Carol's Chaotic Collection of Curiosities


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Monday, May 19, 2003
 

Male/Female Blogger Pollsee A Small Victory

Do men make better political/war bloggers than women? I think more men than women are interested in those topics. And each gender notices different details to cover when discussing the same topic. But quality of writing isn't a gender issue.

Do you prefer blogs by males, females or you don't care? I don't care. I just look for interesting viewpoints and good writing.

Do you find that males and females write differently about the same subjects? To some extent, though it still comes down to individual personalities. Gender is only a part of that.

Do you have double standards? That is, do you think it's okay when a man makes sexual innuendos and curses in his posts but you are turned off by a female blogger who does the same? Crude is crude—doesn't matter who's doing it.

Do you find that males or females tend to be more opinionated in their writing? Again, that depends on the individual—and how much they care about the specific issue at hand.

Do you find there is a lack of quality female bloggers who write about politics, current news and world events? To be honest, when I'm reading I'm generally thinking about the ideas presented, not the author's gender, so I can't really say I've ever noticed one way or the other.

Do you find you enjoy male or female blogs in general (on any subject) more than the other? With me it depends more on how much I'm interested in the subject at hand rather than the author's gender.

Who is your favorite read for political/war/news commentary for male and female bloggers? Don't have any particular favorites. I like one person's commentary one day, another writer's the next day. Different things catch my attention at different times.


7:50:43 PM    

Hear! Hear! - from Printwash by Doc Searls

Now here's the problem: Most of these newspaper stories (the majority on the Breaking News list) are going to disappear after seven or thirty days, relegated to for-pay archives.

[snip]

Blogs are one big fat op-ed section for the news organizations out there. Thanks to the ethics of linkage (crediting sources—a polite grace learned from orthodox journalism and years of compiling footnotes and bibliographies for term papers in high school and college) and of Google's PageRank algorithms, the blogosphere is a vast watershed of credit-giving: an authority-granting system of a high order.

It is vastly dumb, given this situation, for the newspapers to continue hiding their stories and archives from search engines. The cost in lost authority far outweighs the benefits in selling those archives for $2.95 (or whatever) per story.

[snip]

Both Orlowski and Nunberg miss what should be an obvious fact: Tyler's original piece can't be found by Google. The New York Times' archives are unexposed. They are not, to borrow a bit from Nunberg's analogy to a piazzas and souks, in the marketplace. The "googlewashing" Orlowski talks about was done by the New York Times, not by Google, and not by bloggers.

[snip]

On the whole, blogs are highly compliant with the ethics of the periodicals section, the ethics of the stacks, the ethics of sourcing and archiving, the ethics of giving credit where due.

The bottom line: In the age of the Web, the practice of charging for access to digital archives is a collossal anachronism. It's time for The New York Times and the other papers to step forward, join the real world and correct the problem. Expose the archives. Give them permanent URLs. Let in the bots. Let their writers, and their reputations, accept the credit they are constantly given and truly deserve.

Carol's Comments:

Totally aside from the whole Google issue, I wouldn't mind paying a couple of dollars for an article if I could get a permanent link to it without forcing my readers to also pay. Or if the price included permission to repost the article on my own site. But no, I can just reread the article online as many times as I want for 30-60-90 days. Why would I pay for that??? I can just print out a copy of the article when it first comes out and reread it for the rest of my life for a few cents worth of paper and ink.

I'm delighted to note that our Seattle newspapers so far have not succumbed to the trend toward pay-to-read archives. (Guess what? Their articles also show up in Google searches!)

  • Seattle Post-Intelligencer
  • Seattle Times

  • 7:03:27 PM    

    Famous Feline

    You're Tigger!

    You're Tigger. Playful and fun-loving, you enjoy
    hanging out with friends even though you don't
    always have to be the center of attention.
    You're never pessimistic or sluggish. Your
    enthusiasm is at once endearing and over-the-
    top. You're the quintessential extrovert.

    Which famous feline are you?
    brought to you by Quizilla


    12:56:59 PM    



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