Matt A. Myers

This is my response to Joanne Wilson’s interview by Founder’s Toolbox and triggered by the relatively few other commentary that the thread drew today on Fred Wilson’s cross-post of the interview.

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Women aren’t just needed to be louder and celebrated in business - they’re needed to be celebrated everywhere. They’re needed for a balance in policy making around the world.

Clearly this is the time in technological evolution that it has to happen, and can happen. But there does need to be an assertive effort to find the channels where people are willing to listen - and including leading into the mainstream media.

I think these channels are starting to be created, but I hope they don’t create a negative tone towards men; Celebrate the pros that everyone can bring and don’t attribute current issues to too many men historically being in powerful positions (which may be the case but you’ll turn off a lot of people) - the better way simply to say that the balance that women can bring into discussion and decisions has been missing, and is needed if we’re going to survive; Don’t blame others, be the change.

The base problem in my mind for most world problems, including why women are seen as having less voice, is they simply don’t have time in most cases. Women aren’t the only ones with less voice though - the poor also have less voice economically and therefore what they need is overlooked and dismissed too when governments are putting things into place for high economic productivity; Raising children and taking care of others isn’t the highest priority and it should be. The role of family care-taking needs to be given a higher level of importance and focus, the highest in fact.

Women in general take on the moral responsibility of raising the family and helping pay towards a family’s debts, which simply doesn’t leave really any time to do the ever important job of thorough discussion and society / community-molding, and doesn’t give the time needed to raise a family and community; I’m talking about primary caregivers in general.

I don’t think anyone can successfully argue that women have had enough influence in the way our society is today.

Perhaps in France where women with children are given a lot of help, for free, to help raise their children. Similarly for education where if a child is capable they will have schooling paid for them as far as they can go.

This needs to be implemented worldwide - and women do have the ideas needed - it’s just a battle, it’s a battle for all of us fighting the status quo.

There need to be many great leaders who put a non-convoluted plan together for the world to lead towards. We have enough innovation, the technology and the knowledge of what is enough to let the world be healthy - so let’s do it.

Yelp: Google Told Us “Our Way Or The Highway” is a post by Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land.

I’ll be honest. This article pissed me off a bit. I’ll admit too, I’m in an irritable mood - so hear me roar..

<rant>

The millions of users Yelp says they refer to businesses will be largely from Google keyword searches to begin (or at one point they were).

Yelp gets branded from being on Place pages, but yes it then doesn’t require users to click from Google search listings over to Yelp for a rough idea of review/ratings - but why doesn’t Yelp want to be reciprocal in the benefits they’ve received from Google over the years? Possibly because it will totally kill Yelp’s growth and valuable traffic of new customers flowing from Google?

How many people go directly to Yelp now to search for business listings instead of Google? Do you see some hypocrisy there Yelp? And are you that insecure about your business?

Picking a silly fight too IMHO - all in an attempt to control their environment instead of manage it.

So, Yelp’s complaining about Google stepping on their turf… But it’s common sense that they would expand into other areas, they’ve just been busy with other things. It makes me wonder who’s behind the wheels at Yelp and what their understanding of things is.

From this behaviour though, with the CEO not being confident about able to succeed against Google or find its place among competitors, Yelp probably should have taken the $500 million.

And why is author calling Google the bully? Isn’t it Yelp doing the bullying? Good debate tactics painting someone to look like the bad guy though..

</rant>