Adding my piece on the NY Times article on women & blogs.

So, this is the link, and here is what I have to say about it: The predictably-linked article, from The New York Times discusses the so-called male-dominated world of blogging. The very concept of a male-centric "Blogville" seems ludicrous to me.

I can't recall exactly why I first entered the great wide world of blogging (oh day of days). I'd thought my interest had been piqued by Rebecca Mead's now-famous article in the New Yorker on the nascent blogging scene, but date-checking shows me that my first posting came two weeks before the publication of that article. In any case, I remember that article as being my inspiration for blogging. More specifically, I remember my inspiration being Meg Hourihan, co-founder of Pyra, the company behind the Blogger software (is software the right word?) this blog relies on. From the moment I read the article, I thought Meg (who is herself a BlogSister) seemed nothing short of totally awesome. I read her blog, and I wanted to meet her. I knew that was an absurd and slightly creepy aspiration, and if I couldn't meet her, I could at least blog my heart out. So to me, blogging was always about the women, from the very beginning. I soon discovered other favorite blogs, all belonging to women: Mighty Girl (which I still read almost daily), Weblog Wannabe, and BlogSisters (obviously cool). A quick analysis of my blogroll reveals that of twelve blogs, exactly half are authored by women. Not too shabby.

In short, I feel Lisa Guernsey's article was under-researched and therefore misrepresented my experience, and probably the experience of many other bloggers, both male and female. I remember thinking that "Blogville" was, if anything, dominated by females. In the end, while it was nice to see something in a major publication about BlogSisters, I thought the broad conclusions the author came to were rather unsubstantiated.

(a version of this was originally posted on Fire & Ice)