Chauncey Zalkin | www.girlonthestreet.com | www.whatwomenmake.com
"In 1999 I had a pre-blog era blog called Girlonthestreet.com. Creative young women came to me from the press and started to contribute their own stories and pictures of their creative endeavours, hopes, and dreams. It was an early homegrown social network and powerful essays and stories came out of it. We even did a secret Santa.
I'd like to think I had a tiny influence on their self-esteem and their adult creative endeavours, although they did all come to me and already had an assertive go-getter nature inside them. A certain self-confidence that I think truly exists but is missing from the media 'for women'.
Now, my interest is in upping the ante. What Women Make is more in line with global sustainability, fresh thinking, innovative living and inventing the future....
I'm curious and want to share with the world what women are making. How can I show them off? How can I help them along the way and give something back to women without freedoms. That's my mission.
I have a lot of passion for creativity, craft, as well as for setting a higher bar of storytelling about women. I've been preaching my cause and pushing against marketing cliches since 1999 and I'm really proud of this new evolution (What Women Make).
I find the stories that women tell through their work and among each other to be incredibly rich and terribly undervalued. I hope to provide a new benchmark or visual coordinate for creative and entrepreneurial success.
The Networks that work best for me...
I always have one eye glued to Twitter and Google Reader. I am just now starting to look at FB as a non personal social networking tool. I love Slideshare. I think it's just fantastic (and started by a woman). I use LinkedIn for professional contacts and I think it's a great resource but my WWM group has not really gotten off the ground and there's no plugin for blogs unfortunately. I find that Melissa Sterry and her New Frontiers venture and everything else she does is simply amazing. She has been incredibly supportive of me making me a media partner in many things she's done. That is one woman with her heart and energies in the right place. I would look to her as a great network for all positive and innovative people hell bent on change and better ideas. I belong to a lot of social networks but I admit, I use these big ones the most and always forget to go on blogher or any of those. My favorite resource of all is to attend events like London Design Week, Salone del Mobile, and conferences on pertinent topics. Most of what I do, I have to clock in long hours to find and edit. There is no easy channel for any of this."