols, while other women get overlooked, are underpaid and not taken seriously.

After Google Buzz launched to a lot of hype and controversy in early February, it looked like it could become a big hit for Google - especially after the company fixed some of the early privacy flaws that plagued Buzz in its early days. These days, however, a lot of us on the RWW team have noticed that the number of interactions on Buzz seems to have declined rapidly. While a lot of people are still sharing their blog posts, Flickr and Twitter items on Buzz, the number of comments and likes on most posts is pretty low.

When it comes to tech conferences, the first thing most people think about is the parties.

They might think about networking opportunities or learning experiences, but all too often, these are brushed off as mutual admiration societies and redundant, unoriginal chatter. I've heard every critique imaginable about some of the best-known tech conferences

Social media gurus: We all know one. If you're lucky, you know only one.

They are the attendees of tech parties, the "Twitter consultants," the armchair generals of the Internet, and their numbers grow by the day. Yet most of them couldn't distinguish a line of code from a badly punctuated haiku.

What's to be done with the social media experts? Accept that their blathering may contain some wisdom? Or require technical exams for all Twitter users with more than 1,000 followers? You decide! And make the NMDs among us take our "technical" quiz.

For many years, I have been famously (or notoriously) anti-Silicon Valley. There's nothing wrong with the place in iteself; what I detested was the snobbish notion that the Valley is the de facto or "best" place to run a startup or be involved with the tech world.

I'm now forced to eat my words as my hetero life mate and I prepare to move into a Burlingame apartment conveniently located a few blocks away from the startup he's now working at;

Still, if I were starting a company, would I move from Omaha or Nashville or Boulder to come to the Valley? Would you?

In just a couple more days, a healthy section of the RWW team - and a good number of our friends and fans - will be convening in Austin for South by Southwest Interactive. A couple of us have been asked to speak on panels; we wanted to share that information with you and ask you to share your panels and talks with us (and the rest of our readers, too).

Leave a comment telling us - and the rest of the world - about your SXSW Interactive panel. Let us know who's going to be talking and what you're talking about, plus where and when to show up.

In the past, we've talked a bit about issues of gender and technology, but today, this blog post brought another important aspect of tech and discrimination to our attention.

We polled some of our friends on Google Buzz and asked whether ageism is something they've seen at work or that has effected their lives. And the responses were interesting - although some say they try to be as even-handed as possible, others said that age discrimination exists at both ends of the spectrum, especially when it comes to landing a job.

For months, we've been fielding rumors (and filtering out the facts) about MySpace's proposed redesign and rebranding.

Tonight's report on TechCrunch outlines a few minor details of the overall plan to stop the site's hemorrhaging users and stem its financial decline. As we've known (and as we predicted last year), the site will shift its emphasis from pure social networking to content discovery and recommendation. The site's tagline is expected to change to "Discover and Be Discovered."

Earlier today, we had a runaway hit of a post that went viral within a few hours, getting unbelievable pageviews and hundreds of retweets and comments.

The trouble was, it wasn't because of the post's content. Due to some interesting SEO magic, the post was one of the first search results for the term "Facebook login." As a result, hundreds of confused readers bombed us with angry comments about how much they hated the "new Facebook," a.k.a. our Facebook Connect comment login.

How can we balance making the Web simple enough for all users while still creating tech cool enough to satisfy geeks like us? And who says either group - nerds or users - is "normal," anyway?

So, Facebook went and secretly rewrote PHP's runtime to be a lean, mean, C++ translated, g++ compiled piece of resource-friendly hotness.

If that sentence confused you, then you're not the target audience for this post. We want to know what our developer friends think of HipHop, the latest open-source code project to emerge from the deep, dark dungeons of Facebook's Palo Alto headquarters (ok, the HQ's actually quite pretty, but we like a good turn of phrase). Read these expert opinions (and by "expert," we mean Rasmus Lerdorf), and let us know in the comments what you think of the new PHP runtime.