Blogher was last weekend. It was about and for women who blog. The Times covers it in the Fashion section. Whaaaa? Women blogging is a fashion thing, like the color of lipstick? Or did they put it there so reach women who might be interested in blogging, but don’t know how to get started? Dunno.
Last weekend, about a thousand bloggers, almost all without the Y chromosome, attended the annual BlogHer conference, which began in 2005 to help female bloggers gain exposure. It has since evolved into a corporate-sponsored Oprah-inflected version of a ’60s consciousness-raising group.
At the seminar “How to Take Names and Be Taken Seriously as a Political Blogger,” many women said that their male colleagues and major media groups tended to ignore them, and to link to them less often (unless they are Arianna Huffington). They pointed to the Netroots Nation gathering (formerly known as Yearly Kos) for politically progressive bloggers, occurring that same weekend in Austin, Tex.
Ms. Stone, one of the BlogHer founders and a former journalist who has produced blog networks for HBO and E! television, said that like other women at the conference, she was disappointed at the scheduling conflict.
Blogging is something I do because I want to express myself, not because I want to get attention. I know about that because the only thing reading this blog are the spiders.
Other prominent female bloggers who did not attend the BlogHer conference agreed that there are unique challenges that women in the blogosphere face. “Women get dismissed in ways that men don’t,” said Megan McArdle, an associate editor at The Atlantic Monthly who writes a blog about economic issues. She added that women are taught not to be aggressive and analytical in the way that the political blogosphere demands, and are more likely to receive blog comments on how they look, rather than what they say.
It wasn’t me. Most of the time.
Look, if you want to get noticed in the blogosphere, you need to think about this as a business. Are you providing a good or a service? If you can’t see that it is a service that is being provided, you are getting nowhere. What problem does your product solve? Political blogs provide a place for people of like interests to congregate. Much of that is personality driven. Personality connection is like catching lightning in a bottle. Kos did it. Jane and Reddhead did it. Arianna has a list of celebrities she can hoist onto the front page.
It isn’t clear how many blogs will get started and catch on the way those did. There are a lot of blogs and there are talented writers like Spencer Ackerman who are just a featured writer on other blogs.
Many bloggers hope to follow in the footsteps of Stephanie Klein and Heather Armstrong, the well-paid, well-known bloggers who gave the closing speech.
Heather Armstrong started a blog that was of the “bare-my-soul” variety, and there is only room for so many of those. After a while, I tune out to those.
One of things that seems more true about women’s blogs than about men’s blogs (absent data) is that women seem more willling to write about families and children. I don’t understand this. I write about my kids sometimes, but I have given them pseudonyms. For the most part, I don’t know why I should read about your life. I don’t think it is any more interesting than mine, and I don’t think that your insights are all that much better than mine. There isn’t a compelling reason for me to read about your life.