Mike Butcher

I’ve talked about the world of blogging in past columns so I won’t bother with the detailed definitions here. (Quite simply, if you work in the online business today and don’t know what a blog is then either get informed or consider a career change). What is worth re-stating, however, is that blogs are incredible opinion machines. Bloggers love to chat and rant to the world at large about any issue under the sun. Without that darn fiddley HTML, blogs made personal publishing easy, and the greatest exponent of this was Blogger.com itself, alongside a handful of other platforms.

Some bloggers have managed to even make money, usually with a PayPal “tip-jar” (like AndrewSullivan.com) but they are a rarity, and, like Sullivan, are often moonlighting professional writers. This is the “op-ed” end of the blogging spectrum. Few thought blogging could amount to much outside of sheer vanity publishing.

But in mid-2002 strange things started to happen. A handful of entrepreneurs started launching blogs as business propositions. Nick Denton, the former British journalist and founder of Moreover.com, aired his theory of “80 per cent publishing”, and “Thin Media”.

Then in July last year, Denton launched Gizmodo.net, reviewing and providing quick links to new hi-tech gadgets. The result? An online media property that has so far been read by over 260,000 people, of whom over 8,500 people visit each day, and which gets about 500,000 page impressions a month. Not bad for something that takes it’s editor less than a couple of hours a day to update. And the revenue? The jury is still out, but as an Amazon affiliate, almost every gadget is there to buy. And besides, the running costs are practically nothing

You don’t have to look hard to realise there are far fewer women in the IT industry than men. And there was no better contrast than the events of last Friday.

Around 40 male hackers were milling around a secret London location, debating the latest developments. A short taxi ride away, a few hundred 11 to 15-year-old girls were arriving at the Science Museum to win prizes for building web sites.

The latter was ITbeat 2003, a government initiative to encourage more girls to consider careers in the IT industry. Run under the auspices of E-skills, an IT skills body supported by IBM, the department of trade and industry and the Science Museum, ITbeat.com aims to promote IT among girls.

The music industry and pop artists with teen appeal have added their glamorous weight to tackle a serious problem. The number of female IT professionals in the UK has fallen to 22% over the past seven years, according to the department. This is not only a crisis for women in the industry, it’s a wider skills problem.

Research company IDC says that IT spending in the UK will create another 500,000 IT jobs by 2005, which implies we are heading for a large deficit of women and key IT workers overall.

Tosca Colangeli, of IBM, a sponsor of ITBeat, said the decision was taken to target the 11-15 age bracket because this is the time when decisions about careers tend to be made.

“We wanted to emphasise to girls that there is a huge variety of jobs in IT, and create a fun event to emphasise that,” she said. Elizabeth Varley, of Onlinecontentuk.org, concurs:

“The public image of IT careers needs a shake-up so people realise that there are many, many different types of jobs in the industry and that they can be creative, rewarding and also fun.”

Only around 5% of young women consider the IT industry for a career, with most perceiving it as nerdy, even though girls who pick IT often excel. In 2001, about 32,000 boys passed an IT GCSE compared with 24,000 girls. However, girls tended to score a higher pass rate.

The ITbeat.com competition, launched in November, was promoted through teen magazines and schools, and invited girls to design a website for their favourite pop star. Entrants and winners were invited to a slumber party hosted by TV presenter Kate Thornton at the Science Museum.

Milling around were role models from the IT industry, including Alison Hulme (Kiss FM DJ), Andrea Duffy (director of e-media, Sony Music Europe) and Shannon Ferguson (director of media and entertainment, Yahoo). Cherie Matrix, a community manager with Freeserve. com said: “I think the ITBeat project is great. I didn’t have a real job until I got into the net a few years ago.”

Her enthusiasm was matched by April, 11, from the Blessed Hugh Farringdon Catholic School, in Reading. “There aren’t enough girls into computers. We joined the school computer club and got to do lots of projects like the school magazine and learn about technology. I think it’s really cool.”

Her friend Hayley, 12, added: “We get to use the equipment without the boys taking over.” Dominic Tester, their IT teacher, explained: “It’s all about breaking the cycle of girls not being into IT. We have 108 girls in the school’s computer club, and so many times I’ve heard the girls say ‘I didn’t know I could do this with IT’.”

The event was enjoyed by the 250 girls, if the screaming as the boy-bands and TV presenters shuttled on and off stage was anything to go by. And in keeping with technology, the technical hitch was never far away, in the form of intermittent power cuts in the celebrity marquee. Anna, 12, and Gretel, 15, from Winchester Westgate School, won their award with a web site about pop band Blue. Anna built the site while Gretel wrote the content. Anna said: “I was bored one day and started playing around on the internet and learnt how to build a site. Now I even teach my Dad how to do it.”

· Onlinecontentuk.org See www.itbeat.com

The hitch? You have to have a Windows machine for it to work, and the service is paid-for:

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It’s not unlike the media to hype such a launch story, wait for the extravagant party, wake up with a huge hangover and then proceed to trash it all, accusing the company of spending far too much money on the launch and it