I make rounds of the top circuit blogs and also regularly visit two or three 'minor' blogs. That seems pretty common, anecdotally. And given that theres a lot more minor blogs out there... it leaves slim pickings for the minor leagues.

I do have to agree that there's virtually no top tier female bloggers, although there's quite a few awesome ladies in the comments of good blogs and in the dKos diaries. Dismally scrolling my favored blogs list, I see...two with their own blogs, and one of those is Respectful of Otters which has been inactive for quite some time now AFAIK.

Good points. Now, what are you doing to help break the cycle other than pointing out its existance?

Here's a sugestion: How about creating a new mini-blogroll on your front page. Update it regularly. In it, you link to bloggers who ought to have better recognition but for whatever reason, don't get it. And make a point of being diverse in your linking. To make the workload manageable, I'd suggest updates every 4 to 6 weeks and no more than 5 to 7 blogs listed in the blogroll.

Even better, try to get one or two of the other big-name Lefty bloggers to do the same thing.

"Now, Brad is absurdly talented, knowledgeable and fun to read, he's certainly one of the best bloggers around. So what's happened? Why hasn't his readership soared?"

It's because he's actually a woman!

You're not going to drive his hit-count any hire by linking to Yglesias when you mean to link to Brad.

I've been slow put your new site on my blogroll because I don't have the continuous reminder of seeing your name in my referrals. Today I had that reminder. You're going to remember now, too, right?

You have to register for the TTLB ecosystem to be included. (Also, you have to install SiteMeter to be on the traffic ranking there.) The information it reports is often obviously suspect. It may be the best we have, but that doesn't mean it's good, so people should limit using it as conclusive evidence of anything.

I can't believe I just typed "hire" instead of "higher". God, I'm getting old....

Or maybe you're reading Yglesias too much. :)

Zounds! Well I, for one, am now linking to Avedon.

And praktike's point is truly well-taken. I was thinking of ditching my lavender banner for something more, ahem, masucline. That should drive up the hits!

By the way, the Drezner-Farrell paper on blogs and their funny ways kind of gets into all this from an academic perspective. Maybe not the female part. But the "logjam up top" part.

Note: Brad DeLong made an attempt to rectify this situation in late 2003 with his Subvert the Dominant Internet Link Hierarchy! post. Seems to me that's the best way to handle the problem. Use Brad's title, list a few blogs (or just posts) that you've liked and the communal linking aspect that made this blogging thing so interesting in the first place gets a shot in the arm.

Another alternative would be to set up a remaindered links blogs and incorporate it the way Kottke does.

See also DeLong's first post on this issue where he muses for a while about the problem in general and then proposes this solution to high page rank sites.

Promiscuous link sluttage is the answer. I call on everyone reading this with a website or a weblog to find a measure of sites that link to you--my current favorite is Technorati, but whatever you want. Rank the sites that list to you by their "authority." Find the least authoritative, look at it, and if you like it link to it. (If you don't like it, don't.) Link to it. Put it in your blogroll. Talk about it. And don't just pick one. Pick two--maybe one from the least authoritative category, and one at random.

LINK SLUTTAGE IS THE TOOL TO SMASH THE LINK-CHAINS THAT ARE THE OPPRESSIVE DOMINATION OF THE INTERNET HIERARCHY!!!

Actually Avedon, I wasn't talking about your blog, I was talking about your points vis-a-vis TAPPED. Sorry if I was unclear on that. My point simply was that I didn't just appear on their blogroll randomly because I sent in a picture of myself looking masculine (though the low buttoned shirt might have helped), but that I'd been on there blogroll before, been around the blogs for awhile, and got legacy'd in when I moved. Now, I may or may not deserve to be on the blogroll, but my inclusion there shouldn't be used to demonstrate some sort of favoritism. I've been blogging for almost a solid year longer than Suburban Guerrilla.

As to other points, I think they're good ones. I have been trying to promote blogs I like -- Brad's, Here's What's left, Liberals Against Terrorism, Shakespeare's Sister (I've linked to her before, I'd just forgotten to put up the blogroll link till yesterday)...part of the problem, and this is cyclical, is that it's hard to find new blogs I really like. The guys I link to regularly, Matt, Brad, Kevin, Liberals Against Terrorism, etc are really very good. Now, two of them are recent and I've done my best to get them out there, but I don't find it so easy to discover blogs that I find as useful. This is particularly tough because there's only so much time in a day and in trying to feed my own commentary, I have a tendency to rely on those whose opinions I historically find provocative and whose skills as aggregators I find exceptional (political wire, mydd).

Not to mention, as I was saying in the post, that even when I do my best to promote one, it doesn't seem to do a whole lot of good. So there's a structural problem here -- I tend to think that the 10 top lefties should get together once a week and all link to three great blogs they found that week -- the same three, so the push is sustained on a single site. That might make more of a difference. Or so I'd hope.

Fixed the link to Brad, by the way. i was linking out of my newsfeed and he and matt are right next to each other, so I control-C'd the wrong one.

What's interesting to me is the point that the lefty blogsphere is "clubby" and not friendly to new kids on the block.

It's interesting because the blogsphere is full of people (like Kos and others) who decry that Democratic leadership is too insular, and that the reformers are being kept out.

What is it people say about projecting your own behaviours onto others? Maybe we jump all over the Democratic party for being hostile to newcomers because it's a common trait we all share. And wish we didn't.

CFR -- i agree with that.

Also, i was wrong about blogging a year longer than Suburban Guerrilla. I've only blogged a few months longer. Contra Summers, many boys can't do math, either.

Dude. I've mocked you many times. Hell, I mocked you today. But, I've got to give you points for going beyond asking the question. Good for you.

Yeah, my joke sucked. I was planning to make "I'm currently listening to Ani DiFranco" it's own bulletpoint, but then combined it with another for concision. Worked out real well in making me look like a pandering poseur. But what can ya do, "publish" has already been pressed and the mocking has laready commenced.

Well, live and learn. I can't get too mad at anyone on the LA Weekly masthead.

Paperwight has a "promotion" blogroll too...I think it's a good idea.

Ezra, I least nobody called you "Danny Bonaduce!"

Prakt: It's evolved into Danny Blogaduce.

Oh, thank God, now I have more blogs to waste my time with. Beats actual people.

And anyone who thinks that women aren't "funny" or "fundamentally vicious" (and I mean that in a good way) hasn't read Roxanne's post. Wow.

Ezra - It's a minor miracle. I think you actually managed to move the conversation forward a bit. Thanks.

I think that the diary features at dkos (and to a lesser extent myDD) play a large role in the phenomenon you describe.

As a Daily Kos diarist I can write up a decent post and be assured that more people will read it than if I were even a mid-level Dem blogger writing an excellent and heavily linked to post. If I get lucky (I write an exellent diary and am smart enough to post it at the right time) and my diary makes the recommended diaries or gets promoted to the front page (which has happened to me a few times), I am essentially guaranteed that thousands if not tens of thousands of readers will view it. Even important campaign staffers and DC insiders read the recommended diaries quite frequently, thuis increasing opportunities for my writing to have an impact outside the blogosphere. This along with the fact that technically setting up a kos diary is infinitely easier than setting up a nice Typepad blog contributes to the seemingly closed club of lefty bloggers. However, when one considers the widely read diarists, it would seem that the lefty blogs aren't quite so clubby after all.

One last side note: many of the most popular diarists tend to be female and many of these have an intense personal following (ie Maryscott O'Connor and SusanG).

yikes. I'm feeling the pressure to get my distinctly female ass back into the game.

I clicked all around the TTLB ecosystem and went to 10 blogs in a row here, 10 there, at all levels of popularity. The numbers stayed heavily male. So my sense is that despite the scores of excellent female political bloggers, there are more male bloggers

Your logic is fundamentally flawed. You are presuming that TTLB Ecosphere is a fair and representative sampling of the entire blogosphere. Even though as Mithras pointed out, you have to sign up for it yourself. And it is, itself primarily a politics-focused site. More importantly, though (& correct me if I'm wrong)- it ranks by the # of links you receive from other ecosystem members and not by actual traffic. Though there is a ranking by traffic list, the average daily visits of a great percentage of Ecosystem blogs comes up blank so they're not included in that list.

Take for instance Dooce. A hugely popular non-political blog written by a woman that is #82 on the rankings by incoming links - but doesn't appear *at all* on the rankings by traffic list because her daily visit average isn't showing up. Yet a recent NY Times article about her blog said she has a readership of 40,000.

If one were to go to What She Said! and randomly looked up 10 blogs in a row, you could just as easily conclude that the vast majority of the political bloggers are women. The ecosystem is a self-selecting club. Just as What She Said is. Only those bloggers who are interested in joining are going to be ranked. That doesn't mean other bloggers who haven't opted in to the ecosystem don't have a wide readership or a big impact outside of it.

Start looking outside the TTLB member list and you'll start to see a more realistic, representative sampling. Go to the blog of someone whose comment you read that made you think a little, perhaps even mine and start exploring their blogroll. Explore some of the nominees of all the various blog awards.

Thanks, Ezra.

The thing is, you were linked as Pandagon, not as Ezra, and that does make a difference - people aren't always so quick to make that amendment.

(But I'm really just totally pissed off at TAPPED for still having Glenn up there. Once he made that remark about DC not being ready for democracy, I figured he was showing his true colors, and I was right. He falls for every damned racist argument the right-wing puts out lately. Anyway, he's objectively pro-torture.)

I have the opposite problem from yours - I find there are far too many good blogs for me to keep adding them all to my blogroll, so I take my sweet time about it to see if they (a) keep coming to my attention without me making the effort and (b) last. Some new weblogs do have a tendency to start strong and then suddenly come to a halt.

Not that my opinion matters, but I note that Brad Plumer and Justin Logan are two of the cool kids, already hooked into the policy and writing establishment. I'm not sure how they need "promotion".

I actually try to promote blogs by people who aren't really part of that establishment. Right now, I've got something like 50 or 60 blogs on deck, and about the same number already on the blogroll. I have some of the usual suspects, but also some less-trafficked blogs. Of course, my blog doesn't get enough traffic that my promotion really matters, but I'm happy to provide what little impetus I can.

From the outside, it really does look like inside baseball -- the same few early entrants with the same few others they link to, and then everyone else links to them and a few other people. Almost every time a new blog gets linked on one of the big-boys, it's a new entrant that they already know in meatspace. Of course, that might mean that I (and a number of lesser-known blogs) really don't have anything particularly original to add. Then again, I don't see all that original across the top tier either. Sorry, but it really is small variations on the same stuff, especially in the moderate Democrat model.

Last, I think that the blog world ought to be actively used as a farm team for real writing and opinionatry. There are thousands of people writing every damn day, most of them doing it out of passion, in their spare time. Some of them are very very good; they see things that others don't, or at least they say things that others are unwilling to, even if they see them. Imagine if they were allowed to do that kind of work full or even part time. But it's very hard for an amateur to even imagine a path to that kind of work, let alone find it.

Whimper. No. More. Blogs. I can't take it any more. I no longer have time for Fafblog. Some of my blogline links have 200 unread postings. Some of us have a life, you know. Or used to have a life. What's a life?

Sorry. Gotta run. Arabist Network. Then Left2Right. Add Suburban Guerilla. Refresh. 4 new Plumer postings.

I have 13 more posts to read here at Ezra's. Whimper.

Paperwright -- true that Logan and Plumer are writers, but their blogs are barely read. A side effect of their training, however, happens to be that they're excellent authors with lots of knowledge on important subjects. They've certainly got an unfair advantage, but so long as my test is "blogs I think my readers would benefit from", and it is, they top the list.

Blogs, particularly the lefty blogs, are a clubby lot. The top guys (and gals) link to each other, perpetuating higher intragroup hits, but not doing much to help those outside the popular circle. The right is much better at this -- Instapundit exists to drive traffic to young blogs and Hewitt has made it a pet cause. On their side of the aisle, they've created established routes for recognition, not to mention habituated their readers to bookmarking new folks. We've not done that.

You know, one of the very best lefty bloggers at linking to others is...Avedon Carol. I'm frequently in awe of her ability to find the good stuff that's been overlooked elsewhere. Just something to consider.

Rox: That's the nice thing about working with the LA Weekly. Editors who can tell me when my the interjection to my joke rips the whole obsequious/funny factor away and just leaves obsequious. There's a Geoffrey Dyer (who I don't always like, but nevertheless) article where he says:

I went up and did my fake pompous writer thing. They, however, thought I was doing my real pompous writer thing, so it didn't really work.

[T]rue that Logan and Plumer are writers, but their blogs are barely read. A side effect of their training, however, happens to be that they're excellent authors with lots of knowledge on important subjects. They've certainly got an unfair advantage, but so long as my test is "blogs I think my readers would benefit from", and it is, they top the list.

Ezra - the question is, I guess, what the goals are. If my only goal was "blogs my readers would benefit from" regardless of who those bloggers are, my choices for promotion would be different. By contrast, I try to at least choose some (actually quite a few) "people who are under-read, and not a part of the existing media or policy apparatus". See, promotion in my mind is not about the blogs, it's about the people and the points of view they bring. To my mind, then, it's much more valuable to promote Jack*, or John McKay than it is Brad Plumer. Not that Brad is not worthy of promotion, but he's already hooked into the machine. A lot of other people (as far as one can tell) aren't.

BTW, I'm guilty of this as well. Most of my blogroll is people others will have heard of. I keep looking for new stuff, because I think of the high link-density for a few blogs is a bug, not a feature.

I think you need a mixture of both. I'd say, though, that the "machine" does not necessarily mean the blogs. I look at blogging as its own form of media, and just because someone has a hook into another form doesn't disqualify them for promotion in this one. Anyway, blogs have an unlimited amount of space, so it's not an either/or proposition. it just seems to happen that a lot of the new, little-read bloggers who I find to have a lot of talent have entered the ranks of the paid. I guess I see it as a good thing -- it's what I want to do, and I hope my blogging will help get me there and be enriched from my experiences. So i look at it all as pretty synchronistic.

Anyway, blogs have an unlimited amount of space, so it's not an either/or proposition.

I respectfully disagree. Look at McManus's lament up there. There's an infinite amount of space for information, but there's not an infinite amount of space for absorbing it nor are there equally good paths to all of that information. If there were, we wouldn't even be having this conversation.

[I]t just seems to happen that a lot of the new, little-read bloggers who I find to have a lot of talent have entered the ranks of the paid.

This is a real problem generally, one which you may not recognize. There are a lot of people (I would count myself among them) who would like to make a transition away from morally-neutral work to morally-useful work, but the economics are very different at 35 than they are at 22. I note that both Plumer and Logan are young (good for them).

A lot of the people that I would want to promote and would want to see rewarded for their work are not that young, not that able to take those risks. That's part of the reason that I try to promote people who aren't already in the machine, because there may not be any other path to their stories. People who entered the ranks of the paid while they were young and are (regardless of their age) using the blog as another outlet for their work are double dipping in a sense (and good for them), but I am more concerned with the people who aren't already being heard.

I note that Kevin Drum, from what I know, came up this way, (as an early entrant) from amateur to professional. That's part of the reason it's so disappointing that he doesn't seem inclined to extend the ladder to others now.

The DKos thing is worth noting. I write at Bopnews - and I remember someone in /comments/ to a reccomended post linking on of my article and we got a couple thousand hits out of it.

WTF?

It's a real hard row to hoe to move up the blogosphere rankings. Bop's top 100 (barely), but we get 1/100th the hits of the big boys.

There was a very strong first mover effect in the blogosphere - those who got in first and did good work, got in. I've pushed a couple blogs I like, Oldman (who is now a bop author, but I pushed him for months before he was invited) and Pogge. But if you want to promote someone you have to keep linking to them regularly and for me that means they have to keep writing stuff not just that I like - but that I want to comment on. There are plenty of good writers whose blogs have stuff I like, I may even think its' amazing. But I look at it and think "I have nothing to add to this" and go my way. Or perhaps I throw them one link - but I don't keep doing it.

Should I do more - yeah. But honestly it'll probably happen when I come across a blog that is not just excellent but into the "must write about this" area. And you can be excellent but be writing about something I simply can't add anything useful to.

One thing I do reccomend is to strongly consider being part of a group blog. It's important to have fresh posts regularly and its' hard to do by yourself if you have anything like a normal life. But with five modestly hardcore bloggers (post every couple days) you can have a few new posts a day - and you can have a variety. There are people who come to BOP for each of the major posters - but they often stay and read the others. Same is true of Pandagon. There's a lot to be said for group blogs. And, in the long run, as the solo bloggers burn out, I think more of the top blogs are going to be group blogs.

Paperwright -- I think that's where you and I respectfully part. I don't really see blogs as an affirmative action thing, a way for non-media voices to get heard. Instead, i see it as more meritocratic, a way, hopefully, for the best voices to get heard. My point with bard and Justin is that they are, indeed, some of the best. So is Digby, so it's not just a professional thing, but I strongly believe that the utility of this medium is in getting the very best writers to use it, to write often, and to provoke thought. In service of that, I look for the writers I think to be the very best, no matter their relation to the media machine. It's not that I prefer to promote one over the other, it's just that the source of their paychecks doesn't, and in my mind, shouldn't, enter into the equation. No matter their age or occupation, I think the best writers should rise, and if we can actually make that happen, we'll be fulfilling the promise of blogs.

"bard", of course, should be "Brad". And the rest of the spelling mistakes should be the words they resemble and the incoherent sentences should be coherent ones. Been a long day.

Ezra, in that case, you will eventually have a blogosphere which looks almost exactly like the current policy and punditry world -- people already in the business picking other people who are already in the business, because they can afford to write for publication full time, and make similar arguments and have the same types of published conversations, because that's the world in which they're trained and that's what the people picking them recognize as quality. I don't think that's the right outcome myself, and it leaves a lot of talent on the table.

And I think you miss my point a bit; it's not like I reward mediocrity. I actually read the people I link to regularly before I link to them, often for weeks or months. That's even more true in the case of the non-professionals, where they might have a great one-off, but nothing else for a while. Maybe you as a [currently inchoate) professional are a better judge of writing than I, but I read a lot of things that get selected by professionals for publication in quite respectable outlets, and a fair bit of that is mediocre, with nothing new at all in the way of perspective or voice. And maybe that's what happens after years of writing the same thing over and over again. After all, there's an parallel group of right-wing people out there on the other political side who write utter bosh, and get paid well for it, so they can afford to churn out a lot of it, which people on this side of the political divide then dissect, in fairly predictable (and occasionally less so) ways.

None of that, BTW, is a quibble with your assessment of Brad and Justin (who are probably reading this, so it feels odd to talk about them in the third person -- hi guys.) I'm sure they're quite good.

Anyway, that's enough for today; it's been a long day for me as well -- up since well before 6, up again tomorrow at 6.

I lied - that's not all.

Contrasting "affirmative action" with "meritocracy" in this context (and many others) is bogus, and assumes that there's some infirmity in the writers I may choose to emphasize compared to the writers you may chose to emphasize.

The great thing about blogs is that good writing can be exposed to a wide audience for the price of a thoughtful blogroll link or conversation-starter by someone who already has an audience (which they may have gotten in any number of ways, including by having a pre-existing audience in "real media" or a personal connection with a pre-existing blogger with an audience).

The bad thing about blogs is that if those blogroll links and conversations in the few large-audience blogs are filled with other large-audience blogs or with people who already have a large audience elsewhere, the notion of a meritocracy fails, because you've created an aristocracy, with all the barriers to entry that entails.

That's why I think that looking for good writing in places where it might otherwise go unnoticed is the responsibility of those who take seriously the possibility of expanding the scope of talent that is recognized and realized. That's the unfulfilled possibility. That, I believe, is part of what being a progressive is about.

OK, now that's really enough. We've probably beaten this thing to death.

But I'm not sure it's bogus. You're asking to give special consideration and precedence to those who haven't aimed themselves at working in politics. Brad's in his very early 20's, I assume Logan is as well. We're not talking about James Fallows here. But that aside -- I think you're missing my point. I don't want to favor anyone, not the connected nor the amateur. I want to promote the voices I judge the most valuable. As I said earlier, Digby isn't from the halls of power. Nor is Julia Saltman -- she's a law student. I don't think Shakespeare's Sister gets paid, nor are the folks at Here's What's Left getting bylines. My point is not that I refuse to go digging for good and under-noticed writers, but that I refuse to ignore those I find simply because they get a paycheck or two. If I had a blogroll full of professionals, I could see your point on this better. But as is, two of the six I'm promoting work in politics, one in media and one at a think-tank.

As for the aristocracy, I agree entirely. That was the point of my post -- we need better promotion mechanisms. Our disagreement is whether young bloggers with political dayjobs should be promoted as well, I think so. One last thing -- you imply that I know these guys. I found Brad's site completely randomly. I did meet him on a recent trip to SF, but that was months and months after I started linking to him. As for Logan, I've never met him and, so far as i know, he;s never even linked to me. He very well may not know I exist. So this isn't clubbiness or personal favorites -- I simply find these guys to be talented and worthy of wider recognition. Just like Julia and Shakespeare's Sister and Michael and Heather and Susan. Just to be clear -- it's not about the job title, it's about the post quality.

And I want to be clear on one other thing -- I don't think only professionals can be good at this. I didn't start out as a professional, nor with the intention of being one. Kevin, Matt, Digby, Kos, Stoller, Billmon, Soto -- all these terrific writers emerged from their own, non-politically based lives to excel at the blogs. Others surely will as well. Indeed, i expect the blogs to become, like they have been for Matt and I, a farm team for professionals. Whether anybody drafts me is still in doubt, but there's no doubt that I never would've entered the game had it not been for the blogs. So I actually envision a different progression than you -- I don't think the blogs are going to be filled by "slumming" pros, I think they're going to find their stars among hungry activists, and those bloggers will fall in love with the craft and try to become professionals. And that'll introduce new and different blood into a DC WAY dominated by Ivy league editors. So i think the blogs will promote and reward different voices, and rather than media forcing conformity on them, I think they're going to imbue media with diversity.

Last thing -- I do understand and respect your viewpoint and nothing I say should be taken as an attack on your or those your promote. I disagree with parts of what you're saying and I'm down to defend my system, but I'm not attempting to land blows or appear contemptuous of yours.

You're asking to give special consideration and precedence to those who haven't aimed themselves at working in politics.

I'm not asking that you do anything. I'm merely stating why I do what I do. And I think that there is a very real problem on the left -- a lot of people who would love to try to work in politics can't because they have responsibilities, no safety net (and unlike the right in many cases, no Scaife sugar daddy). In particular there's a lot of life experience, knowledge, and skills for mid-career people that's wasted because there's no transition path, or even partial transition path. That's only going to get worse as it gets harder to make a living over the next decade or so.

That's a real problem, and the only thing I personally can do right now to try to address it is promote those people. See, not everyone is a hungry activist, or can afford to be one. Not everyone knew what they would really come to care about when they were still young enough to take those kinds of risks.

One last thing -- you imply that I know these guys.

No, I wasn't implying that in this case; I'm sorry it came across that way. I do know that I often see additions to the big-audience blogrolls announced with: And here's this already-connected guy I know who's started blogging.

I'm not trying to knock you for having two pros on the promotional blogroll; they're young guys and they can use the promotion, I'm sure. I understand your viewpoint; I merely have a slightly different set of goals based on the problems I see. I am admittedly also less optimistic about the likely long-term outcome given the nature of professionalization.

Now, Brad is absurdly talented, knowledgeable and fun to read, he's certainly one of the best bloggers around.

Blogs, particularly the lefty blogs, are a clubby lot.

I wonder why the thinkers don't blogroll those on the "other side". Why is that?

In my case, it's because I have no interest in driving traffic to them or increasing their legitimacy by means of link ratings. Of course, I'm a partisan. I have to dispute your assessment, though, as many of the "thinkers" do blogroll Righty blogs, and in particular, they'll blogroll (and link in context) to thinker Righty blogs, e.g., Volokh, Drezner, Hit & Run. Yglesias in particular has a fondness for libertarians.

Not to sound horribly naive, but why is everyone so concerned who is on what blogroll and who links to whom?

I mean, blogging is a hobby, right? It is supposed to be fun, isn't it?

I understand that a blogger checks his or her site count or trackbacks concerning what the feedback is concerning something one wrote (and that can be gratifying), but ultimately aren't you writing as an outlet for yourself?

Now, that said, if you feel that the lefty blogosphere is influential concerning the dissemination of good writing and ideas, the important thing then is that it isn't insular and it isn't a boys club. But the vast majority of blogs aren't created for the purpose of changing the public debate, they are created as a hobby.

I'm sure I'm being naive here...

I'm no official spokesmodel for anyone, but speaking for myself ...

I write for myself and I like the audience I've built up just fine. One nice thing about being "under the wire" is that I don't get nearly as many FReepers and trolls as the bigger sites do. That being said, I get some pleasure out of being noticed and linked by bigger sites that I admire. Underline "that I admire."

What personally bothers me is the "you don't exist" or "you don't have as much impact as I do" or "by virtue of your gender, you aren't as important as I am" meme. And that's what many of the "where are the women bloggers?" posts imply.

Bloggers should feel free to link to whomever they wish. I certainly do.

Roxanne,

I must admit that I only went to your blog -- which is immensely entertaining -- precisely because of the recent exchange of blog posts.

And, honestly, speaking as one reader of blogs, I have to admit that I didn't read many blogs written by women, precisely because of the reasons Ezra stated above (the first liberal bloggers were primarily men, I keep going to those sites out of inertia and there are only so many blogs one can visit in a day, etc...).

So there is an underlying point -- and a positive result -- to this, which isn't necc. gender-specific by itself (how can genuinely talented but more obscure bloggers get recognition). But I think there is a tendency for some bloggers to become overly obsessed with recognition for their writing, rather than focusing on why they actually began blogging (an outlet).

Roxanne, I fear you're being melodramatic- when has someone actually told you that because of your gender you're not as important as they are in the blogosphere? (Personal attacks from the right do not count)

Kate: I fear you are being too literal in your reading. And perhaps, humorless.

See Ezra, now I'm in trouble for not being clear enough.

I'm late to the discussion, but almost a year ago, the "where are the women political bloggers" question came up on Pandagon, and I got irked by Ezra's response (I believe it was the same "why" Drum rolled out about women not liking conflict), and I started my blog and gave Ezra credit for prompting me to do so. And I don't think he's ever gone to read it. Which is fine, I guess - I'm not the greatest writer in the world and I don't always have the time to write as in-depth of a post as I would like to write. Plus, I write about non-political issues just as often as I write about political ones.

But I think it would be great if we had an Instapundit of the Left - someone with a huge readership who would keep an eye out for up and coming lefty bloggers, and promote them by linking to them. I have a feature on my blog where every day I highlight another lefty blog, but my readership of

Kate, I won't speak for Roxanne but my take is - everyone equates the TTLB or Technorati rankings as explicit rankings of "importance". Obviously, the more readers you have, the more exposure your ideas will get (and possibly even by folks in the MSM) and the bigger impact you will have on public opinion. So when somebody says "why aren't there more women in the top TTLB rankings", they are in effect saying "why aren't there any women bloggers worth paying attention to?". Because worth is determined by readership, though for some reason... that's supposed to be determined by incoming links and not traffic. Which is funky.

Anyway, I've been doing a little research and there seems to be a BIG problem with TTLB's rankings by traffic stats. I've been looking up the blogs on my own blogroll and notice that while most do appear on the rankings by incoming links (of other ecosystem members, I believe which is inherently self-fulfilling in & of itself), at least half have blanks in their "Average Daily Visit" stats and do not seem to appear, on the rankings by traffic list as a result (inluding my own, which pathetic as my daily traffic rate is I can understand why I wouldn't make the top 5,000. But my measley stats should still be available).

If the traffic stats aren't accurate, then it's ridiculous to rely on TTLB rankings as any indication of actual popularity. For instance - I know Dooce one of the hugely popular "Mommy Blogs" who gets a hell of a lot of mainstream press, is ranked #82 in the ecosystem based on unique incoming daily links . But she is nowhere to be found on the traffic ranking list - because her average daily visits isn't being reported for some reason.

She was kind enough to reply to an email I sent her yesterday and as it turns out, she gets 52,000 unique visitors a day to her site. Which would put her at #10 on the TLB traffic rankings (right below Wonkette) and well above Yglesias if it were being reported correctly. And she says it's the same deal on technorati. She gets twice the unique daily traffic of other blogs that are consistently ranked higher based on links, instead.

I'd really like to know why those stats are coming up blank. Is it due to differences in the code on each website or what? Do you have to subscribe to premium Sitemeter service or something? The answer could give us a big clue here...

The promotional thing is good. But you don't link to me. I'm crushed. After all I've done for you! Like that time I linked to you - uh - in a post that was about another blog. And also - uh - did I mention that time I linked to you? Yeah, that was great.

So, in conclusion - crushed.

I have to dispute your assessment, though, as many of the "thinkers" do blogroll Righty blogs, and in particular, they'll blogroll (and link in context) to thinker Righty blogs

Perhaps I'm wrong.

Not to sound horribly naive, but why is everyone so concerned who is on what blogroll and who links to whom?

Mustang Sally - The TTLB traffic rankings only count those who have non-password-protected Sitemeter stats. I don't see a Sitemeter icon on Dooce's page, so her traffic is not measured by the TTLB system. It's presumably the same for the others with blank stats.

This is the best conversation I've found about the topic, which is really now two topics. It occured to me a minute ago that there exists a tool that would go some distance in solving the problem of underexposure for readers and for bloggers. Kevin Hayden, of the American Street, put together a massive, fully-linked index of progressive blogs. It's a very easy way to increase your exposure to blogs you've never seen before.

Go here.

Kevin also put together a group blog (American Street) that is gender-balanced. Full disclosure: I write for the Street.

OH MY #*%&$!!! You've got to be freakin' kidding me! Now why, pray tell hasn't anybody chimed in with that little jewel of knowledge previously so maybe we can get off this battle of the sexes merry go round once and for all?

So the question *should* be 1) why don't more female bloggers use Sitemeter; or 2) why do more female bloggers password protect their Sitemeter stats?

Silly me, I thought setting my privacy settings to "High" would keep me from appearing on public lists. Apparently, having it set at "Medium" has the same effect.

Given this information, I'm inclined to answer #2 as "women are generally conditioned by society to protect their privacy." When I set up my sitemeter account I didn't give a second thought to the necessity of keeping some info private. Not the # of hits, really - but the referrals list. It seemed like I was protecting the privacy of my readers that way. You could easily correlate the time a comment is posted to a corresponding referring url, for instance and since a lot of people visit from work websites a troll could conceivably get that commenter in a lot of trouble if they wanted to.

Something to think about.

Sally -- that's only if you go by traffic rankings, not link ecosystems.

I'm jumping into the discussion late (and I haven't been following it at all, so I will await Roxanne's mockery; if I mention that I am right now listening to Neko Case, perhaps I will get a double dose), but the idea that early bloggers were mostly male seems to be an ahistorical reading based on the post-9/11 surge in political blogging. Rebecca Blood is the obvious counterexample, given that she's written an essay on the history of the medium, but I was reading Girlhacker and /usr/bin/girl (and possibly megnut) back in 1999; the reason people like Dooce or, say, Mimi Smartypants don't show up in the ecosystem thing is because they're operating in what is basically an entirely seperate domain of cross-linkers, if not readers. LiveJournal's traffic is huge (and not entirely composed of 16-year-old emo kids, although I don't see why they shouldn't count) and the majority of users are women, but because it operates as a walled city by design, people who are focused on political blogs aren't going to see it.

None of which takes away from the question of why the big name political blogs skew male.

I feel bob mcmanus's pain.

I am locked in a constant struggle to read fewer blogs. I barely have time for the ones I already read, much less more of them. In the last two months, I've cut something like 20 RSS feeds from my Bloglines account. For example, I stopped reading Yglesias because I read TAPPED and because other blogs highlight his best posts. I cut Josh Marshall. I cut Hit and Run. I cut The Hamster. It's been an age since I read Oliver Willis. When you left Pandagon, I deliberated over whether I had the time to read your new blog.

Recently I have found myself wishing that my favorite high-volume bloggers would just post less frequently. They are kind of hogging my bandwidth, and I do think it keeps me from checking out a broader array of blogs. I wish more people would follow the example of lower volume bloggers like Body and Soul, MaxSpeak, Nathan Newman, and Majikthise. I think that, were I ever to find the time to write my own blog, ideally I would not even post every day, but certainly no more than five posts in one day.

I write for myself as well. My blog is rather specialized towards family law, family issues, and outing the backlash fathers' rights movement, so I'm not on a narrow Bush administration path, except when it comes to someone like DHHS's Wade Horn, those dreadful marriage initiatives, and abstinence-only education. When I first started my blog I decided to take the route I did because not enough people are speaking up about how this administration is promoting its own agenda regarding what is a "real" family. It's harmful for everyone, especially the poor. I must be doing something right because I was a Koufax Awards finalist two years in a row.

Ezra -- a slightly belated note to thank you for adding the "Deserves More Attention" blogroll.

I add new bloggers to my own blogroll regularly, and I also remove bloggers if I realize I'm clicking on them more out of habit than out of actual enjoyment of what they're writing. I do try to keep the list to about 30, though. I work 3 days a week and am carrying a full courseload at grad school, so my time is not unlimited.

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