Category: Weblogging

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Just walk away, if I ever take all of this so seriously that I lose perspective.

Just walk away, if I become one of those unthinking webloggers who pile on at a moment’s notice, pontificating from such a privileged position of smug superiority. I’d rather burn this site and plow salt into the ashes.

Barry at Alas, a Blog has probably done more for women in weblogging than any other man I know. Recently, he got into some financial difficulty and had to sell his domain, keeping his weblog and asking that the new owner not host porn. The new owner hasn’t, but he has posted a page that links to several hardcore porn sites–using Barry’s accrued Google ranking to drive up the rank of these sites.

I can understand Barry’s dilemma on selling the domain or not, because I had a similar offer for burningbird.net a few months back. If the offer had come during a downtime for me, I would have taken it. As it is, with my redirects, I’ve basically killed all page rank for all my domains–a state that leaves me happy, because I don’t want these domains to have value other than what I provide, not Google.

To return to Barry, according to Sour Duck some of the more righteous ‘discovered’ that this happened (do you think it’s because Barry wrote about it?) and are now disdainful of Barry, what he has done, and have vowed never to link to him again, for him being the traitor to the ’cause’.

Give me a break. These women will slam one of the few men who consistently bring up more issues of impact to women than the women at Blogher or most other female-oriented site. Why so condeming? After all, it’s not as if he’s linking to porn, or the fact that people searching for information on feminist issues will now be shown page after page of porn sites. What happens in the end is one porn site ends up ahead of other porn sites. Frankly, can any of us tell any of them apart anyway?

Here’s what one purist has to say:

You asked for no input, no feedback, no suggestions. As though your blog is what it is because of you and you alone, or because you paid for server space. Your blog was what it was because of all the people who commented to it, read it, guest blogged there. They made it what it was, too. Their words, on your site, are what caused it to be widely read– not just your words. And their words are their words– not yours. Their reputations are their reputations, too. That being so, I believe you owed it to all of the people who supported your site by commenting to it and guest blogging to ask for their thoughts and views before you irreversibly tied their words, comments, guest blog posts to a page which links to misogynist, racist internet pornography. You could have gone ahead and done what you were going to do anyway, nobody could have stopped you, but at the very least, we’d have had a heads up, and we could have stopped posting before the porn links page was created, and hence we would not have unwittingly helped to boost the search engine ratings for porn sites with our feminist, woman-centered postings! This is especially true for those of us who oppose pornography, for whom this is central to our feminist politics. You know who we are. You owed us *at least this*. But you allowed us to keep posting, and boosting the internet ratings of racist, misogynist pornography websites, for months. You didn’t let us know until people had discovered for themselves that these porn reviews were part of Amptoons. And even when you finally let us know, because the porn links were found on your site, you didn’t allow for commentary or feedback or even trackbacks. Why? Because you’d cut a deal at our expense, and you didn’t want to hear about it? Because you didn’t want search engine ratings to go down, possibly compromising the deal you cut behind our backs?

Hello? What part of ‘domain already sold’ didn’t you understand? No, skip that: what part of personal space don’t you understand?

Where does this person get off putting such demands on any weblogger, much less one who I know for a fact, has been fighting the battle for women online one hell of a lot longer than most of the outraged people?

I can be persistent and I can be assertive and I can even be pedantic at times when I’m fighting for the cause of women, but I’ll walk away from this space, without a look back, if I ever get to the point of telling another weblogger what to do, as well as kicking dirt in the face of one of the few men I know who has consistently fought our fight.

I never want to be that good or that pure.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

As I just detailed at my Just Shelley site, I’m ‘rolling’ my three weblogs back into one and making various other changes. I’ll still write on the topics I’ve covered here, but in one place. It should make keeping up with comments simpler.

None of my other sites on specific topics will be weblogs. They’ll be more ‘traditional’ web pages, with no comments, no date emphasis, longer and more self-contained articles, how-tos, and so on.

Burningbird, as in burningbird.net (not the weblog) will end up being the main point of entry for my site (a place holder is in place now).

I’m still keeping Yellow Alligator, with some style changes, but it’s going to become re-purposed.

I’ll be closing comments here starting tomorrow in preparation for cutting a static copy of this site for the closure. Links will be maintained for those who have linked to stories. Feeds will be permanently redirected to the Just Shelley site, so those of you who have subscribed to both sites, my apologies if you get double stories (not sure what aggregators will do with this).

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I didn’t uncover this comment thread until tonight. My ears, feet, and most other body parts should have been burning because it was several men talking about me. I don’t find it flattering.

What’s disappointing is that each time we bring issues of equality for women to the fore, women’s views are discounted, either because we’re being a ‘troll’ (or bitch), or because we personally have an axe to grind (or benefit to gain).

Having two or ten or however many number of women speaking at a conference is meaningless if women are not perceived to be of value. If we don’t have equal respect for our work, our views, our beliefs, and who we are, no matter how many women’s faces appear at these events, we’ll still be invisible; no matter how many opportunties we have to speak, we’ll still not be heard.

That’s my agenda. Just in case anyone wants to know.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

It’s funny, but in all the discussions on gatekeepers in weblogging, an underlying assumption is that it is the high profile webloggers who fill this role. However, gatekeepers exist in all layers of this statusphere, and one is just likely to be on the outside looking in within the small groups, as within the large.

I went looking for a definition of what is gatekeeping, and I found an old post of Jonathon Delacour on the subject. He got the term from Dorothea Salo based on a role playing by women and men, where the man pretends incompetence to get out of tasks, and the woman shuts the man out from the task and then complains about lack of help.

This is based on the origination of the term ‘gatekeeping’, by Kurt Lewin, …which he used to describe a wife or mother as the person who decides which foods end up on the family’s dinner table. David Manning White is the one who first extended this concept to journalism, where the gatekeeper is the person who decides which information enters the system, and which information does not.

If you think on it, we’re all gatekeepers. I read dozens of stories a day, which I don’t pass on to my readers. Why? For some stories it’s because I don’t find them interesting enough; others because I’m not in the mood to write a post; still others because I don’t want to send flow or because I’ve linked the person already so many times this week and don’t want to seem like a groupie.

It’s natural to be a gatekeeper. According to the University of Twente site, gatekeeping is inevitable:

The gatekeeper’s choices are a complex web of influences, preferences, motives and common values. Gatekeeping is inevitable and in some circumstances it can be useful. Gatekeeping can also be dangerous, since it can lead to an abuse of power by deciding what information to discard and what to let pass. Nevertheless, gatekeeping is often a routine, guided by some set of standard questions.

The focus is on the higher ranked folks because they can send, and withhold, significant amounts of flow. However, I’m finding that the high ranked sites tend to give and withhold flow more as a matter of obtaining more for themselves then to enforce a specific viewpoint or behavior. More, the nature of the flow that comes from these ’stronger’ sources is such to counter the long term effectiveness of the attention.

Think of attention in this environment as a river of water. If the river’s water level is normal, it flows naturally; providing both irrigation and transportation, as well as habitat for wildlife and recreation. Over time the water may increase gradually. When this happens, the banks and the river bed adjust and a smaller river becomes a slightly bigger one and the cycle continues.

If the water in the river is below normal levels, it puddles instead of flows: there’s not enough of it to cause the water to push beyond the contours of the river bed. The result is some areas will have water while others won’t. The areas that do have water, the water stagnates because there’s no circulation to keep it moving.

Worse, though, is a sudden huge increase in water. Nature may unleash a torrent of rain, or a dam may break and the water levels exceed what the river can handle. It breaks out of its banks and floods the countryside around it. If the water stays within the river banks, it’s more constrained, which causes it to rush even stronger, damaging the river bed. Wildlife habitat is destroyed, transportation halted, and everything that could be irrigated is now flooded.

Eventually the event that led to such abundance ceases, and the river returns to its normal flow, typically with negative consequences.

Ultimately, it’s not healthy for the river to get a sudden influx of water. The same can be said for webloggers and attention: it may be exciting during the event, but eventually the A lister turns his or her attention elsewhere, and the flood is gone is suddenly as it started. This type of attention is not a sustained attention: it comes, it flows, it’s gone.

If the higher ranked were to persist in giving attention, eventually the person may find themselves ‘elevated’, but this is rare (and usually of service to the A lister). No, I have found over the years that elevation really comes from attention downstream rather than up. The attention flows too strongly for it to stick with the A listers. However, though the rest of us don’t have as much flow to send, we send it again and again. We grow our audience from each other. Because of this, I question whether the A lister’s role as ‘gatekeeper’ is as insidious as broadly believed.

We fell in love with a graph with a long tail years ago, and we’re not willing to give up the idea that power rests with a few, and therefore granting of attention–or not–is no longer our responsibility. It’s their responsibility, we say to ourselves, whoever they are at the moment. The long tail is a myth, though, a form of reverse empowerment: the A list seem to have more power because we’ve given away our own.

To return a moment to my analogy, funny thing about rivers, because as large and as wild as they are we do have some control over them. We can hold the river back with a massive dam or we can manipulate its flow through a series of locks. I’ve watched the locks along the Mississippi and any one can’t make a difference, but dozens all along its path keep even this, one of the world’s mightiests rivers, tamed. Well, as tame as a river like the old Sip can be, until it stands up shrugging aside our small efforts.

We’re like those locks, controlling the flow of attention to each other; sometimes letting a little more flow through, sometimes shutting the gates because we’re peeved (or not in the mood, or it doesn’t serve our interests, or any of a hundred reasons).

We’re all gatekeepers, of one form or another.