Gina Trapani is a well-known woman in the technology world. Her job descriptions include tech blogger, podcaster, book author and software programmer. She is the founding editor of Lifehacker.com, a daily blog on software and personal productivity. This website allows access to information that is usually limited to a select group of individuals. I’ve often been intimidated by the “techies” with their extreme knowledge of computer operating systems and software and their seemingly otherworldly language pertaining to these subjects. However, as I was looking around the Internet and asking my friends where they get their news from in order to do this assignment, I was pleasantly surprised to find Lifehacker.com a readable and understandable resource. I was even more thrilled to find that a woman had started this website.
Lifehacker.com is based on Ms. Trapani’s book Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better. It is a daily weblog about technology with posts made by the Lifehacker staff, as well as opportunities for readers and followers to contribute tips or tidbits of information. Lifehacker was launched on January 31st, 2005 and has received recognition from top scholarly publications. Time and PC Magazine included Lifehacker.com on their lists of top blogs, and Wired presented Ms. Trapani with an award for the Best Blog in 2006. While I must admit there are still parts of the site that don’t quite make sense to me, there was also a lot that I did understand and could learn from. It’s rare to see a woman at the forefront of technological blogging which makes Ms. Trapani and her work all the more impressive. Her writing has appeared in Popular Science, Wired, Women’s Health, PC World and Macworld, and currently she is a weekly columnist at Harvard Business Online and co-hosts a This Week in Google podcast.
The video below is a brief interview with Ms. Trapani from the 2007 Blogher conference in Chicago in which she discusses how she got started in the blogging world and how she created Lifehacker.com
Very cool! AND, I love that lifehacker has a posting on how to make a home server out of a whiskey bottle. Handy, indeed!
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