March 12, 2004

Why are most popular political bloggers men?

Christian Crumlish

The Columbia Journalism Review's Campaign Desk blog recently ran an interesting article treading that familiar territory of comparing the abundance of public-minded outspoken masculine weblogs with the paucity of famous political blogs by women. The author of The Blogosphere: Boys 'n' Their Toys (even the title is reminiscent of the title of a Shelley Powers essay from last year) interviews or quotes a number of the leading blog commentators, from Reynolds to Shirky to Blood and discovers that (1) the blogosphere is not as much of a meritocracy as it is often portrayed and (2) female bloggers seem less interested in focusing exclusively on politics.

The most amusing comment comes from Reynolds:

"Men are programmed to show off to impress women and impress other men, and so blogs where you can be outspoken are naturally appealing to them - although if anybody thinks blogs are impressing women," he adds, almost parenthetically, "they're in trouble."
Posted by xian at March 12, 2004 8:29 AM
Comments

I am always suspicious of stories like this because of where they get their data. First of all, my blog is basically a political blog, but I have no knowledge of it ever being "counted", however they do that.

In addition, I don't use Sitemeter for my stats. The Truth Laid Bear statistics use that. So my site doesn't show up there at all.

It seems like there is an exclusive club out there all right -- it's a club made up of bloggers who happen to use the tools that other bloggers and journalists find easiest to research. The rest of us are out of luck.

Posted by: Susan at March 12, 2004 10:49 AM
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