w00t.

Wow. What can I say? I’m pleased as a peach about how She’s Geeky Twin Cities turned out. I’m so excited about organizing the next event! It’s going to be even more awesome!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

First, a HUGE THANK YOU to all our attendees. Ladies, you are awesome and I’m so humbled you chose to attend our unConference.  Second, thank you to all our sponsors: ClockWork, ipHouse, the Science Museum of Minnesota, Fabuliss, MinneWebCon, MinneStar, and SieEnt. Thirdly, thank you to Heidi Nobantu-Saul for facilitating both days and for all the pre-conference help. Thanks to our volunteers who tweeted, blogged, facebooked, hooked us up with contacts and checked women in at registration. Finally, last but not least, to Elizabeth Tupper for driving and seeing this to its fruition. She’s Geeky Twin Cities would not have been possible with out her!

Speaking of Liz, she said it best:

“Words can not explain how amazing it feels to bring 100 women the same life changing experience you had 8 months earlier.”

So instead of using my words (assuming I had them) – how about hearing, reading, seeing the event through others:

She’s Geeky Attendee Blogs/Podcasts:

From the ipHouse Blog
From the “Professional MacGyver”
From Social Nicole
From Kay Roseland
From Fabuliss
From the Most Popular Girls on the Internet
From Jenna Pederson

If you wrote something about She’s Geeky and its not here, let me know and I’ll get it up here!

She’s Geeky Press!

MPR press
Tech dot MN Story

Photos from She’s Geeky Twin Cities

I’ve always been a nerdy girl.

I’ve always been curious about the world around me. I was (and still am) especially fascinated with space. In third grade there was a partial solar eclipse. The night before the eclipse on the news they showed how to make a pinhole box with tin foil. I put one together that night. I had to fight my parents to stay up to finish it and I was very proud of it. I brought it to school and showed it to my teacher. I was the only kid to have one, but my teacher let me out on the playground at the appropriate time to use it. I was excited as the little dot of light began to shadow into a little crescent. I felt special to have the permission to be outside to witness it. But, I also felt very alone. There was no one to share the excitement with.

As I got older, I discovered that not only was it lonely to be a nerdy, geeky kid, but even more lonely to be a nerdy, geeky girl. Sure, the boys on my block would play with Transformers and the Atari with me, but I had to fly solo when my collection of My Little Ponies and stuffed animals saved the world along with Optimus Prime and Voltron. They just weren’t interested.

Talking Shop and Shopping

The Internet made it easier to connect with other fellow geeks and nerds but as a woman, I was a minority. I love talking about video games, music, science and technology. But sometimes I want also to talk about shoes, handbags, makeup, economics and my bizarre crushes on Werner Heisenberg and Mark Mothersbaugh; especially so with people who simultaneously want to talk about the former too.

So I said to Elizabeth Tupper, “Hey we need a women’s’ tech conference in the Twin Cities”. And not another group to join, but a conference that brought all kinds of disciplines together to cross-pollinate. After encountering several dead ends, Liz found out about She’s Geeky DC on twitter. It sounded perfect. We flew out there on our own dimes to check it out. We loved it.

Why She’s Geeky is Awesome

She’s Geeky DC was awesome because we could talk about tech and yoga together without an eye-roll. Moms brought daughters. We worked in corporations, for non-profits, for the government, for ourselves. We could talk about science and cocktails. We asked each other if management or consulting or programming was the right career path for us. We asked each other why we weren’t speaking at tech conferences. We asked each other why weren’t starting that business or following that dream. We encouraged and energized each other. And when the power went out on Saturday, we improvised!

We could talk about whatever we wanted – it was our conference.

And that’s the vision Liz and I wanted to bring back to the Twin Cities.

Just like my 3rd-grade nerdy girl self, we just want to share the excitement with other women seeking the same.

What’s more awesome is that the Science Museum of Minnesota sponsored our meeting space and all attendees will be able to stroll through the museum as well. How cool is that?

I hope you register for the event. I can’t wait to meet you and hear your stories!

We hope you’ll join us August 6 and 7 at the Science Museum of Minnesota!

The first test of an entrepreneur is – can you spell “entrepreneur”?

So I think I passed that one. *whew*

I’ve decided to combine my passion for empowering women with my passion for video games. Its like the peanut butter cup of video games and its going to be awesome. As much as I’d love to spill the details, I know I can’t just yet — and its driving me nuts!

I have to say that I am amazed and in awe of the support I’ve been receiving for both my idea and what I’m going to accomplish. People really do want to help others.

So to that end, I encourage anyone with a great idea to start talking about what you want to do with that idea and see what happens. Perhaps you’ll be amazed too!

…well web stalkers and reputation managers…

I finally got around to updating all of my profiles, when a friend told me about extendr. The cool thing about extendr is that it gives a nifty little tour option for your links. People can explore your world without actually visiting the Web sites. The browser plug-in to bookmark links to your profile seems to work, but it puts all the links into a “from the web” category. So you need re-categorize all the links into the appropriate categories. Luckily, this is simple in extendr.

extendr is missing feeds. Why not let someone subscribe to updates? The 250 character limit is constraining too. I haven’t seen any of the extendr profiles ranking in the SERPs for name searches either. It looks like that is going to take some time to achieve. The extendr pages do get indexed, however.

extendr could be used in so many ways. People know you from so many different aspects of your life. Manage your personal brand. Find and express your individuality through all the noise. Use it for your business, product.

It will be interesting to see which profiles and aggregators will be adopted on a large-scale in the next few years (and what new ones will appear on the scene). If anything, extendr has make me realize how many profiles I have laying around the Internet. Its a great place to keep it all tidy.

So I’m playing with the new Google Profiles today. So far seems like yet another profile to maintain. Possibly handy if you have a relatively common name. Probably not handy if you are say, John Smith.

If you have a Gmail account, the profile URL can only be customized as your gmail ID name or a series of numbers to mask your ID (otherwise people could infer your email address). If you use a non-gmail account, you can customize the profile URL to whatever your little heart desires. Which is what I did.

Search visibility is pretty much instant, but profiles, for now, are located at the very bottom of the page. I purposely set up my URL for my short name, Jacque, instead of Jacqueline to test. I have visibility for both names in the SERP.

Here is the result for me signed into a different Google account. Note the sponsored link:

Here is the profile on the bottom of the 1st page in the SERP. Note the links to the other Social Networking sites.

A search for my short name, Jacque shows the profile result along with with my full name:

Jackie Urick is a common misspelling of my short name. While I have thought about “dominating” search for “Jackie Urick”, once I realized a few years back that the only other person with my name is some high schooler in Montana (prolly graduated by now even), I didn’t sweat it. Besides, I use “Jacqueline” for my professional name.

What is nifty is that MY Google profile is appearing for the search “Jackie Urick” despite the fact I didn’t list it as a nickname in the profile.

TAKE THAT JACKIE URICK IN MONTANA.

You can visit my profile here: http://www.google.com/profiles/jacque.urick