BlogHer - Reality Check: Women in Blogging - Comments

Good luck with the new blog

Virginia DeBolt — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 08:05:11 -0500

and don't be shy about moderating comments from the ghouls who seem to have targeted you.

http://www.webteacher.ws/
http://first50.wordpress.com/

A Follow-Up

alyssaroyse — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 23:21:32 -0500

So, a little over a week ago, I started a blog called Start Her Up at the Seattle P-I. Start Her Up is a blog about my experience starting and running a venture backed company in Seattle. That's all. My perspective on things.

I happen to be a woman.

I didn't know if anyone would read it - they are. Interestingly, the most popular (by far) blogger about Business in Seattle blogged about by blog. John was great, I liked what he said about me, he's smart and his mentioning me gets my blog read. (Yes, I see the irony in the male endorsement thing.)

What's funny was the "controversy" that it started from anonymous readers who attacked me for, I guess, Being a woman, or the wrong kind of woman. Their assumption (having clearly not read ANY of my posts) is that I was bashing men, or saying we should all hire more women, or something..... And i was immediately taken to task on all sorts of things that were well outside the purview of my blog. Which, again, is just about my experience.....

I wonder if all of these assumptions and judgments of me were based solely on my gender? Ironically, one of my main points has been that I do not feel discriminated against in the business world, just have a hard time bridging obvious communication differences and finding common vision from such obviously different reference points.

The whole thing was funny to me.

I was just speaking as a woman, but everyone seems to want to believe that I'm speaking for ALL women. Nope, no one can do that!

___________
Alyssa Royse
JUST CAUSE: A Web Site To Save The World

Start Her Up: A blog for Women Entrepreneu

Thanks for the shout-out!

Kylie — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 12:27:26 -0500

It's always nice to see your name pop up somewhere!

I check Shine on a daily basis, and it seems like they are experimenting with a wide angle of different articles and features. Hopefully, they'll figure out a way to entice women without so much fluff.

In the meantime, why is it so hard to add friends and build a community on their site?

Thanks, Virginia

Jill Miller Zimon — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 12:19:08 -0500

I really appreciate the support of the idea - making it happen? That's another thing. :) What's a little ole deficit in knowing how to set up anything other than my e-mail? (nah - that's not quite true but still - this would make me have to go in much deeper than I am write now with my knowledge - so I have to take it slowly, and with partners!)

Jill
Writes Like She Talks

Vote for ~~Jill~~ Your Favorite Female Blogger!

It was a little

Virginia DeBolt — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 12:04:50 -0500

too much like iVillage for my taste. But we'll see where it goes from here.

http://www.webteacher.ws/
http://first50.wordpress.com/

Good luck in Ohio

Virginia DeBolt — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 12:03:49 -0500

Sounds like a great project. Hope its a big success.

http://www.webteacher.ws/
http://first50.wordpress.com/

My question, where are the men?

alyssaroyse — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 10:04:26 -0500

I love this post, and the reality that it represents. It's funny though, as we look for and hire bloggers for JUST CAUSE (which we are still doing, if anyone's interested) I have ONLY found women. Maybe it's that we work in the "cause" sector, but the only voices I can find are women. I want some male voices.

Funny.....

On the other side of the coin, when I tried to find women in Seattle who were founding and running venture backed companies to blog about on Start Her Up, i struggled to find 12 of them. There are hundreds of companies in the VC / Angel market here, and as far as i can tell, only a dozen run by women. So we still have a ways to go somewhere (and I guess I'm grateful, since that's my blog beat!)

Anyway, we're looking for bloggers on JUST CAUSE. We need someone to write about Education, The non-profit sector, socially responsible investing, Socially responsible businesses. If you are interested, shoot me an email (alyssa - at - justcauseit.com). If you know someone (male or female) who would be great, let me know. Pay isn't much, but you do get shares in the company..... (It's a chick thing, we're into sharing!)

___________
Alyssa Royse
JUST CAUSE: A Web Site To Save The World

Start Her Up: A blog for Women Entrepreneurs

Great Post Virginia.

Catherine Morgan — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 09:21:36 -0500

Hi Virginia. This is a great post, thanks for writing it. I checked out SHINE, but I wasn't very impressed. Although, I do like that they are using women writers.

Contributing Editor Catherine Morgan
CatherineBlogs, The Political Voices of Women, Care2 Election Blog

Thank you for this post!

Jill Miller Zimon — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 08:42:04 -0500

Virginia, I was at WAM!2008 (Women, Action & the Media) over the weekend and, as often happens as a result of going to a conference, am overflowing with ideas.

One of the ideas I'm trying to pursue is to put Ohio's female political bloggers into the sunshine. We have a list of nearly 100 political blogs on BlogNetNews Ohio (which some folks don't like because of perceived bias but I am fine with the project) but of the top 20 in influence ranking? Only two of us ever make it in there - ever, since this system began in April 2007.

So I'm in conversation with another female political blogger about how we can get an online conversation of Ohio female political bloggers from all points on the spectrum - even the ones who believe that there is no difference, so that we can hear and learn from those perspectives.

Hmm - sounds like I'm going to need to interview or find an older interview of Lisa, Jory and Elisa to find out what they believe makes such a community work. :)

I read about Shine too and had similarly cautious feelings. We'll see in time I guess!

Thanks again.

Jill
Writes Like She Talks

Vote for ~~Jill~~ Your Favorite Female Blogger!

Reality Check: Women in Blogging

Virginia DeBolt — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 07:37:37 -0500

The status, visibility, and viability of women in blogging shows signs of reaching a stage that might be considered "mature." I don't mean mature in the matronly sense, I mean mature in the sense that women bloggers are filling all sorts of blogging positions, spreading through the blogoshpere in every possible way.

Like everything else running on Internet time, it's happened fast. It was only a little over two years ago when BlogHer began in response to the question, "Where are all the women bloggers?" BlogHer brought women bloggers into the spotlight by the trainload. It's provided attention, success, and growth to thousands of women bloggers in a very short time.

Part of the mission at BlogHer has been to reach out, find, quote, and link to women bloggers. I've noticed an interesting trend recently. When I look around for women bloggers to link to in my articles, I find that many women bloggers are not scratching out individual spaces on the web these days. They are working for other people, adding their voices to some larger media company.

Take a look at the most popular blogs on Technorati. The top 10 includes four where women play a prominent role.

The Huffington Post where numerous writers are women and the editor-in-chief is a women
Engadget which comes under the Weblogsinc umbrella, a site with a number of women in leading roles
Lifehacker a woman led site
Mashable where Kristen Nicole contributes

The Techmeme Leaderboard lists the sources most frequently posted to techmeme. Among the top 10 are:

CNETNews.com where you'll find several women bloggers
ReadWriteWeb where Sarah Perez is a regular
GigaOm a site with many women writers, itself an umbrella for several women-heavy sites such as Earth2Tech and Web Worker Daily

Women's blogs regulary make up some of the "Whose Blogging about this Article" and "Whose Blogging about this Topic" links listed by the New York Times in the BlogRunner section. For example, here's the BlogRunner article on the announcement of a new Yahoo site called Shine, aimed at women. Scroll down the page and you'll see the New York Times linking to women's opinions about the new Yahoo Shine effort.

Speaking of Shine, based on what's above the fold there, Yahoo seems to think that women are more interested in celebrity gossip than anything else. On the positive side, Yahoo is using many female writers for the new site, and it's open to comments. There are plenty of topics besides celebrity gossip, so this may turn out to be another site that builds up the reputation of women bloggers in the mainstream. We'll have to give it a while to see if it takes off. Kylie reviewed Shine in more detail yesterday in Men are from Google, Women are from Yahoo?

Thanks to BlogHer and other sites where women's voices are regularly heard, more and more women are finding their way into media positions where gender isn't the only issue. Women are speaking out everywhere. As for the women-bloggers-reach-maturity issue, when women are 50% of the bloggers garnering quotes and links, we will have reached full maturity. And I'd sure like to see some all-women sites make it into those top 10 lists as proof.