Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
Update
This post was a mistake. Not the Specks, or linking Catarina, but Adam Green has left me cold…especially when referring to chick blogs. Mr. Green, we’ll also link back when you’re being a dork, too.
My original link to Mr. Green was not because he said ’something nice’. I don’t particularly consider, ‘you go, girl’, to be all that complimentary, myself. It was because there was a point I wanted to make, in that diverse discussions are more interesting than ones that consist of similar people saying similar things.
However, the point was lost among all the references to ‘girl’, ‘chick’, and hints of our warm, nurturing side (as compared to, as Seth in comments pointed out, the guys and their rough and tumble shoot ‘em up sides).
Mr. Green, here’s a note from my warm, nurturing side: leave the outmoded phrases and stereotyping at home with your bell bottoms and polyester disco suit. It is woman or women or even, preferred, weblogger–not girl, and not chick. Was that warm and nurturing enough for you, Mr. Green?
(Hopefully we can also cut off the use of ‘blogher’ to differentiate women (those warm nurturing women) webloggers from the men (those tough, aggressive men) webloggers at the pass before this becomes too widespread in usage. Not unless we want to start referring to the male webloggers as ‘bloghims’.)
Adam Green writes on two snapshots of the copyright/RSS discussion on Tech Memeorandum:
One reason why much of the heat has dissipated, and the battle has morphed into a search for a middle ground may be that women have entered the discussion. While this started with the men riding out to shoot up the cattle rustlers, the womenfolk are now asking questions and looking for answers.
Is this sexist generalization? Perhaps, but based on the two Tech Memorandum snapshots I’d much rather read a discussion dominated by Shelley Powers, Susan Mernit, Denise Howell and Jeneane Sessum, than Mike Rundle and Om Malik. No offense meant guys.
Adam has discovered something really amazing: if a dialog is extended to a diverse audience, it ends up being a lot more interesting. In this case, women joined the discussion and the dynamics of the discussion changed.
We women have gotten men to link to us now and again; the next step is to get them to actually talk with us. Hopefully, eventually they’ll reach the same epiphany that Adam has.
I’ve adopted a term I discovered from Catarina Fake to describe the phenomena of linking to women webloggers, while reserving debate primarily to the menfolk: chicking the women. Catarina has been reading a biography of Martha Stewart and found that the author had gone out of his way to trash Stewart, without acknowledging all of her rather impressive accomplishments. The only really positive voice in the book had this to say on Stewart’s interaction with Time Warner about a television show:
Sheingold came to sense something else about the way Martha’s colleagues handled her at Time: There was a slight but unmistakable–and ever-present–tone of condescension in their words, as if the members of the Time Inc’s boys club wanted her to know that they still regarded her as nothing more than the fashion model she once had been, instead of the business executive she’d become.
In time, Sheingold invented a word for what they were doing to her. He didn’t share the word with anybody, but it popped into his head every time he heard them belittling and dismissing her, in that certain way that would make Martha’s jaw set and her face go cold. …’Chick-ing’ her.
Jaw set…face cold…I hear that.
Speaking of cold, after this discussion about RSS the following represents the chances of me ever providing full feeds again.