Women Blogging through Ronni’s eyes

The perennial question, Why Aren’t There More A-List Women Bloggers, came up again at Time Goes By – What it’s really like to get older. Ronni, who is known as the premier elderblogger in the country in spite of her lack of interest in being on the A-List, has some very interesting comments about how blogs get ranked, particularly by Technorati.

I hold out hope for microformats as a way to address the problem of identifying women bloggers, or elder bloggers, or whatever type of relationship you want to identify. I’m talking about something like XFN, a microformat that lets you identify a link as belonging to a friend and even getting into details about whether the friend is personal, professional or whatever. Learn more about microformats at microformats.org.

4 thoughts on “Women Blogging through Ronni’s eyes”

  1. I would rather be recognized as a good edublogger on the merits of my content and not about my gender. I’m glad someone is looking for women edubloggers and noticing and perhaps there are a disproportionate amount of men blogging in a field that is predominantly female.

    I like your blog.

  2. Thanks for your comment. I enjoy your Cool Cat Teacher blog.

    I agree that the content of a blog is more important than gender of the blogger. But from another point of view, the blogosphere is one of the few areas in American life where women have a 50% representation according to the industry statistics in The Media Report to Women. In other media such as newspapers, television, and magazines women’s voices are a marked minority.

    Women represent 50% of internet users and content creators. This is not true in our legislatures, our courts, on corporate governing boards, boards of education, or in other places of power and influence. I’d like to see women take advantage of this blogospheric level playing field opportunity to increase their influence over the American conversation. One way to make that easier is to find a way to identify women in some standard manner when it is appropriate.

  3. just as i am “other” according to Blogger, i’m the same in relation to this conversation. thanks to ronni bennett at TGB for the link. she herself was enormously helpful to me when i began as an Elderblogger in march.

    using that noun as my identity has been very important: it gets attention from those interested in what us older women are doing and moves us a step away from negative ideas about blogs. and there are many! even though i was recently described as “techno-savy” by a very savy herself retired professional woman here in new york city, i still need the services of a tech to negotiate the blog world.

  4. Thanks for the comment, Naomi.

    When I started this blog back in 2001, I was mainly concerned with the practice of teaching HTML and CSS, and the books that were available for that purpose. My focus remains educational implementations and available texts of HTML and CSS, which are age and gender neutral topics in many ways. But over the years more personal issues have crept in and I find myself pointing out gender inequities often. I do try to maintain a professional tone, and save my more fanciful ideas for other blogs.

    Elder voices talking about peace are so important now, so if I can give you any tech help in your endeavors, just ask!

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