"I couldn't possibly fail to disagree with you less."
16 March 2005They read me, they really read meI've stayed out of the "Is blogging a boys' club?" discussion stirred up by Steven Levy and abetted largely by Jeff Jarvis, but this piece by Cobb got me thinking:
In the blogosphere there is a real contingency of patronage. I'm not sure that everyone is so eager to say so, but it's real. As real as is the term 'blogosphere' is the term 'blogfather'. Ask any blogger of substance, and if they're honest (and are abetted by a technical clue or two) they'll know which other blogs send them the most traffic. They will also almost surely know who gave them their big break and under which circumstances that occured. There is not a conspiracy of white male bloggers, and I'd guess all of them would be loath to admit any such clubbiness, but all popular bloggers belong to a club and none of them are about to delink anytime soon.
I am neither popular nor possessed of substance — bulk, perhaps — but I do know which other blogs send me the most traffic. Day in, day out, the following (listed alphabetically by first non-article word) show up most often in my referrer logs: Baldilocks Four men, four women. (My two largest traffic days ever came from a post by Michelle Malkin, but this was a fluke.) If there's really a "boys' club," no one's given me the Secret Handshake yet. And I don't really have a "blogfather," since I was out here before most of my regular reads; further, to my knowledge, no one sees me in this role. I must point out that neither ScrappleFace nor LGF has ever linked to any individual article of mine, but I seem to rank somewhere above the middle of their blogrolls, and I have had some email correspondence with Scott Ott. Oh, and I got pointed to the Cobb article by La Shawn Barber (in lieu of the usual "Via" tag). Posted at 8:49 PM to BlogorrheaUm I'm a woman and I have a blog. So I guess I As a sane person, I don't differentiate between "men bloggers" and "women bloggers" when I click a link or pull one down from the favorites. Mostly I think of blogs I read in terms of "teenage jackass," "leftist moron," "right-wing nutjob," "sassy," "funny," "insightful," "unemployed-and-longwinded," and "concise, precise." The latter, of course, applies to you, my dear. Coming from a sane person, that counts as high praise. :) Of course I read you. The non-sequitur-ness of most of my comments is purely incidental. Posted by: McGehee at 7:12 AM on 17 March 2005Still can't be bothered to sort blog authors by peepees. I guess everyone has to have a hobby though. Posted by: Andrea Harris at 8:21 PM on 17 March 2005I can cite more than one instance where I linked to someone and ran into gender-related pronoun trouble in the composition of my post. Not that it matters to anyone at this point except those who are actively looking to have their feelings hurt. That's all right. I solve that problem by using "he" whenever I don't know what sex the person is. The only other alternatives are bizarre verbal contortions, and life is too short. Besides, I clear out the thin-skins that way. Posted by: Andrea Harris at 9:21 PM on 18 March 2005 |