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 !

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.

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…

I told a geek guy I know that I was thinking of working with The Next Women, so he went to the site to see what it was about. He read a quote from an interview with a fondatrice (the feminine form of “founder” in French), who was talking about her startup, which has to do with beauty products. He laughed. Read another one about shopping. He laughed. Another one about renting designer handbags. He fucking laughed.

And that’s the problem. Women entrepreneurs and their ideas are sometimes brushed off with disdain by people with junk. So we need to support each other. Like Girl Power 3.0, like CyberElles, like Girlz in Web, like Paris Girl Geeks, like The Next Women, like Women 2.0… Any others you’d like to tell me about?

Why the name Fondatrix? The suffix -trix is a Latin feminine form, and where the French -trice came from. In English, there’s pretty much only one word we associate with that ending… And trix suggests tricks; Web girls are clever girls… Then there is Astérix, the diminutive Gallic hero who symbolizes French strength and determination. All the Gauls’ names end in -ix. Of course, the female characters are all either harpies or bimbos, as far as I can tell. Of course. I used one of them (above) for the Facebook group. For now.

So if you’re a woman in a startup, come join me in Fondatrix. Nobody will laugh at you.

(Closed this group in May, 2010 before I unliked Facebook.)

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).