Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
I hesitated to mention the “Whose Butt should we be kicking” panel at SxSW until I saw more detail on the session. Thankfully, Dru Blood provided a fairly detailed liveblogging of the event.
It was a mistake for SxSW to keep this session once the original panel broke up. There was a dynamic involved with the original participants that led to the subtitle: whose butt should we be kicking? I created the title of the panel, and saw this session to be controversial, provoking, and even a little confrontational. I, and I believe the original organizer of the panel, Dori Smith, saw this as a a true debate between strong willed women who disagree on the answer to the question: if we exist in equal numbers, why are we not seen?
It was never intended, at least from my viewpoint, to be a how-to. We have how-tos. We have them coming out of our asses and they aren’t making a difference. It was never about individuals, or how any one person could increase their visibility. Whose butt should we be kicking?–that’s not a how-to.
This is not a criticism of Blogher, because I got them involved in a replacement panel after the SxSW organizers expressed interest in it still continuing. The Blogher folks did a terrific job finding replacements, and the panel that was formed had a dynamic of its own–just not the same as that of the original group. This placed an unwelcome burden on the new panel members–ghosts of panel members past. Keeping the title was a mistake, because it implied debate, and the replacement panel didn’t have the dynamic for this particular debate.
Frankly, I’m not sure that this debate can ever happen. Not in weblogging. There isn’t enough marketing impetus to sustain a debate of this nature.