And I am so interested in hearing exactly how much time you spend – how much exactly is an “extraordinary amount of time finding those qualified women and asking them to speak?” A few days? A few weeks? A few months? And how many women, exactly? A dozen? Half a dozen? Three? And how do you actually go about doing this? What is your methodology for identifying, tracking down and approaching women? How hard is it, really?

1) As a conference organizer, you spend a disproportionate amount of time looking for women speakers. Put another way, using the same “find speaker” methodology you will discover one woman for every ten men (this seems roughly tied to the proportion of women in tech?).

2) In my experience, women have recommended other female speakers to us, although it does not usually fill the gender gap.

3) Speaker discovery methodology usually involves a combination of the following (among other less common things, of course): reaching out to obvious high-profile individuals in your particular topic area (3-4), posting a submission form on your web site and sorting through approximately 60-70 (at least) speaker submissions, 99% male, and reaching out specifically to women in your network and asking them if they know other qualified female speakers.

4) You CAN fill half your speaker roster with women, if you really do work hard at it. But it raises interesting questions, especially if you are hosting a paid educational conference, because for whatever reason, my experience teaches me that you are unlikely to find as many women speakers who are equally qualified to speak on their given topic as you will find male speakers. To clarify: this is not to say that said female speakers don’t exist, but rather that given the constraints of the event business, finding them is part of a trade-off. So you often need to decide if you want a 50/50 balance in your speaker list or a more engaging conference.

So why bother?

Honestly, the most engaging event you can put together is one where both men and women, who are equally qualified, are equally involved. As an event producer, it’s your mission to work your butt off to put together the best possible experience for your attendees.

Tech events are part of the tech ecosystem, and are certainly part of the cycle. How many women attend tech events? It’s related to how many women are on stage. How many women are on stage? It’s related to how many women are in tech. How many women are in tech? It’s related to how many women attend tech events.

In short: Aliza, we are constantly, unendingly looking for women to speak on topics relevant to our audiences. And it is, unsurprisingly, hard to take an industry that is, by everyone’s numbers, extremely male dominated, and make it appear fully balanced on stage. But it’s worth working on. Judging by your Twitter account it seems like you might have some interesting stories to tell – please send me an e-mail and let’s talk about what you can share.

StartupDay 2010 is the conference for pre-entrepreneurs interested in founding or joining a tech startup. Learn what’s important for creating a tech business from scratch.

One the people in Seattle working hard to reinvent the technology events scene (it DOES need some reinventing) is Marcelo Calbucci.

If you’re in the Seattle area and you’re thinking about putting aside the daily grind and setting out into the vast, uncharted regions of startupland, I’d recommend picking up a ticket to this conference, scheduled for September 25th.

I’ll be hanging around, so be sure to say hi.

A patent application submitted by Paul Allen’s Interval Research in 1998 envisioned groups of authenticated users sharing “lightweight messages” through a central server, using distributed client devices.

To borrow phraseology for some other common statments: The Patent system of protecting inventions is the worst system ever created to protect inventions, except for all the others.

Chris Pirillo, on why he’s leaving Gnomedex behind:

Without a dedicated team of rock star organizers and directors, tasks slip through the cracks – and you often won’t realize this until the event happens. When someone’s attention is diverted to other projects, yours will not receive the attention it requires.

My boss likes to say that running a great event is like running a great restaurant – if you’ve done it right you make it look easy. Gnomedex always looked easy.

But beyond that, running events (I should know) is a metric buttload of work, and something the size, scale, and quality of Gnomedex is not a weekend project. Thank you Chris, and everyone else involved for so many years, for contributing to the Seattle community as long as you have been.

There are a lot of cool people in Seattle doing a lot of cool things.

One of the takeaways from running parties of all different sizes over the past few years (for work) is that if you bring the right crowd together, most of the other details don’t matter as much as you think they do. If you’re putting a mixer together, the first thing you should do is find a few people that need to attend, and make sure you accommodate them. Any venue will do, any crowd will not.

Seattle is good at pulling a fun crowd together for drinks. I don’t know if it’s the weather that makes us all a little unhinged, but it’s a very vibrant community and I’m excited to catch up with people tonight.

Email and Instant Messaging offered ways to communicate that didn’t put the same kind of pressure on me; I could check in with people before I gave a response to any given question. I could always put my best foot forward. No grammatical errors.

When I had to get a bid from a supplier or figure out details for a mass mailing (we no longer send snail mail brochures for our events, of course), I would always try communicating digitally before, with great reluctance, I would pick up the phone and call someone.

Over time I’ve grown to love the phone. Now I find myself e-mailing people and asking when they’re available to talk on the phone or, even better, meet up in person.

Everyone is just a person. It turns out that work can be a lot more fun if you take the trouble to deal with people instead of a checklist. That’s one of the things I really enjoy about the event business. At the end of the day, my work is really about getting people to have fun.

It’s taken me a few years, but I am no longer scared of the phone. How cool.

Take LIKE out of the freedom discussion and it makes things just a little easier.  I don’t like a lot of things people do, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have the right to do them.

This is one of those issues I tend to get my back up about – both ways.

There are some people who think everything is a right. Jamba Juice is not a right.

There are some people who think that rights only apply to things they like. That’s just incorrect.

I meet two or more people on the street who are strangers to each other, and to me. I ask them if they will pose for a photograph together with the stipulation that they must touch each other in some manner.

Starting July 1, and every day for a year, I will get rid of something. I will donate, discard, re-gift or recycle some bit of debris accumulating in my house. Anything non-perishable considered, exempting books and music.

I’m too scared to do this.

To use App Inventor, you do not need to be a developer. App Inventor requires NO programming knowledge. This is because instead of writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app’s behavior.

I just put my info in to get an invite to the service. If this thing really makes it that easy to produce an honest-to-goodness mobile app for the Android platform…

…wow. Just Wow.

AppleTalk is a protocol that is not supported in Mac OS X v10.6.  Many network printers have support for IP-based printing protocols that can be used instead of AppleTalk.  Please see the “To add a printer via the Print & Fax preferences pane” section for information about how to add a printer using IP.  Or, visit your printer vendor’s website or contact your printer vendor for technical support.

Laaaaaaame. Now I can’t print.

You put a slice of frozen bacon in the clock’s chamber when you set the alarm the night before, and voila, you wake up to the wafting smell of a cooked piece of bacon.

This might be the best alarm clock ever invented.

Aside from one rogue article in the New York Times, which Gruber cleverly refutes, my evidence is all anecdotal and logical deduction.

I’ve been an AT&T customer and a T-mobile customer, and I switched to AT&T in 2008 for the original iPhone On the AT&T network I’ve used the iPhone 2G, a Blackberry 8900, and my new iPhone 4. (and a nokia in 2002, but that’s going back too far). on T-mobile i used some clamshell phone followed by an SDA running Windows Mobile.

Without a doubt, the best calling experience has been with AT&T, using my Blackberry.

Switching straight from the Blackberry to the iPhone 4 has made the difference very pronounced and obvious. In places where my Blackberry made calls quickly and flawlessly I wait 5-10 seconds for my iPhone to initiate a call, whether or not I’m holding the device (I haven’t experienced the kind of signal bar loss that many people have written about).

Gruber seeks to blame AT&T via the logical question: ”

In a word: no. In my experience Apple is not the type of company that would sacrifice industrial design for the sake of making phone calls, especially when they sell plenty of phones anyway, and even Walt Mossberg is blaming AT&T.

The iPod touch is in itself proof that he “phone” component of the iPhone is relatively unimportant. I’ve written this whole post from my iPhone, which is a far more pleasant experience than my Blackberry.

So my point is not “OMG I hatez teh iPhone,” nor is it that I’m going to stop using it. It’s just that I don’t think a Verizon based iPhone is going to solve anyone’s phone call issues.

So true:

The $29 “Bumper” is hilarious. I think Apple is really in the iPhone-case business, and the iPhone is just an attempt to sell us something to encase. It’s day one, everyone’s freaked out about breaking their new all-glass iPhones, and they’ll sell you a “bumper” case — the only case available for the iPhone 4 in the Apple store today — for $29. Looking at this tiny piece of rubber, you really have to admire Apple for having the balls to charge $29 for it. And they’re going to sell a ton of them. The best part? It comes in a lot of colors, but today, only black is available. So if you’re really set on a teal or pink one, but are paranoid about breaking your new iPhone, you’re probably going to end up buying two of them.

And yet I bought one myself. Thing is, the phone looks way better without it.

Draft, our first app for the iPad, is now available in the App Store. Draft is a straightforward, basic sketch app for the iPad with email and Campfire sharing built in. We use it every day. We hope you will too.

Of course, why pay $10 when you can get basically the exact same thing for free.