Well here I am at Wolfstar again, and today’s been very interesting so far!
After reading BBC News article “The power of female blogging”, I feel a little uneasy about just why more women are choosing to blog. I personally decided to start up my own blog to help get my name out there and improve my PR portfolio.
Blogging is a way of expressing your thoughts and opinions on any subject you want; it gives people the ability to read these views at the click of a button, but according to BBC News this is no longer the only incentive to start a blog.
Blogher.com, an online community for women who blog, encourages it’s users to accept the request to display adverts on their pages. But just how ethical is this, and since when did blogging become the latest 
opportunity to get quick and easy cash?
People love blogging because it gives them the opportunity to shout to the world about anything that takes their fancy, with little or no censoring. But if advertising on blogs became the norm, just think what the result could be. What’s to say that the blogger wouldn’t accept a little more money to write whatever the advertiser wants them to? Products could be plugged and companies promoted, all under the veil of the bloggers views. The reader, none the wiser, could believe the subtle advertisements within the blog are genuine opinions and buy the product based on recommendation. Great news for the advertiser, awful news for genuine bloggers.
So just what are these women writing about that sparks the advertiser’s interest in the first place? Well, after checking out Blogher.com, I’ve got to say I’m not overly impressed. Most of the featured blogs are about fashion, TV or household chores (I kid you not, there’s a post about how to clean grout), surely female bloggers could be portrayed in a better way!
It’s about time female bloggers put their name on the map for the right reasons; scrap the ads and let’s have some straight talking, honest blogging!
The relative lack of female bloggers is even more surprising when compared with other forms of social networking: Facebook seems an overwhelmingly female environment (though my ‘friends’ are drawn from the predominantly female world of PR so I may have a distorted view of this).
Here’s my attempt to answer the riddle:
Facebook (and other social networks) are cooperative environments. Blogging can be, but can also be competitive (‘he who shouts loudest…’).
Social networks are private, or semi-private whereas blogging takes place in public.
It just seems to me that men prefer shouting and showing off more than women…
Well, I guess it’s a natural process – we will have people whom you call ‘genuine’ bloggers – people blogging for passion, with great social media skills and some of them using blogging as a part of their portfolio (which is great, and I support it strongly) and we will have bloggers who do it just to have their voice on-line about their every-day life and use blog as a tool to gain quick cash – I think both is acceptable and everyone will be able to judge what’s good for them. At the end of the day web was, is and always will be the most democratic place;)
Interesting, I will post about it too, I think…