How Can This Continue To Happen?
Where are all the female bloggers? They are sitting the audience wondering why at least one of them isn’t on the panel.
You will not see Ana Marie Cox of Wonkette on my blogroll. She is a paid gossip columnist for a media company, not a political blogger. She markets sexual innuendo about people in DC, but her one-liners and short posts don’t add anything to the conversation because she deliberately stays politically neutral. In spite of this, the people who form panels keep including her. She fails the “Deep Throat Test”, i.e. when someone says “Deep Throat” Watergate is one of your top two responses. She is not acceptable as the “token woman” on the panel, which is also not an acceptable practice.
Melanie, Susie, and Echidne all have post about the panel. Melanie and Susie were sitting in the audience. That was stupid.
The organizers of such panels need to start reading blogs, and stop looking at statistics. As a programmer/system analyst I won’t even charge them to tell them that all current web statistics only have value within their own scope, and only when comparing two sites within that scope. No need to go into the effects of caching by large ISPs, or any other hidden variables. If you are forming a panel and want to know who to invite, ask bloggers.
The ladies on my blogroll aren’t there for “balance”: I read what they write, I refer to them when I post, I comment at their sites. I use my blogroll first, before I use bookmarks. I had to manually insert those sites on my template, so I use them.
