Shelley Powers at Burningbird has been discussing gender and racial inequalities in linking in the blogosphere and has often been met with defensiveness and rudeness for doing so. What strikes me about the discussion is how it mirrors the discussion of Affirmative Action in the US. Shelley isn’t calling for quotas, but a lot of bloggers she discusses with take it that way. And they don’t like it one bit. I think much of the defensiveness is just people natural dislike of even the whiff of criticism. But some of it reflects the reality that if the observation is true, then for many people the solution follows naturally from the problem – a requirement to link to more women, to in fact achieve link parity. The ironic thing is, most of this discussion is taking place amongst good liberals and progessives, and the other ironic thing is that who you link to matters far less to a blog’s quality (the effect is pretty much zero) than who a business hires matters to the fortunes of the firm. But I’m struck by how much the discussion follows the lines of discussion over AA.
But that’s not the full scope of Shelley’s dissatisfaction – her observations on gender extends to far more than just link patters in the blogosphere, and her observations on linking are far more than just gender/race equality. I’m not always in agreement with her, but she certainly sets a thoughtful and civil tone in her discussions and her points are always worth consideration.
Full disclosure – Funmurphys links to more women than men, more whites than minorities — at least in the case where I know the gender and race. This is not policy, this just is. When it was just an ordinary website called the Murphy Nexus, which focused much more on just family stuff, my links to and from were in fact mostly to women because they ran similar sites. Should I make more of an effort to link to more women and minorities, or should I try to make more of an effort to link to better bloggers, or should I give up the blogroll altogether? Well, I wish I had more time to do more blog exploring, and the blogroll is really there for me – I use it in my blog readings. So it’s not going away, and if you think there is a blog out there I should be reading, please let me know.
