I’ve stayed pretty quiet on the BlogHer crowd for a long time, since maybe 12-18 months ago at The Blog Herald, but now I read this rubbish at the Contra Costa Times and I can’t help but comment again.
You see, there’s an agenda at foot, and it isn’t about empowering women to blog.
Their motto: “where the women bloggers are” is condescending and self serving to start with. If I was a female blogger I’d find the motto offensive. They’ve got about 2800 members, at congrats to them, it’s a great figure for any sort of organisation, but clearly the women bloggers aren’t at BlogHer, they’re every where.
They’ve at least now admitted that there are more women writing blogs than men (in the past they claimed the opposite) but then they fall back on the tired and tested rubbish of obsessing about “the A-List” and a lack of female representation.
Without going back over the whole history of the development of blogging, the so-called A-Lists are a historical quirk that is changing every day, and has changed rapidly since BlogHer first opened it’s doors. Sure, there are more men on it, but men were pretty much there first, amongst the geeks who first started blogging, and have the advantage of time in building things like traffic and in-bound links.
But the problem for my liking is this “victimhood” mentality that women are hard done by on the blogosphere. It’s crap….complete and utter crap, because at the end of the day an A-List of any sort is just that, a list, and lists really don’t mean anything in the long tail that is the blogosphere.
Let’s take my own b5media for example. We have more women bloggers then men. I couldn’t give you an exact figure, because I don’t really care about our ratio of women to men. See, we hire bloggers based on their skills, not their gender, race, sexuality, disabilities or any other criteria.
The blogosphere has more women in it than men, and that’s regarded as a given, even by the BlogHer crowd.
Are women bloggers being read? To bloody right they are! And I’m sure if you were able to measure by how much you’d probably find that women bloggers are more highly read than male bloggers.
But this doesn’t suit the BlogHer crowd, because to feather their own nests and to create a position of power for themselves, it’s important to play up alleged inequalities in the blogosphere, and these guys (or should I say gals) have always been obsessed with the A-List, mainly because they want to be on it.
It’s a power play.
And lets look at BlogHer:
Their pitch is getting attention as the business world again goes ga ga for the Internet. BlogHer boasts the kind of demographics that make advertisers drool: educated, upwardly mobile women who like to shop online (94 percent have education beyond high school, 64 percent are between the ages of 28 and 40 and make more than $50,000 a year, according to a survey of nearly 3,000 bloggers conducted in May).
Not really representative of the greater female blogging community now, is it? 94% have tertiary education.
These are powerful, highly educated women with an agenda for power. It’s just a shame they hide behind the cloak of victimhood to try to obtain their goals. Lets hope one day they join the huge, overwhelming majority of bloggers who don’t obsess about A-Lists and other such crap, and get out there and have a go, whether that be for personal therapy, social networking, or even the chance of minor celebrity status. The Blogosphere IS a level playing field, the only thing not level is the metrics of stupid things like A-Lists.
Tags: BlogHer
