Adding my voice against Section 377

I get upset with the anti-gay rhetoric here in North America quite regularly. I often forget, however, that in other parts of the world, there’s more than just an cultural sentiment opposing sexual minorities: there’s law and policy opposing them as well.

I received a link from Yuvraj Joshi a few days ago detailing some of the work being done by Voices Against 377, a coalition in India speaking out against Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code which criminalizes private consensual sexual acts that are considered “against the order of nature.”

According to the website:

The law penalizes certain sexual acts equally. For example oral sex, regardless of whether it is heterosexual or homosexual; even penile-masturbation of one person by another – is considered criminal. Although facially neutral, the law has effectively stigmatized and criminalized a section more than others, namely same-sex desiring people, including those who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT), hijra, kothi and other Queer people. The law has been used by the police to intimidate same sex desiring people and has been a source of serious human rights violations.

People can think what they want about the morality of sexuality and philosophical discourse like that, but it’s hard to argue against the fact that having a law that denies fundamental freedoms is a violation of basic human rights, whatever your stance on the moral issues.

Several high profile citizens — including Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth, Amartya Sen, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Nitin Desai — have sent an open letter to the Indian government urging them to consider the consequences of such an antiquated and discriminatory law:

In independent India, as earlier, this archaic and brutal law has served no good purpose. It has been used to systematically persecute, blackmail, arrest and terrorize sexual minorities. It has spawned public intolerance and abuse, forcing tens of millions of gay and bisexual men and women to live in fear and secrecy, at tragic cost to themselves and their families. It is especially disgraceful that Section 377 has on several recent occasions been used by homophobic officials to suppress the work of legitimate HIV-prevention groups, leaving gay and bisexual men in India even more defenceless against HIV infection.

I strongly urge you all to read the rest of the open letter, and if you feel so inclined, add your name to the list of the people speaking out against Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code.

Hoya Saxa

As a former Georgetown student, it’s no surprise that I’m a huge Hoya basketball fan.

Their Final Four appearance last year was not a flash in the pan as many have been suggesting: they recently won the Big East conference for the second year in a row (no easy feat in one of the best conferences in the nation) and are in position to win the Big East tournament and make a strong case for a high seed in the NCAA tournament starting later this month.

Of course, you don’t need to take my word for it. Dana O’Neil wrote a fantastic piece on ESPN about how JTIII is bringing the Hoyas back to their glory days. From the article:

The game for the regular-season crown was sweetly indicative of what the Big East is about.

It was brutal and ugly and beautiful all at once. Shots were harder to come by than Kleenex at a Brett Favre news conference, and the unforced and forced errors rivaled those of a crummy tennis match. Ten minutes in, the score stood at 10-7. Georgetown had five turnovers, Louisville six. Louisville went 15 consecutive possessions in the first half without scoring; not to be outdone, Georgetown all but blew an 11-point second-half lead with three cough-ups on three trips down the court.

But for people reared in the heyday of the league, there was nothing painful about it. It was exactly right.

I’m extremely proud of my Hoyas this year, and have been wearing my GU t-shirt all season. Before I break out into the fight song, check out this great site celebrating 100 years of Georgetown basketball. Let’s make our 100th year special by winning the national title.

Hoya Saxa.

Alltop is like marijuana (kinda)

“Too dumb for geeks, too geeky for dummies.”

That’s a horrible place to be stuck if you’re a new web application, and that’s exactly the reaction I received from Jay Moonah when discussing the newly launched Alltop.

For those of you that missed the big announcement by Guy Kawasaki this morning, Alltop is basically an aggregator that groups feeds based on certain topics. According to their website:

You can think of an Alltop site as a “dashboard,” “table of contents,” or even a “digital magazine rack” of the Internet. To be clear, Alltop sites are starting points — they are not destinations per se.

I’ve been playing with Alltop for a few weeks now (it has been up for quite some time pre-launch) and have already put it to good use, but it was only after my conversation with Jay today that I realized that the true power of Alltop is its role as a gateway drug.

Alltop is easy to get and easy to like

For reference, here’s a snippet of the conversation I had with Jay over Twitter today:

• jmoonah: Hmmm, not sure I get http://alltop.com/ — is it just a bunch of pages with a bunch of RSS feeds? Am I missing something?
• vasta: That’s all it is. You’re not missing anything. It’s really feed aggregation for dummies, to be honest, and that’s why it’s smart.
• jmoonah: I sort of get it, but I have no idea who I’d point here. To me it looks too dumb for geeks, too geeky for dummies. Who’s the target?
• vasta: A friend asked me yesterday, “how do you stay on top of all that Mac news?” I pointed him to http://mac.alltop.com/. He=impressed.
• vasta: *I* don’t use Alltop, but it’s a good way to introduce people to feeds if they’re willing to learn but don’t have an entry point.
• jmoonah: Yeah that makes some sense. Be interesting to see how it does.

The anecdote about my friend is completely true, and it’s not the first time I have referred someone to the site.

A few weeks ago, a relatively tech-savvy friend was ruing the fact that there was no central repository for all the big sports news stories on the web. (ESPN ignored several smaller sports on its homepage.) I recommended subscribing to the RSS feeds of several sports sites, but my friend wanted a much easier way to get his news. The Alltop Sports page solved his problems.

Alltop makes you yearn for more

It may be too “dumb” for the geeks, but there is a large portion of the internet-using public that aren’t using tools like RSS but still are pretty comfortable with using the web and browsing extensively. Alltop is perfect for them.

The best part of it all will be the time when those same people using Alltop will stop and say, “I wish there was some way I could customize this page.” As soon as that time comes, these people will become new potential users of tools like RSS, Netvibes, and iGoogle. And that, if I may say so, will be a good day for the web.

Alltop is the first step — easy, fun, and seemingly harmless — to turn dabblers into hardcore users. Support groups to follow.

Twitter is more than just status updates

I am, what some may call, a Twitter evangelist. I preach the gospel of Twitter to everyone I meet. Most people look at me in confusion.

Today, my work has been made easier.

Thanks to the great folks at CommonCraft, I can now show people a simple video that explains Twitter in everyday English.

Once you’re done watching the video, go sign up for a Twitter account and then let me know so I can add you as a follower. Then, come back and read why Twitter is so much more than what you saw on the video.

Twitter is conversation, links, and ideas

Once you get used to the status update functionality of Twitter, the next logical step is discovering how the service is an excellent tool for asynchronous conversation. Like those in a chat room (from the old days of the internet), your conversations on Twitter are (usually) open to the public. This allows for fresh infusions of ideas and it also allows facilitates the discovery of new people to follow who have similar interests or stimulating ideas.

Conversation, undoubtedly, leads to ideas that reside outside the Twitter framework. This, in fact, is what I believe is the true power of Twitter: the ability to share links and ideas to people that want to engage with those same links and ideas.

Slowly, Twitter has been replacing my RSS reader as my main way of discovering good content. Essentially, following good people on Twitter lets me have access to personally-selected curators of the web, leading me to new places with every link they post.

What’s great about this targeted link-sharing is that the conversational aspect of Twitter comes back into play, allowing users to engage and interact with the links and content being shared.

Twitter is what you make it

I know people that are using Twitter for many other reasons than the ones I outlined above. In the end, Twitter isn’t just what you see in the video (though it’s definitely a great starting point) — instead, Twitter is anything you want to make of the most addictive asynchronous messaging platform to come about in years.

So go sign up and let me know so I can follow you.

On hugging: an update

About four months ago, I wrote a post about a middle school principal in Oak Park, Illinois that decided to ban hugging in her school. While I found the entire concept of banning hugging ridiculous, it turns out that other principals were in favor of the idea.

A principal in Mesa, Arizona, recently instituted an anti-hugging policy where small hugs of less than two seconds are permitted, but anything longer is not.

The ridiculousness of this policy baffles my mind. Are there hall monitors that stand there with stopwatches in order to measure the length of the hug? How is a three-second hug less appropriate than a two-second hug?

Luckily, the students of this school are smarter than the administration, and spoke out against the new rule with a giant group hug. This alone proves the value of the hug. Instead of protesting with violence, furor, or disruption, they decided to speak up and speak out using one of the most peaceful and supportive methods possible: embracing each other.

Students of Shepherd Junior High School in east Mesa, I support you and join you in your efforts to eradicate such irresponsible and ridiculous school policies such as bans on hugging. In your honor, I will hug all my friends I see today and tell them about your plight.

In the meantime, try and giving your principal a hug. Maybe a lack of hugs is the actual root of the problem in the first place.

Building a better workplace

Not only do they make one of the best project management applications on the web, but it looks like 37signals is a great place to work as well.

A recent post on the Signal vs. Noise blog outlines some of the experiments that the company is undertaking in order to make create the optimal work environment. Included among the experiments going on right now:

• Shorter work weeks
• Funding people’s passions
• Discretionary spending accounts

These experiments are important not only because they will increase company morale, but because they encompass values — such as sharing, trust, and personal reflection — that have often been overlooked in the corporate environment.

While the changes are not directly related to efficiency and productivity (both of which are the impetus behind most shifts in corporate culture) the overall effect of the experiments will be to make employees more passionate about their work and the company.

One of the first things that stood out when reading the post was 37signals commitment to sharing: funding employees’ passions was not done in the spirit of simply making people happy, but because these passions led to increased learning which could then be shared with both other employees and customers.

What was most striking to me, was the essential shift in looking at employees as responsible stakeholders rather than simply workers:

If there’s a problem, we’ll let the person know. We’d rather trust people to make reasonable spending decisions than assume people will abuse the privilege by default.

Trust, a key value in our everyday personal relationships, has often been ignored in the corporate environment. The issue of abuse of privileges only comes when people feel as though they don’t deserve the privilege. By trusting people to be responsible constituents of a company (or any other group), we encourage those same people to feel invested in the success of the group.

I’m looking forward to seeing what else 37signals comes up with in order to make their workplace one of the best in the world. In the meantime, I’ll keep a lookout for more news on the results of their experiments. I’m pretty confident they’ll turn out well.

Does your company take innovative measures to create a more positive work environment? If it does, Twitter me and let me know about them; I’ll add your thoughts to this post as they come in.

Unsolicited Testimonial: Mighty Leaf Tea

Mighty Leaf Tea is an artisan tea company that sells regular and specialty teas in handcrafted tea pouches. Their tea is available for purchase at stores across North America and also via a very easy to navigate website.

The Experience

The first thing you notice about Mighty Leaf Tea are the very pretty and perfectly woven silk tea pouches. Intricately hand crafted, the pouches let the hot water seep into the fresh herbs and leaves within in order to create a five-minute pouch brew experience that rivals most steeped teas. The leaves and herbs themselves are fresh and aromatic — whether you buy them in the pouch or loose — so that every different kind of Mighty Leaf Tea (and there are several!) packs a ton of flavor into your cup.

The quality of the tea aside, one of the other strengths of Mighty Leaf Tea is the diversity of leaves and herbs that they have for purchase. Their website arranges all their teas by region, caffeine content, and type, and each tea has extensive information about its ingredients, history, flavor, and use.

The Mighty Leaf tea pouches are biodegradable and environmentally friendly, and their loose tea blends — while flavorful on their own — are perfectly suited for mixing with your own herbs before steeping.

The Gotchas

It is hard — actually, almost impossible — to say anything negative about the tea itself, so I’ll focus on the web ordering experience. While the website is easy to navigate, the shopping bag is still a clunky application and doesn’t allow for payment by PayPal. Other than that, there is very little to say about Mighty Leaf Tea that isn’t complimentary.

What It Costs

If you’re used to buying the cheap Tetley Orange Pekoe boxes, Mighty Leaf Tea might seem a bit expensive. For those of you that have purchased good tea before, Mighty Leaf is moderately priced and provides tons of value for the money. If you decide to purchase a pack of 100 pouches, you’re looking at spending just under $60 Canadian. You can also purchase loose leaves for a good price.

Recommended If You Like

Tea, hot beverages, silk pouches, fresh herbs, great packaging design, a great way to spend a solitary weekday evening.

This Unsolicited Testimonial has been inspired by (shamelessly stolen from?) Anil Dash’s series by the same name. Please see that post for more information and background.

Is Victoria’s Secret too sexy?

The old adage of “sex sells” is impossible to refute. So when Victoria’s Secret CEO Sharen Turney started blaming poor sales figures on being “too sexy,” I was a bit taken aback, a bit stunned.

But she may have a point.

I was tipped off to Turney’s comments on a recent post by Melissa Shum on her excellent blog Just Cuz I’m A Girl:

Interestingly enough though, CEO Sharen Turney has not blamed this issue on the outrageous gas prices or the plummeting economy. Instead she claims that the Victoria’s Secret brand has lost touch with it’s sophistication and femininity by being “too young” and “too sexy”.

While it may seem ludicrous at first to associate lingerie store woes with oversexiness, Turney may have a point.

I have spoken to many women, young and old, who feel intimidated to enter Victoria’s Secret because they don’t feel as though they fit the image that the company has crafted in the past few years. While in the past, Victoria’s Secret’s products have been known as dependable, sophisticated, well-made, and sexy, the present focus on solely ‘sexy’ may alienate some customers looking for affordable yet alluring lingerie.

It’s not only the women I spoke to who feel that the store has gone “too sexy”: surprisingly, most of the men I spoke to share the same sentiment. While Victoria’s Secret may have started as a store where men could feel comfortable purchasing lingerie for their wives, men entering the store now are looked upon as fixated on the Victoria’s Secret Angels (a stigma brought on by the sexiness of the marketing of the brand) rather than looking for quality underwear and sleepwear for their partners.

I’m not saying that Victoria’s Secret needs to stop advertising its products as sexy — after all, sexiness is pretty inherent to the concept of lingerie these days — but I am saying that they need to re-evaluate their message among their core customers. Women I have spoken to shop at the store for quality and sophistication, as well as attractiveness. Men may love the sultry advertising, but when it comes to purchasing lingerie, most of the men I spoke to look for simplicity and ease of purchase.

Victoria’s Secret has done a great job in convincing us that it can bring sexy back, but still hasn’t proven to me that it can bring utility along with its sensuality. There are ways to combine practical messaging with tantalizing advertising. Like Melissa says, perhaps it is “time for a revamp in the Victoria’s Secret marketing department.”