Every week I am going to do a blog-feature on a woman blogger. I have been toying with this idea for awhile now, and Feministe's entry the other day sparked my desire to do this again. I am really interested in what women have to say about blogging and their experiences in the Blogosphere.
This week, my featured blogger is Rebecca Blood. I think it is appropriate to start my series with a woman who started blogging back in April of 1999. Rebecca's book "The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog" has received excellent reviews.
TK> How do you think you became an 'A list' blogger?
Longevity, mainly (I've been doing this since April, 1999 - before there was software to do it for you). Additionally, I think my essay "Weblogs: a history and perspective" put me in front of people early on. And then the book, but mainly, I think it is just that I was in that first wave of bandwagon-jumpers.
TK> Why are there so few women deemed to be 'A list'?
I think it depends on which cluster is making the list. I think there are plenty of clusters where women are the stars. As far as media attention goes, journalists tend to link to - and write about - other journalists, and for some reason there tend to be more male journalists maintaining weblogs. After the september 11 attacks, the media started paying attention to the warbloggers, the vast majority of whom are men. bloggers had been writing about politics forever (in fact, two of the earliest to do so were women: myself and Lyn Millet), but 9.11 made the subject - and that particular spin on the subject - quite sexy, and the media didn't have the background to put this new permutation into context.
Some media attention has been given to the "tech bloggers", a term the warbloggers coined to describe every weblog that ever existed before they did. in fact, tech weblogs were a small subset of all those weblogs that came before. The tech weblogs tend to be created predominantly by men, but again, that's just one cluster among many. Of the early tech bloggers, many were about the web and web design, and many of them were done by women. weblogs about more general topics - pop culture, current events and politics, and the like - have always tended to have a healthy representation of women.
So I think a lot of this is a matter of media perception and who is getting media attention; and also the result of the very egalitarian intersection of individuals writing about the things that interest them most, and bloggers linking to the weblogs that interest them most, and readers reading the weblogs that interest them most.
TK> What are your thoughts on the blogosphere as gendered space?
Like the Web in general, weblogs have always felt pretty egalitarian to me. A recent survey bears out that instinct: there would appear to be more women blogging than men.
TK> Have you ever had any negative responses to your blog?
Sure, there have been several occasions when people with differing political views have dismissed my opinions on their sites, but only a few times, and most of them have basically been trolls, so I ignored them. There was one female blogger who repeatedly slammed me on her site, supposedly because I collect linen, but again, as far as I could tell, it was basically a troll designed to elicit a heated response - and link - from me, and I declined to do either.
TK> I looked at the Perseus results, and yes it would seem that more women are blogging than men. But it does seem that the blogs that get the most attention are men. Certain types of material get more attention than others. What are your thoughts about this?
As I said before, I think it's largely a matter of media attention combined with the subject's readers, journalists, and other bloggers are naturally interested in. I don't think it has much to do with gender.
---
Thanks Rebecca for your feedback. Check Rebecca's latest essay on "Weblogs and Journalism in the Age of Participatory Media "
posted by Netwoman @ 12:10 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home