10:08:48 PM      trackback [] 

Women of the blogosphere

No, it’s not Playboy’s latest ploy. Scary thought. A few weeks ago Dave Pollard wrote a post “Is the blogosphere sexist?” based on discussions he had with some “A-list” bloggers and his own research. He posted several theories about why with half of all bloggers being women few show up on the “top 100” lists, which means women aren’t as frequently linked to as men.

Then I found this post at Burningbird on “The Gender Ghetto” about what happens when women form "groups of webloggers linking to each other, but get scant attention from the males hereabouts.” She laments the lack of representation in the blogosphere (and elsewhere) and says “I want to be an influence now.”

As I commented at Burningbird, I’m a newbie and hadn’t really thought about the gender distribution of blogs. But I’m at a prime point for being influenced by other bloggers as I figure out where I want to take this thing. So who I come across as I travel from blog to blog matters to me. In my experience, I haven’t had any trouble finding other women bloggers. Like Pollard, I may have more links to men (most of the political blogs, for instance), but I check in more frequently with the women bloggers. I don’t want to miss what’s going on in their lives, as with my girlfriends in the real world.

In these discussions, I found a couple of references to Shirky's Law, which says if you want to be popular you have to be there first. Or you have to be loud and pugnacious. But that’s pretty limiting. And not everyone wants to be an influence anyway. As Shirky writes about LiveJournal (the one place where women bloggers are more prominent), some bloggers just want to write for friends, not an impersonal audience:

Publishing an essay and having 3 random people read it is a recipe for disappointment, but publishing an account of your Saturday night and having your 3 closest friends read it feels like a conversation, especially if they follow up with their own accounts.

Also, Indigo Ocean had a similar comment on Pollard’s post:

I don't mind having a small readership. I think my writing is good and I like my blog so I do let people whose blogs I like know about me and ask them to link to me…  I prefer to have people find me through the slow and personal process of reading the blogrolls of like-minded individuals who link to me. That is also how I find new blogs.

Pollard thinks “we need better measures of blog popularity and quality, measures that better identify great new bloggers (and great one-off posts) by some electronic analogue of 'word-of-mouth'.”  Meanwhile, he posted a great set of links to some super Salon blogs written by women. Check it out.

10:57:35 AM      trackback []