I want to listen and absorb so I will gather thoughts later (or link to good writeups)… but here are some early BlogHer impressions:
A presenter said, with no trace of irony, that the attendees were primarily women, about 20% men, and that journalists were also in attendance.
Fun to be in a room that’s 80% female… almost like a library conference.
One panelist to another, and everyone immediately got it: “Would you mind Tina Turnering the mike a little bit?”
Much concern and discussion about the “A List.” Here are several characteristics of the top Technorati blogs are:
1. Heavily political in nature
2. Consortium blogs, such as Daily Kos
3. Run by men
Should you blog for eyeballs? Disagreement here. Some say yes–if you become popular, you will be influential, get attention, get invited to conferences, etc. Some say no: write for your communities, write your interests.
I am inclined to believe in the power of the Long Tail. Free Range Librarian may not be Jeff Jarvis’s first read of the day, but to the extent I have reading communities, and I continue to write things you want to read, I will have eyeballs.
A woman just tackled the “women need to network” truism by stating that there were plenty of people she didn’t want to network with. Point taken.
Mena Trott (pictured above) turned out to be sitting right behind me and made wonderful impassioned statements about how many women work for MT. She said all tech support at MT are female and the LiveJournal sysadmin is female, too, and she summed up essentially that women too often just don’t get no respect, but were still doing great things. I hope the audioblogging is chunked enough so you can hone in on what she said.
Posted on this day, other years:
- OCLC's Crisis Moment - 2010
- The travel marathon is over - 2009
- Hello, I Must be Linking - 2008
- Harry Potter and the Frog Strangler - 2007
- A Voice Crying in the Wilderness - 2004
I keep thinking I should write-up my analysis of A-listery (though almost nobody would read it). Regarding:
“I am inclined to believe in the power of the Long Tail. Free Range Librarian may not be Jeff Jarvis’s first read of the day, but to the extent I have reading communities, and I continue to write things you want to read, I will have eyeballs.”
I think there’s a bit of a global/local problem there. That is, it’s one thing to say “Very few people can be worldwide A-listers, but there’s value in being a local A-lister in one’s profession”. It’s quite another thing to say “Very few people can be worldwide A-listers, so be happy even if you have one reader in the universe” (both of these concepts tend to be called “Long Tail”)
It’s all part of dealing with the reality that there IS a reward per unit effort curve. And with many more people down at the bottom than on the top (even a *local* top).