Recently there has been much discussion of the underrepresentation of women in the media industry. It can be easy to lament about the situation, difficult to understand the reasons, and even more difficult to actually do something about it. How can an industry work towards gender equality, when many other industries and the culture at large reflect these biases?

Enter UNESCO’s Women Make the News initiative. This advocacy initiative, starting with International Women’s Day and lasting through April 30, aims to promote gender equality in the media across the world. According to a UNESCO report, women make up 36 percent of reporting jobs and 27 percent of management jobs in media companies worldwide. This year’s initiative focuses on the difficulties for rural women to access media, and gives those in the industry suggestions of how to participate. Read more

Google is expected to start selling glasses by the end of the year. No, they are not foraying into optometry, but rather finding a new way to stream the contents of your smartphone straight at your eyeballs.  The glasses, which reportedly resemble a pair of Oakley Thumps, will run on Android and be equipped with 3G, 4G, GPS and a low-resolution camera. Other Google technologies like Google Latitudes and Maps could superimpose information to augment your reality—say, tell you what’s nearby, or what your friends think of that restaurant.

The glasses, which are expected to cost around the price of a smartphone ($250-600), would have a small screen a few inches from the wearer’s eye. Seth Weintraub at 9 to 5 Google reports that head tilting would be used to navigate the device, which will be easy to learn, becoming “second nature and almost indistinguishable to outside users.” But one man’s augmented reality could be another’s dystopian horror. The New York Times’ Nick Bilton thought perhaps the future bodes “throngs of people in thick-framed sunglasses lurching down the streets, cocking and twisting their heads like extras in a zombie movie.” Read more

There’s no dearth of ways for journalists to congratulate and recognize themselves with awards. Whether you’re a small local newspaper or the most-watched national news show, there exists a seemingly endless list of contests and prizes to celebrate everything from the best public service journalism (Pulitzer anyone?) down to the most-specific specialized reporting (Media Orthopaedic Reporting Excellence Awards?). But within that sphere of contest categories, there’s not really been a contest solely focused on data journalism.

Now there is: The Data Journalism Awards, which purports to be “the first international contest recognizing outstanding work in the field of data journalism worldwide.”

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Some of the sites U.S. Internet users rely on most plan to take part in an online protest Wednesday, Jan. 17, against SOPA — the Stop Online Piracy Act — and related bill PIPA — PROTECT IP Act — currently under consideration.

We here at 10,000 Words have covered what the act is about before and why it would matter for journalists. But this net-wide protest by some of the Internet’s biggest names is big news, and will hopefully bring attention to the masses of people who will be affected by the restrictions it would impose but haven’t yet heard of it — those people who visit these sites but don’t follow Congress or Internet/media industry news.

Here are just some of the plans from big names (fyi, these links will probably be broken Wednesday):

• Wikipedia: Plans to black out its English site for 24 hours for the first time.
  
• Google: Doesn’t plan a blackout, but does plan to use its homepage to protest the law.
  
• Reddit: Plans to take down its site for 12 hours in protest and instead post information about the measure, including video of the house hearings/testimonies taking place.
  
• BoingBoing: Announced last week it will go dark for the day and has been sharing tips since on how you can join the crowd.
  
• WordPress.org: This blog host plans to take its main site dark in protest, and even posted instructions on how its users can take down their WordPress blog for a day as well, with links to the many SOPA-blackout plug-ins available.

  This is by no means an exhaustive list, but there are a few people keeping such lists, including All Things D. Politico, apparently, estimates as many as 7,000 sites will go dark. There’s also a pretty good list here of tech companies that have expressed opposition to the bill (not all are protesting, but it’s an interesting list to take into consideration).

Ahead of tonight’s Iowa Caucus, Google has released a new portal site to find everything someone would ever want to know about this year’s presidential election. The site, google.com/elections, is a dashboard for many of Google’s products that could come in handy for following the elections.

When you go to the site, you’re greeted with a Google News-style splash of the latest campaign news. But this is not your typical Google News experience. On the left rail, users are able to filter this Google News stream by candidates or issues. Read more