Duh - Didn't realize my most recent book is out as of this month. For some reason, I thought it was coming out next month.
The author is always the last to know!
Okay, found this on Mochamomma.com by way of LetterB. For BlogHer attendees - 10 second introduction. Well, since I used to live in New York City, I can speak really really fast. So below are 10 things that I could attempt to say in 10 seconds. Hahaha...
1. I've ridden in a private jet with the band Def Leppard.
2. I recently had my beloved Chihuahua stuffed by a taxidermist.
3. In my 20s and early 30s, I wrote songs and played them on a guitar but haven't touched a guitar in ages.
4. While I was living in Wyoming, I sang 4 songs every once in a while with a guitarist at the Best Western - including "Landslide."
5. I grew up in Madrid, Spain and used to attend the weddings and wedding receptions of total strangers with my maid, pretending we were related to the bride or the groom.
6. An old boyfriend took nude photos of me 20+ years ago, and I'm always wondering if they'll turn up online someday.
7. In the late 80s, I had a crush on Keanu Reeves & wrote him a long, crazy fan letter when he had his motorcycle accident then gave it to his agent (who I knew) to hand deliver it to him.
8. When I take a nap, I often enter a hypnagogic state and can blend what is happening around me with my dreams (freaked my college roommate out once when I spoke to her while asleep).
9. I drove around the country for over a year in my RV and lived in it for almost another year and still prefer it to a house.
10. When I was little, I thought I was a witch.
In honor of OneWebDay, I am posting to all my blogs a little story about how I first got started on the Web...
True Story: In August 1994, I was held up at gunpoint on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and kidnapped with a friend. Three guys, three guns. They took us down the block at gunpoint to the nearest ATM machine to take out money. It was dark and suddenly there was nobody on the street except for us. Long story short, we escaped, and I lived to tell the tale.
I left New York City for a month to regroup. Went to Santa Fe to visit my sister who was living there at the time. Now I'd been going online in one form or another since 1987 when I bought my first computer - an Amstrad 1640 dual floppy (no harddrive). The IBM of the UK, I was told when I bought it. I also purchased a modem (1200 baud?) and learned how to access local BBSs - bulletin board systems or computers in somebody's room or basement.
After I realized I could chat with others online and discovered the wonders of e-mail, I began networking with other women through America Online (which at the time was the smallest of the 3 big commercial online services - Prodigy was #1, CompuServe #2) and Women's Wire (which had almost 1000 members at the time). I also started consulting clients about Internet communications and marketing. This was 1992.
So back to Santa Fe, December 1994. I learned about the Web when I saw an ad in the local arts paper. "Discover the World Wide Web" said the ad. I had no idea what the World Wide Web was but I saw an e-mail address. E-mail I knew. So I e-mailed a query and found out that a guy was teaching a class on HTML in town. I took a 2 hour class for $10 in basic HTML and was immediately an expert. Well, in that amount of time, I learned all there was to learn - it was so easy back then.
I began building web sites and published my first one when I got back to NYC in January 1995. I called it "The Web According to Cybergrrl." I had decided not to use my real name online because I wasn't sure who was reading (we've come a long way, baby). So I drew a cartoon character of myself and called her "Cybergrrl" - "Cyber" because I had read and loved William Gibson's book "Neuromancer" where he coined the term "cyberspace" and "grrl" because I wasn't a "girl" and it was sort of a nod to the Riot Grrrl movement.
That month, I began pounding the pavement looking for clients for the new business I dreamed up - Web consulting. I called the company CGIM which stood for Cybergrrl Internet Media. I was wary of calling my company Cybergrrl because I wanted to be taken seriously in the decidedly male-dominated tech industry. Within a few months, everyone was calling me Cybergrrl anyway. My first client was the brand new New Media Director at the New York Times who would sneak me into his office after hours to teach him how to surf the Web and set up an account with an ISP because he knew CD-Roms but didn't know the first thing about the Internet.
My personal web site quickly became Cybergrrl.com, Cybergrrl, Inc.'s first official site for women followed by Webgrrls.com which had started out as an old-fashioned blog - literally a Web Log listing women's web sites around the world. Then we built the first searchable directory of exclusively web sites for women and girls called Femina.com in direct response to the fact that searching for "women" or "girls" on Yahoo.com at the time yielded nothing but pornography. Yeah, this was back in the day when Yahoo was just a side project for two kids in college and Cybergrrl was the most popular women's web site.
About a year later, Women's Wire went online with Women.com (I had approached them in early 1995 to help put them on the Web but they didn't have see the point at the time). Half a year after that, Candice Carpenter and Nancy Evans put up iVillage.com (I had lunch with them a few months before their launch and then held Webgrrls meetings at their offices after they debuted). Both were well-funded endeavors while Cybergrrl started as just me, my PowerBook and some hot pink business cards.
People ask why I'm not a millionaire if I started at the beginning of this whole Web thing and am known as the "woman who pioneered the Web for other women." The honest answer is two-fold:
1. I never set out to make a million - I was just hoping to pay my bills. Like so many women, I just wanted to do a good thing and love what I do. I figured the money would follow. I didn't take a salary for the first few years then took about half of what the receptionist made after.
2. I had a business partner who had a totally different vision for the company than I did. We clashed all the time. I finally walked away from the company and never saw a dime after that. I was able to continue to refer to myself as "The Original Cybergrrl" and "Founder of Webgrrls International," but I lost all of it.
Such is life. And that, in a nutshell, is my early Web story.
The Everything Blogging Book is available on Amazon.com for Pre-order!
We're still working on the final edits but looks like it will be out in July 2006 - hurrah!
So hurry over to Amazon.com, and be the first on your block to own a copy!
We thank you for your support.
Here's my 2nd segment for them.
Keeping a head above water in Alaska
Global warming has the water rising in the Native Alaskan village of Newtok...
My first segment on Marketplace airs today:
A different kind of bookmaking
Business on Native American reservations isn't just about gambling. Aliza Sherman Risdahl looks at a growing publishing enterprise on Wyoming's Wind River Reservation.
Find out more about Painted Pony, Inc.
I'm tickled pink by the mention in MORE magazine of my Babyfruit blog. It is in the October 2005 issue and the incredible, amazing, fantastic Jodie Foster is on the cover.
The piece is about women over 40 who blog, and to be in the same company as Rosie O'Donnell, Anita Roddick, and yes, even Ariana Huffington, is quite an honor!
Click on the image to see a larger readable version.
I guess I've finally graduated into the "over 40" category, or at least 40 years, 9 months, 2 weeks and a handful of days...and counting.
I just did an interview for MoneyPants.
Excerpt from their site:
You're looking for someone who can bring some fun to the misery of money management...Welcome to MoneyPants.
Great concept. Much needed. I think my interview accurately reflects my ecclectic and somewhat haphazard view of money. I encourage everyone not to learn from my actions with money but to learn from my mistakes!
I'm a recovering spend-a-holic and still slip off the wagon now and again. Like the chihuahua lunchbox I just bought along with half a dozen magazines that I probably won't even read but just wanted to have them. Yeah, that was a slip-up.
You know you've come a long way and gotten
absolutely nowhere when you appear on
GhostSites.
Yes, strange but true, I'm now officially a
"Forgotten Web Celebrity" courtesy of
blogmaster Steve Baldwin.
If you buttonhole a young person on a Manhattan street corner today and ask her "hey - what do you think of Aliza Sherman," you'll be greeted with a blank stare. But ten years ago, Aliza Sherman's name danced about the lips of everyone who mattered in the superheated temples of New York's New Media industry, and if she ever deigned to grace you with her presence on a panel, you knew you were blessed, for Aliza was the "it" girl of Cyberspace.
Despite some factual errors, it is actually
quite amusing. I love these references:
It all began in 1995, back when compelling Web content was as thin as the hairs on a baby's ass, when Aliza launched three sites...
She began wearing a hot pink cape around Manhattan; on one memorable occasion, on Wall Street, she stripped off her Armani business suit and revealed the cape to a stunned crowd, running her hands over it as if she were stroking the future itself.
So, of course I had to write to Steve, just to
thank him for the mention (any press is good
press) and to clarify a few things...
Ah, the high price of pseudo-cyber-fame!
Thank you so much for your kind words on "Ghostsites." Loved your embellishments ("she stripped off her Armani business suit and revealed the cape to a stunned crowd, running her hands over it as if she were stroking the future itself.") You encapsulated my Internet experience beautifully.
Just wanted to make a few factual corrections.
1. "She ran a large gender-specific network called "Cybergrrls" with 100 local affiliates."
Actually, the networking organization was called Webgrrls International. The company was Cybergrrl, Inc. and we consulted companies such as Estee Lauder and Avon, JANE magazine, and built one of the first custom shopping carts for the very first web site for Dr. Atkins.
2. "Then, on a dark morning in March, 2000, when the NASDAQ took its first precipitous dip towards the stygian depths, her once-glittering career hit the very same wall that pulverized the dreams of so many first-generation cyber-visionaries."
I actually left Cybergrrl in 1999 due to a business partner dispute - turned over all assets, stocks and ownership to the corporation and tried to start another online venture - Eviva.net, a bilingual site for Latina professionals. THEN the market crashed and we gave back our angel funding ($250K) and licked our financial wounds.
3. "Aliza made what in retrospect was her smartest career move: she left town and moved to a place about as far from cyber-hype as you can get: Alaska."
Actually, I left NYC in September 2000 in an old RV I purchased off the Internet and drove around the country for over a year (http://www.rvgirl.com). In the meanwhile, 2 more of my books were published so I turned the trip into an extended, self-financed book tour. The books were "Cybergrrl@Work" (Penguin Putnam) and "PowerTools for Women in Business" (Entrepreneur Media). I am currently working on a book about blogging for Adams Media and also developing a book about miscarriage and another book about my solo RV adventure.
4. Then 9/11 happened while I was enroute back to Manhattan. I took a detour and ended up settling down in Wyoming for 4 years (1st Cheyenne, then Laramie and Lander). During that time, I took a 9-5 job with state government doing PR for 2 years, started my own Internet/PR consulting firm for a year, then began producing a 12-part documentary series for the local PBS television station. I also did freelance radio work for the local NPR station and freelance writing for publications such as ENTREPRENEUR during that time. I am still a freelance writer (http://www.mediaegg.com) among other things.
5. Finally married (late 30s) and just moved a little over 2 WEEKS ago to Alaska. Recently started a film production and media company with my husband (Moonbow Productions, Inc. - http://www.moonbowproductions.com/) and am in production on my first independent documentary film - about miscarriage. I have some other film ideas in development but the miscarriage documentary - "babyfruit" - is in production.
Like one of my idols, Madonna, I continually reinvent myself, looking for ways to work independently, creatively and passionately and hopefully empowring and inspiring others in the process.
My how time flies when you're a has been...
I'm so excited about this that I'm cross
posting on my 2 main blogs - hope the
Blog Police don't get me!
This past week, I've been trying out the self-
publishing site Lulu.com, and I'm finally ready
with my first product - a collection of miscarriage
poems.
babyfruit: the miscarriage poems.
You can go to my Lulu.com storefront at:
There you can see the book and a brief
description and buy the book directly from
the site! It is print-on-demand. I haven't seen
the finished product yet, but hopefully it will
turn out nicely. The cover was designed by
my sister.
Aliza Sherman: Powertools for Women in Business: 10 Ways to Succeed in Life and Work
Aliza Pilar Sherman: Cybergrrl at Work: Tips and Inspiration for the Professional You
Aliza Sherman: cybergrrl! A Woman's guide to the World Wide Web
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