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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.
