There’s a new addition to my family! Meet the Francophilia Gazette.
It’s an all-you-can-eat buffet of juicy news tidbits and spicy culture bites from France: gossip, trivia, pop culture, high culture, history, and more… A fresh take on France and Frenchness, with none of those tired articles about Brie and beaujolais nouveau…
I’ve tested this material on Francophilia’s audience for a year through Twitter with excellent results, so I decided to deliver it in a format that the other 81% of Internet users could handle.
The content is literally bite sized, and visiting the site is like walking into a chocolate shop. The design is pure delight too: resize your browser and watch what happens, or Ctrl + and – a few times. Go to the site on your iPhone and feel the love…
The Francophilia Gazette is rated “French,” which means it won’t always be safe for work in other countries… Vive la France !
Filed under: web life , Francophilia, fun, startuppity
February 9, 2010 • 4:54 pm
I went to my first Geek Girl Party in Paris, which was masterfully organized by Sandrine Camus, founder of GamonGirls and the woman behind the Paris Girl Geek Dinners. The party wasn’t quite what I expected. I thought it would be a feminine version of all the tech networking/social events I normally attend, most of which are about startups. But I never saw a business card exchange hands at the girly geek party, and I got the impression it wasn’t serious.
The male-dominated geek events I go to manage to be serious and fun, but the all-girl party was just fun. Also, at the boy parties, everybody is buzzing around talking to strangers, like puppies who run to sniff the shoes of the person they don’t recognize. Where the boys will assertively work the room in search of serendipitous synergies, the girls stood around in their cliques and ignored anyone they didn’t know. I felt like I’d been transported back to high school.
Having a geek girl party is a great idea, unless the only purpose of it is for corporate sponsors to sell you pink tech gadgets. If girl geeks want to be taken seriously, they have to learn how to do fun and serious. Like the boys. And they need to ask for more than free panties and pancake mix…
I highly recommend this French geekette’s insightful and entertaining post on the party.
Filed under: tech events, web life , grrls, fun
December 5, 2009 • 7:11 pm
I’ve just created a Facebook group for women startup founders and management. Just a few weeks ago, I started talking to The Next Women in London about doing some blogging and interviews for them. To do that, I need access to women entrepreneurs. So I took the plunge and created Fondatrix.
It’s something I’ve been thinking of doing for a while now. You see, I’ve been on the web/tech/startup circuit for a couple years here in Paris, and the girlpreneurs are just not visible enough IMHO. And I have a very good idea about why that is… Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: social media, tech events, web life , fun, grrls, startuppity
November 7, 2009 • 7:20 pm
I rarely try out a new site without being highly conscious of my own user experience. That’s what happens when you’ve been in startup Lala Land for a few years, write for a tech blog, and are married to a UI design expert.
Read my post Online seduction on frogblog, about being a conscious user (but mostly about how I was seduced by Squiz, and their anti-business cards).
Filed under: apps, web life , grrls, toys, Francophilia, IRL, personal branding, fun
