Burningbird

Besides 83 other A-Listers…? ;-)

(I saw the original post so I know the answer. I'll wait to see if anyone else does.)

BTW, nearly hurled when I saw that crapola from Seth Godin about (essentially) inventing "small is the new big." The bankruptcy of the pundit class, illustrated.

I decided to pull the other one because this isn't just about me, though I am really feeling the pain on the semantic web discussion. I really am unhappy being on the outside on that one.

I missed the quote Ethan. Do you have a link?

It's on the page you linked to in your post, about 4/5 of the way down.

That intense blast of testosterone must have blinded me, Ethan. Thanks.

I liked your earlier version of this post.

That post at Google Blogoscoped is "link bait." It's a classic Web 2.0 post, the blog author didn't actually write any of it, he conned other bloggers into writing it for him. The primary purpose of that post is to draw linkage from Digg, Reddit, and other Web 2.0 sites, to whore for links to increase Google Adsense revenues. The "author" needs to do nothing but cut-and-paste, then watch the revenue roll in.
If you want attention from the Web 2.0 fools, you merely need to emulate the techniques that have already been successful. I'll give you one for free, here is the title of the perfect link bait post: "Top 10 Sex Tips of Google Employees."

I republished the older post, especially since some sites had already grabbed the post link.

I keep telling myself, one shouldn't care. And I didn't until the semantic web discussion. Now, it's like watching my career and future fade away to nothing.

The 'boys blogger club' is frustrating. I noticed the dearth of female names on that list, too (and yeah, it is link bait but it's still pretty effective link bait) and wondered why it is that even in a world where gender shouldn't matter, it still seems that it does.

DnW

I've written on the same subject quite a few times - mostly in regards to the photoblogging community (it is very male-oriented) - but also about women bloggers being invisible. With respect to the few women who are considered important enough to quote or invite to conferences, most women are ignored. We are still considered to be in the private realm (home, family, women's issues) rather than the public arena (work, politics, technology, etc.). Even if we write about politics or technology, it is rarely given as much respect as it would be if it came from our male equivalents.

jesus christ. never changes.

DnD, yes, that's the silliness of his reply: he doesn't care about this. Then statiscally, he should have had a 50.50 chance of getting women on the list, if there wasn't some male factor involved.

I'm feeling this, very strongly right now Dawn. I am at a point where I don't know if what I'm saying is crap, or if what I'm saying doesn't have that 'male' sound that would give it respect.

I'm burning out from trying.

Jeneane, actually it does. It gets worse.

Do they think we're making this all up? That women don't like recognition? That only men write anything worthwhile?

Trying to get people in this environment to acknowledge that something is wrong is almost impossible. No matter how many times these things get pointed out, how many people read this post and think to themselves: there is no problem, what is she bitching about.

I left my other comment asking where are the women anyway on the other post before seeing this. Obviously it's a problem if your posts about semweb don't appear on techmeme, Shelley, but that's not an instance of women getting filtered out, it's because of your blog churn. Not that there's anything wrong with blog churn, I am engaging in some myself this week.

The bigger problem I see is that the way women blog and communicate isn't the way the broader technology community deems important or significant. Mostly we're not brought up to think that our business or technology ideas have huge import beyond the small situated contexts in which we deploy them. So while men can get on the phone and blab for 45 minutes or an hour then make them into a podcast. I believe most women don't feel they would add any value by doing something like that. While many men will make grand pronouncements about the semantic web or whatever even if they know nothing about it, women often confine their statements to more personal things and things they know through and through. Those are broad generalizations of course. Just seems to me that's what I see from women blogging about tech.

I'd like to be proved wrong. I'd like to figure out a way to get tech women's voices heard better. BlogHer's obviously not the solution, though I'm not against what they're doing, it just doesn't promote women in tech.

Anne you and I commented same time.

Blog churn? Anne, techmeme filters based on Technorati rank, as well as being linked by their seed webloggers. People are filtered, and the creator even says this is so.

If one of the key bloggers doesn't link a woman weblogger, then they never get the golden key into the techmeme lists. There is a gate to this community.

I think I prefer Megite, which seems to believe that everyone who has something to say should be included.

Also, women do talk these things. I found a Ziff-David article written by a woman blogger on the NY times story, which showed up on Megite, but not techmeme. Yet other ZD stories show up on techmeme. Excuse me, those written by one of the 'preapproved' elite that is.

Women are talking. We're not being heard. Technology is being used to shut us out, and then the boys can wash their hands of it and say: hey, we didn't do it, it was the application.

But Shelley, you had a really high technorati rank with burningbird and I imagine you haven't yet reproduced it here, so I don't get why you're saying that it's not blog churn in your case. I wonder if it's reasonable to use yourself as an example of the more general problem.

As for women more generally being filtered out–I think we'd have to look at statistics re: how many women are actually blogging about tech, how often they post and link, and how often they get listed by someplace like techmeme to understand whether women are getting filtered out at a higher rate. I think they probably are–unconscious prejudice against women is more pervasive than most people will admit too–but at the same time there's also a basic problem of lack of women in the technology industry and a lack of women blogging ovaries out in the same way that a lot of men blog balls out, if that makes any sense.

Shelley, I don't think you're talking crap. Part of my master's thesis is actually about how women are overlooked in the blogging world (and not just in tech circles). There are a few studies of this topic out there. Most say that it's not intentional but I think that it's more insidious than that. Unless you're a woman with a well-known name, it's nearly impossible to break into that "A-List" (a name I detest, btw) crowd.

I seriously think it is because women, no matter how accomplished and respected offline, are simply not given their due credit online. It's like the whole glass ceiling thing all over again but in a virtual realm. We are those women who have to push through.

Anne, what do you consider blog churn? I think we're talking cross purposes.

If you think it's not a high technorati rank, than I agree, that's what's being filtered. And I also say that this happens to the detriment of women more than men, and therefore is a biased technology.

Doesn't matter how many women write. If they write on these topics, and do not have a chance to participate in the discussions because their 'rank' isn't high enough to pass some arbitrary filter, or run against some other encoded bias, then the technology enforces discrimination.

Why? Because we've already seen a bias reflected in technorati ranking–men are linked more than women.

And because women don't show as much, then they don't get noticed as much, and don't get linked as much, and then don't rise up through Technorati, which would be the tipping point for them to show up on techmeme, and the cycle starts again.

Rank aside, I actually have shown up in techmeme at this site, and this URL. Why not now, beats heck out of me.

And that's also why I didn't want to keep the previous post on this subject, because this really is not specific to me — Sheila Lennon, who has been around a fairly long time is not showing; neither was Donna at Ziff-Davis. Now, why were they not showing?

Because they haven't been linked within a techmeme capacity by one of the techmeme seeded webloggers.

Bam! There's your gate.

Dawn, would love to hear more about your thesis.

The first counter I thought when I saw "link bait" was "literature review". Academia is quite similar to the web (not least because it was designed for and by particle physicists) - how have women solved the problem of citation in academia?

Shelley: So what is your most popular blog post? Also, http://burningbird.net/technology/semanticweb/the-elephant-strikes-again/#more-3649 and other permalinks on burningbird.net are 404.

Anne… this isn't about "blog churn" in Shelley's case. She's well known and her opinions are read and internalized by the blognoscenti. They know where she's writing and what she has to say, but those assholes will seldom welcome her to "the conversation" because they don't see the profit in it. Technorati ranking doesn't drive the social networking of an a-list anymore than does The Truth Laid Bear. They just provide a little instrumentation for gross analysis. Like few others, Shelley speaks with clarity and insight regardless of market consequences of her analysis. The whole Arrington-Barrington set spins on an axis of small cap entrepreneurial investors informed by the googley lottery dreams of the promoters at its core. They seem to have little time for art, for life, for love. And so they miss Shelley's acer palmatum leaves in autumn red, and they miss her crucial insights regarding the culture's need, the economy's need, the human need for gender balance, and they miss the power of her thinking associated with semantic web architecture while they fiddle with how best to monetize their widgetry.

James, my tech weblog mysteriously broke just as this one did last week. It takes a lot of work to recover it, so it will be without working permalinks until I can get it fixed. And possibly move off of Wordpress.

I don't know what would be my favorite post, or the one that had the most impact. I've been slashdotted three times. I've had several end up with over a 100 links. I had a stupid blonde joke that went forever. I'd have to think on it.

OK, Frank, your turn: what the heck is 'blog churn'? I thought I was up on all these terms. But thank you for your kind words.

As for this whole thing, I'm regretting saying anything on anything.

Small technical notes (this is conjecture, I don't know for sure). I think the blog-churn issue is:

1) You show up on techmeme if you link-TO, and have high technorati rank.
[blog-churn: Moving from high technorati-rank blog (burningbird.net) to low technorati-rank blog (just.shelleypowers.com) means not showing up - this isn't gender-specific, apart from the gender issues in building the rank in the first place)

2) You show up on techmeme if someone of high technorati rank (or techmeme seed blog) links-YOU
[This does have a gender aspect, as a part of general oligarchy structure]

Though I've never found underposts to drive all that much traffic. The techmeme ordering seems to be a reflection of attention, not a driver (everything has both reflection and driver properties to some extent, but not in equal measure - techmeme seems to be far more on the reflection end, while megite seems to lean a little less to attention and a little more towards driver end)

I don't know the intricacies of techmeme attention, but I just inferred that what Anne meant by "blog churn" was moving from one URL to another and losing pointers, losing rank in any old link catalog because you've ditched an URL and picked up a new one. People who have blogrolls likely still have burningbird linked, not just shelley, so you've discarded all that pointage by blog churning.

(So yes, i agree with what Seth says in Number 1 in his comment above).

Seth, Frank, thanks for clarification on the term. I'm not going back to Burningbird, so I guess I'll just have to stay blog churned.

Will I turn into blog butter at some point?

Seth, I never received much traffic from techmeme.

I don't think blog churn is some term of art, I just made it up to describe your moving from burningbird to just.shelley. So what Seth said.

I'm not arguing there's not a gender issue here, there is. But using an anecdote of your semweb post not appearing may be misleading, because had you still been writing on burningbird, it might have been the first post listed (who knows though, there is the linking-in aspect too).

I'm a perfect example, Anne.

Do my words suddenly have more meaning and value posted over at Burningbird rather than here? Do I suddenly have more relevance to the discussion if the URLs begin with "weblog.burningbird.net"?

If the link is all that mattered, we could set up automatic linking machines and remove ourselves from the equation and not have to be bothered with attempting to put together some form of meaningful communication.

The technology is flawed, but beyond that, it's also discriminatory. It focuses on a unit of measurement that favors men over women. Whys and wherefores doesn't matter. This is a fact.

We could choose to change society, or we could focus on changing these specific uses of technology. Which is easier? I put my dime down on changing the technology, but those who benefit from this are so entrenched and so adamant in maintaining the status quo that I wonder if it wouldn't easier to change society.

We agree that the current way of measuring rank and influence and importance handicaps women bloggers.

I can see what you're saying now–you are a good example of a woman blogger filtered out. I was thinking two things: (1) you've been considered important by techmeme in the past, so there's at least some evidence that women can succeed in the world of linkage and (2) the fact that you're filtered out now doesn't tell us much unless we know more about what men were filtered out too. Maybe I'm wrong on the second point, though–you are still the same person, your ideas are part of the same idea stream, your writing style and capabilities haven't changed.

So. To change technology or change the social setting? Umm, I have doubts whether we can change either. I feel resigned to the situation as it exists, in fact, it lately feels like it's getting worse, I don't know why.

It is getting worse.

If Web 2.0 is 'guaranteed 10% women', the so-called Web 3.0 consists of "I don't see anything wrong". At best, women are tokenized; at worst, women aren't even there.

Well, they may play that game, but that doesn't mean the rest of us won't point them out for pricks.

[…] I suggested to Shelley that the reason her semantic web post didn't appear on techmeme was because of blog churn (referring to her refactoring of her blogging across various sites) and not because of gender discrimination; she pointed out how I was wrong, and I stand corrected. But I think the concept of blog churn is still important: it's hard work to figure out how to organize our blogging. Do we blog at one site or many, with or without other people, for ourselves or for other organizations? How do we divide up the various topics we want to write about across blogs? And what does that do to the reputation and rank we've built up? This is of more than theoretical interest to me right now, as I have just joined Om Malik's Web Worker Daily as lead writer. […]

I don't think calling blog churn a gender issue is useful - virtually anything relative to a social differential, directly or indirectly, is going to affect people disproportionately on the losing end of the differential, so it doesn't tell you anything to call it that. And if you go down that path - all inequality is a gender/race/orientation/income/etc. issue, because of the inequality effects, you're not saying anything beyond the initial statement, but it's confusing because it looks like more than it is.

That is:
1) Churn causes loss of visibility
2) This is because visibility is determined by link-popularity
3) This is a [gender race orientation …] issue because #2 disproportionately affects [gender race orietation …]

If you can stick statement #3 essentially everywhere, it has no meaning beyond a very basic statement that broad inequality affects many groups. That is, it's fogging the useful distiction between things which have particular connection to one grouping, and general impacts across many groupings.

The point is moot anyway, Seth.