From comments: the revolution will not be tweeted?

jon asked in comments:

I wonder, what would a feminist- and womanist-oriented social network look like?

(We might have readers unfamiliar with the term “womanist”, if so, see Renee Martin’s I’m not a feminist (and there is no but) and Ope Bukola’s meta-discussion following from that.)

I find this question a lot easier to answer in the negative (“what wouldn’t a feminist- and womanist-oriented social network look like?”), and my answers would include things like:

• packaging women users as a demographic product for sale to advertisers
• packaging women users as a demographic product for sale to people seeking relationships with women
• packaging women’s lives and identities as a product for the entertainment of other users

Ditto for replacing women with other marginalised or oppressed users. But I find it harder to answer it in the positive. What do you think?

Linkspam, the country where I quite want to be (8th December, 2009)

• Margarita Manterola of the Debian project writes about Software Libre, Pasión de Mujeres, a free software event in Argentina where all of the speakers will be women
• We are all pretty WEIRD: noting that most psychological research is done on Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) subjects, and the implications for science reporting on gender and race.
• CNN reports on A day in the ‘normal’ life of a Nobel Prize winner, focussing on Carol Greider’s single motherhood.
• MMORPG News reports that Aurora Technology’s King of the World MMORPG is going to enforce character genders matching player genders by asking players creating a female character to undergo a “webcam test”. Apparently they hope that this will make female players feel respected. We just bet.
• The Los Angeles Times had an article about Brightkite, describing it as targeting “hot girls”, since “guys will go where the hot chicks are.” Brightkite CEO Jonathon Linner posted an apology to the company blog for upsetting women Brightkite users.
• Scientist Carrie: Geeks, meritocracy, and gender: a response to Skud’s meritocracy post, with some additional thoughts and examples.
• We linked to the GNOME Journal Women in Open Source issue before, but a lot of people are especially liking Cathy Malmrose’s The Un-Scary Screwdriver about her five-year-old daughter and friends installing Ubuntu and building computers.
• Mislav Marohnić listed Things I learned from iPhone and Droid ads, inspired by Skud’s post.
• Tara C. Smith has a roundup of discussion around The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, edited by Richard Dawkins, which only features 3 pieces by women, of 83 total.
• The Globe and Mail reports controversy around a sex scene between two male elves in Dragon Age: Origins, “revealing what some experts call the homophobic underbelly of the gaming community.” See also the discussion thread at Sociological Images.
• Study: Males vs Females in social networks has a gender breakdown of users at various sites, including Twitter, Facebook, Digg and Slashdot.

If you have links of interest, please share them in comments here, or if you’re a delicious user, tag them “geekfeminism” to bring them to our attention. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links in comments and on delicious.

Ceci n’est pas une linkspam (4th October, 2009)

• The do’s and don’ts of being a good ally
• Ring around Saturn: Jennifer Ouellette at Twisted Physics profiles astrophysicist Carolyn Porco and her work on the Cassini probe
• Liana Leahy asks SRSLY? at claims of reverse sexism in regard to the women’s Rails workshops she’s organising
• Peggy at Women in Science writes about women who might be in line for a Nobel prize
• Embrace Your Inner Hacker Girls in Tech guest poster Sara Czyzewicz, on building stuff with microcontrollers at MakerFaire RI
• Desiree Michael writes on ways to fight the Gender Divide Who Said It Would Be Easy?, on Girls in Tech
• Bruce Byfield has a belated report on the mini-summit on women in free software
• Apparently, Women Rule the Social Web but not Digg. Or wikipedia

If you have links of interest, please share them in comments here, or if you’re a delicious user, tag them “geekfeminism” to bring them to our attention.