News O’Reilly Media Celebrates Technical Women for Mother’s Day

By BJ Wishinsky, Communities Program Manager

Hilary Pike issues a challenge for Mother’s Day discounts on technical books. O’Reilly Media steps up and offers a 40% discount plus a web page with photos of technical women moms. How did this happen? At the speed of Web 2.0.

Hilary is a technical woman (a developer evangelist at Microsoft) and a mother. I’ve been following her on Twitter since last year’s Grace Hopper Celebration, where she was one of our community bloggers. Last week she thought about the Mother’s Day discounts she saw offered for flowers, jewelry, etc. and tweeted:
HilaryP's Tweet

This was a fabulous idea, so I retweeted (forwarded) it. Then I remembered I’ve been following Tim O’Reilly, the founder of O’Reilly Media, on Twitter. To make sure he saw Hilary’s idea, I retweeted her update again, but this time, addressed it to Tim:

anitaborg_org's retweet
Almost immediately both Hilary and I received direct messages from Tim that O’Reilly Media was going to do it. The result is that O’Reilly Media is offering two ways to celebrate Mother’s Day by celebrating technical women:

  1. The discount code MDAYT will get you 40% off on technical book purchases through oreilly.com. The offer is good through the end of May since O’Reilly knows how busy moms are. So now would be a great time to buy O’Reilly technical books you or the technical moms in your life have been longing for.
  2. They’re collecting photos of moms and grandmothers with their O’Reilly technical books and posting them on a Women in Tech Rock! Join our Mother’s Day Celebration page. Send your photo to press@oreilly.com to be added to the page.

See Hilary’s blog post Challenge: Technical Books Discounts for Technical Moms for more on this story. We’d love to hear more ideas for how to celebrate technical women on Mother’s Day. I’m sure we could get more vendors to participate next year by getting an earlier start.

Please help spread the word so more technical moms can share their photos and get the geeky books they crave. And if you’re on Twitter, thank @hilaryp for her great idea and @timoreilly for meeting her challenge (and say hi to me at @anitaborg_org!).

Have a happy and geeky Mother’s Day!

One Response to “O’Reilly Media Celebrates Technical Women for Mother’s Day”

  1. Shannon Steinfadt Says:
    May 11th, 2009 at 6:27 am

    This was a great suggestion and creative too. Thanks to Tim O’Reilly and O’Reilly Media- they have such a great collection of technical books so this offer is quite a boon!

    Thanks for suggesting, sharing, and starting a neat offer to all involved.

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