The Eye of the Beholder

(If you're here from a link from another blog, check out my current entries here)

As the old saw goes: You can't judge a book by its cover.

But most of us know that you can indeed judge a book after reading the first couple of paragraphs.

So, too, it seems with blogs.

I recently left a comment on the BlogHer site on the on-going debate of whether or notwomen should change the rules by which blogs are linked and ranked--because even though we represent a sizeable portion of those who blog (bet. 43 and 56 percent) we are rarely represented in media, are not as widely linked as male bloggers, and even though Dave Sifry says that the tail wags the dog in blog stats, women are nowhere to be counted among the "A-list" bloggers.

But, my sense is that if women want to have higher profiles, we have to be less judgemental of one another's blogs and be far more link-friendly than men....

There is also the big problem of women mentoring other women. There is a nasty competitiveness among women--young/old, single/married, kids/ no kids, uppercrust/lowerclass--that, no matter how much lip-service we give it, doesn't seem to go away. Often, we are our own wost enemies.

Think about how we perceive one another as bloggers. Do we diss one blog as being "too personal" while touting another because we think it's "more political"? Or do we not link to others in keeping with a personal philosophy re how we want our own blog to be received/perceived?

And, is this the way that male bloggers perceive one another? Some male bloggers specifically eschew the personal in favor of punditry--how many of the A-listers talk about their personal lives in a personal manner? And, does the dogfight nature of A-lister political blogging work to eclipse more thoughtful political commentary (done by those other than Andrew Sullivan)?

In my relatively short time blogging, I've heard a number of things about my blog: that I'm too personal, not polemic enough, that I'm not a "citizen journalist,"....but rarely has anyone ever said my writing stank. So, while I'm a good writer, I don't seem to be fitting into neat little categories that some people find necessary to fit bloggers into before they have a reason to link to them.

Okay, maybe this has to do with the blogger desiring to project a certain image and that my blog just does not fit that particular image. Maybe it has something to do with buzz or conversation, I don't know. But I do know that it makes me feel like the girl in high school gym class who's wearing granny panties rather than a thong.

Yet, as I stated in my comment, I wonder what it is that makes male bloggers link to other male bloggers. Is it really an old boy's network, or is it just that because they are less personal in their blogging than women, and, in their eyes, less like the teen-age girls of Livejournal, are they qualitatively better bloggers?

I don't know....it will be very interesting to hear the comments this weekend. And to see if we can change anything