August 07, 2005

Tools vs. Tendencies

Go read Shelley.

If women are not as visible in weblogging (or technology or politics and so on) because of some escoteric to do with technology, then our problems could be easily solved. I would personally devote my life to finding the Woman Algorithm — the algorithm to give equality to women. But, as we’ve seen with the recent linking to BlogHer reports, the issue isn’t that simple. Even considering the fact that BlogHer was about women in weblogging, the single most linked individual post on the conference, was Jay Rosen’s–one of the few men to attend the conference.

Why was Jay’s the most linked? Well, some of it was because he provided a viewpoint that led to debate. He used a ‘confrotational’ term that was guaranteed to trigger furious dicussion. I linked to him for that specific reason, as did other people. However, Halley Suitt also wrote a post that generated much debate, and though it was also well linked, not as much as Jay’s. Does this, then, mean that Jay’s was a better post? No, not necessarily.


Very significant post on weighing and ranking and linking and algorithms -- and HUMANs.