The answer is “I don’t care how big your penis is or how many people link to your blog!”
Hold on to your hats and glasses, folks! We’re in for a bumpy ride.
Instead of wondering why green house gases have screwed up the Southern California ecosystem, Kevin Drum wonders why there aren’t more women political bloggers in the top 100 of the EGOsystem. If you’re not familiar with it, the TLLB ranks blogs by both the number of blogs linking to it and site traffic. A couple of the nouns, verbs and adjectives have changed, but it’s essentially the same post we see in the blogosphere every 2-3 months. Kevin says:
There aren’t any institutional barriers in the traditional sense of the word [to blogging], which means either (a) there are fewer female political bloggers and thus fewer in the top 30, or (b) there are plenty of women who blog about politics but they don’t get a lot of traffic or links.
I’ve discussed this topic numerous times at my blog and under pen-names at other blogs. Now it’s your turn. What do you think?
February 20th, 2005 at 1:42 pm
I’m not silly enough to speak for all women, but for me, the reason I don’t do more political blogging is because there are no real discussions. It is the same with the op ed page.
Almost no one is attempting to understand something, examine the issue, change assumptions on either side of an issue, and come to some sort of rational understanding of the issue and the problems surrounding it.
Instead it is all about stating your position and then demonstrating why the other guy/gal is wrong. The louder and more vicious side wins, and that generally has nothing whatever to do with the actual merits of their position..
February 20th, 2005 at 1:56 pm
I’m trying to fix the problem by entering the blogosphere myself. Please visit.
February 20th, 2005 at 2:06 pm
I’m sure that everyone who reads my blog also reads Atrios, Kos, and The American Street, among others, so I don’t see much point in reiterating what they’re saying. Despite the many political blogs in my “links” list, my blog couldn’t be called a political blog, since only maybe 25% of the posts are on politics. If you want to see pictures of my dog, though, .
February 20th, 2005 at 2:06 pm
Damn, the source post material from Mr. Drum is tireder than a pre-nap Rip Van Winkle.
February 20th, 2005 at 2:26 pm
Drum is making the assumption that the ecosystem is a fair and unbiased snapshot of blog popularity. It most certainly isn’t. It’s very easily gamed and rewards lockstep linkage — and thereby boosts sites in the great right-wing echo chamber, and downplays diversity.
He might want to think about why the few women he noticed in the top ranks tended to be right-wingers, on a system administered by a right-winger.
February 20th, 2005 at 2:47 pm
PZ: I called into question the Bear’s system before as inaccurate, with the capacity to game it. Which drew an immediate challenge from him. Not being very techno-savvy, I couldn’t point to any clear technology error. But as you look at the list, you can see by the traffic counts that there are duplicates. And I know certain sites, like Doc Searls, should be way up there that aren’t included at all.
I did have suspicions that political bent had a role in it, which is the larger question that Kevin should be asking. Everytime I look at the Top 100, I’ve asked myself why the Righties outnumber the Lefties, 2-to-1 (at least).
Can you explain your point about how that lockstep linkage gaming works?
February 20th, 2005 at 3:28 pm
Avedon Carol responds to Drum with another reason:
<>…I’m staring you right in the face, Kevin, and even though you’ve said you read me every day you don’t have me on your blogroll. It’s things like this that make me tear out my hair when people wonder why women are underrepresented in the top-rated weblogs, or journalists, are whatever. TAPPED still has the egregious Instapundit on their blogroll, but they still don’t have me. They already have Ezra Klein’s weblog, which is brand-new, but they don’t have the excellent Mahablog and Suburban Guerilla. There’s a reason why I called my first fanzine The Invisible Fan.
February 20th, 2005 at 3:29 pm
Oops, forgot to quote Avedon Carol’s remarks above.
February 20th, 2005 at 3:29 pm
Oops, forgot to quote Avedon Carol’s remarks above.
February 20th, 2005 at 3:31 pm
I don’t think NZ Bear is literally “cheating” in any way: he put together an arbitrary rubric which he consistently applies that produces an output distribution. The problem is in assuming that it measures what he claims it measures (popularity) rather than simply measuring how well a blog fits the criteria of his algorithm.
Gaming it is trivial. When I joined the Progressive Blog Alliance, for instance, my position in the “ecosystem” (I hate applying that term to it — it isn’t even an approximation to an ecosystem) shot up, because I had joined a group where all the members automatically linked to one another.
It’s a system that favors low diversity→uniform link targets. That’s also a system that favors early adopters that capture a lot of links when there aren’t as great a variety of choices.
I wouldn’t call it so much a technology error as an implicit bias. Bias is unavoidable and you can’t really blame him for it, but when you accompany that bias with a false claim that it is an unbiased, objective measure…well, that’s not so good.
February 20th, 2005 at 3:58 pm
I really like Mithras’s comment over there: “Focusing on ranking is a little odd. Sure, male bloggers disproportionately read each other and link to each other. That says nothing about quality.” Couple that with Avedon Carol’s observation above, and you’ve got a darn good answer to Drum’s question right there.
Take a look at the blogrolls of these same people who are always baffled about the low frequency of women in the blogosphere. They’re small and relatively static — these are people who act as if they are in a private club rather than a big ol’ hurly-burly carnival. And that perpetuates the inequities present in the initial distribution.
It would be nice if these guys would occasionally look around and pick up a few new weblogs and add them to their blogroll (and perhaps also cull some of the old deadwood). I know I’m often tossing interesting new sites into my newsreader, and since I use my opml file to generate my blogroll, they end up on my page soon enough. A somewhat more active role in seeking out the new and challenging would break up the ossified attitudes at the top, I think, and would end this silly cycling ’round the “where are the ladies?” question.
February 20th, 2005 at 5:01 pm
As Donald Rumsfeld said: “We lack the metrics.”
The assumption is that links and hits define ones standing among bloggers.
The reality from the point of a late arrival is that people who get quoted don’t always get linked. That most people add to their blog rolls but few delete the inactive and updates are not frequent. Many use RSS feeds which aren’t factored into the equation.
Another major point is that it is rarely certain that any blogger is of a particular sex, age, creed, or ethnic origin. In general we would recognize a blogger’s pets sooner than we would recognize the blogger if we met.
February 20th, 2005 at 5:53 pm
i didn’t read drum’s original post, but since when does that mean i can’t comment on it? so here goes:
as i’ve said elsewhere, blogging for popularity or fame or recognition is a useless endeavor. the reason we blog is, at the very least, to express ourselves, and at the very most, to change the world.
anything inbetween is pointless.
blog because you must, elsewise, don’t.
February 20th, 2005 at 6:09 pm
I can’t speak for others, but I gave my all for three years doing a political satire blog, never got more than a couple of dozen regular readers a week, only a couple of links outside my immediate community, and gave up. I’ve come to the conclusion that I wasn’t mean enough, and didn’t make enough obscure references, based on what else I see out there that is more popular.
As for Skippy’s comment, I couldn’t disagree more. You can’t make a difference if nobody knows you’re there. And to say that people should expend extreme effort for three or four readers is to miss the point entirely.
It’s also really easy to say that when you already have a fairly large audience…
February 20th, 2005 at 7:40 pm
I blog because I must, but you are welcome to link to me anyway!
I agree with PZ Myers that early bloggers have an advantage in the blogging hierarchy, and many of them have created what amounts to chatrooms on their sites by now. It’s very hard to get enough readers for a chatroom to start and most later-starting bloggers don’t even try.
I also agree that the “ecosystem” has certain biases, one of them being the large number of links one gets from belonging to one of the blogging groups. The other one is that many of the blogs who link to me, for example, are not in the “ecosystem” at all so they don’t count in my ranking there.
Finally, large readership is not always the same as high-quality writing. It can be, but it need not be. I’d probably get a lot of business if I blogged on snake sex most days…
February 20th, 2005 at 8:36 pm
Self-selecting venues like TTLB, combined with the automatic assumption by many male bloggers of our invisibility (i.e., implying that the onus is upon us, that we’re doing something wrong because they don’t see us, rather than that they’re not looking in the right places or have wilful blinders on), has proven a volatile combination once more. Does this mean we have three more months of being ignored again before another male blogger comments about how we don’t seem to exist?
February 20th, 2005 at 9:19 pm
The Blogstreet BIQ bases their rankings not just on popularity (they have another list for that) but on “influence”, which is calculated by who links you. For a long time I have been around #69 on the BIQ, but this week I dropped completely off their top 100, presumably a result of the fact that I had to change addresses.
I gotta admit, it’s not something I ever went looking for, but I have been kinda bummed out since I noticed it. So everyone go link me right now!
February 20th, 2005 at 10:33 pm
Okay, confession time. I had lunch with an A-lister on Saturday and he explained that men are always bombarding him with emails about their latest posts. He said he seldom got emails from women. Maybe when they say “women aren’t good a self-promotion,” this is what they mean.
February 21st, 2005 at 12:42 am
FIrst of all, my main blog,The Goddess isn’t even listed on Bear’s system. My other blog, What She Said! lists over 450 progressive women bloggers and at this point, Kevin and the rest of the boys have used up all of their “clueless” points. If they don’t get it now, I show no mercy in my responses. My personal message to Kevin can be read at both blogs, and on his blog as well.
February 21st, 2005 at 6:08 am
I emailed clueless Kevin that maybe the a-listers ought to be, you know, reading us and tossing the odd link. The boys’ club is self-reinforcing.
February 21st, 2005 at 8:17 am
I love “What She Said.” My very first thought when this “women don’t blog politics” topic comes up (like clockwork) is why don’t Yglesias, Drum, Kos (who couldn’t find enough women interested in blogging for his site) et al spend some time hanging out there, where they might learn something for a change?
February 21st, 2005 at 8:29 am
I think what’s really bothering the poor white guys is that they don’t think the media takes them seriously. Read this post Kevin wrote only two days before he posed the “women blogger” question:
Of Blogs And Men
He and his commenters wonder if the blogosphere is really all that influential. I think the guys have some bruised egos, and it’s no coincidence that the women blogger question came up soon afterwards. Deflection, pure and simple.
February 21st, 2005 at 9:23 am
Please understand that the following doesn’t apply to all men, but men have been making these observations about the accomplishments of women, in every endeavor, for thousands of years. Why should the advent of a new communications medium alter the mundanity of thought most of them indulge? They know only what they pay attention to, and what they pay attention to is themselves. They give weight to only what concerns them, and what concerns them looks back from the mirror. It has always been thus–that when a woman stops playing the satellite she flies out of the male orbit, and the poor guy just can’t see her anymore.
It’s sickening, it’s tiresome, it’s frustrating…but it’s not new.
I have to confess a deep disappointment in Michael Kinsley, though, whom I have admired for years.
February 21st, 2005 at 12:25 pm
I just posted this comment over at Kevin Drum’s post and thought it might be worth sharing here:
As always, I find this topic amusing. Here’s a personal experience that should illustrate why:
As a result of my political blogging, I was recently interviewed for and quoted in two major media stories about Sen. Barbara Boxer: An AP Wire Boxer profile and a Mercury News Boxer profile.
Moreover, my freelance writing (humorous and serious) has appeared in hundreds of print newspapers and magazines and a half-dozen anthologies. And my political humor has been quoted in USAToday, alongside Will Durst, Lewis Black, and Bill Maher.
Sadly though, none of this apparently qualifies me for a Political Animal blogroll link or for a mention on numerous other influential political blogrolls.
Although there certainly are exceptions, many members of the Political Bloggers Old Boys Club (including Kevin Drum) clearly apply different blogroll standards, depending on the sex of the blogger. Perhaps it’s deliberate, perhaps it’s unconscious, but the results are the same.
As to Kevin’s professed curiosity and wonderment at the relative lack of females at the top of the Blogosphere Ecosystem, methinks he doth protest too much.
February 21st, 2005 at 6:52 pm
Well, here are my questions: is this really a problem for women bloggers or is the problem the boys club has with women bloggers the problem? The reason I blog is because I blog because I like blogging.
Would boycotting the A-listers do any good? We’re smart enough to read the NYT online and figure it out for ourselves. I never read Kev, Kos or Atrios, but occasionally I find myself reading about Kev, Kos, and Atrios more than I enjoy.
Every time Women in Blogging comes up, it could be declared it Women in Blogging Week, and ask everyone to link to one woman’s blog post a day for the ensuing seven days. I’ll start my WBW tonight!
I had more to say (w/fewer suggestions) about this over at Rittenhouse earlier in the day.
February 22nd, 2005 at 2:56 am
Ginger makes a good point, as does Riggsveda. I love the idea of Women Bloggers Week. And the guys we are talking about are extremely self-centered. It occurs to me that they use their blogrolls differently than some others. I think we blog to people we like because we want to help our readers find good writers. I think they link to just the few people they want to kiss up to - they want to impress the few other males they recognize in the field. It’s a shame, because there is some really good writing going on out here.
February 22nd, 2005 at 6:15 pm
Why in god’s name do women bloggers go for this victim crap each time some idiot brings it up again? I bet if anyone did a proper study they would find women bloggers get more attention not less simply because of their sex. No doubt there’s a lot of good bloggers getting less attention than they deserve. Why pretend its all about women?
February 22nd, 2005 at 8:56 pm
“… if anyone did a proper study…”
David, excuse me, but are you sure you’re in the right room for this discussion? The whole point is that this subject comes up again and again because the guys who bring it up again and again don’t, won’t and certainly haven’t made a “proper study” of women in blogging. Did you read Kev’s post? It’s all there in whatever font he uses. There are 450+ progressive women bloggers on M’s What She Said site, and Kev, who wonders where are the blogging women, remains completely unaware of all 450+ of them.
That’s what sent me over the edge this time. And here we are.
February 24th, 2005 at 11:57 am
The commenter who mentioned marketing has a point. My wife and I both have blogs, and while hers has been around for a few months longer than mine, and, in my opinion is much better, I have more links and I’m on more blogrolls.
That’s because I market. I e-mail posts to bigger bloggers if the subject is relevant to something they’re pursuing, or if I think it fits their overall style.
She doesn’t, and doesn’t care to.
To the commenter that said that no one ‘noticed’ their blog, that will rarely happen, and as the number of blogs increases, you’re going to have to do more to be noticed, and by that I mean market, not write for someone else’s tastes.