Reading Response 1: It's a long one. Get some popcorn.

Because I can't come up with a better title than that...

Reading "Blog This! An Introduction to Blogs, Blogging, and the Feminist Blogosphere" "Women in the Blogosphere" and "Blogging Busts Out" was interesting because I often only read a few lines before some random thought or response was evoked.

I'll be honest about how difficult it is for me to organize my thoughts and responses especially to "Women in the Blogosphere". It's hard for me to read the article while also thinking in terms of history. The article was written around April of 2005, almost four years ago. In web terms that's a millennium! Those four years were enough time for the Republicans to peak in power and then begin to crumble like a biscochito. Myspace followed suit and has given way to Facebook which has in turn begun fighting it out with Twitter all of this overshadowed by the rise of Campaign 2.0 and now White House/Government 2.0.

The world changed so much and I believe the blogosphere has changed in many ways as well. I understand that the majority of the top blogs aren't run or written mainly by women but every blog in the Top 5 of Technorati's Top 100 Blogs list has at least one regular contributor who is a woman. Even this is ignoring the number one spot: The Huffington Post.

I suppose my biggest argument that women have the ability to weild just as much power -if not more- than men in the blogosphere is simply Arianna Huffington. Arianna is a blogging Goddess in so many ways the first of which being that she founded The Huffington Post which may not seem like much until you look closer.

Not only is The Huffington Post a blog for Arianna, it also hosts blogs for hundreds of other people including big names like Senator Bernie Sanders, Rep. Barney Frank, and (before she moved to MSNBC) Rachel Maddow. During the campaign season The Huffington Post became a huge go-to resource for political news and information as it had real time front page updates the instant something new happened. Even after the election The Huffington Post has remained a big name in news, big enough that Sam Stein of The Huffington Post was called on to ask a question at President Obama's first press conference.


Another personal blogger-of-note is Ana Marie Cox, founding editor of Wonkette. When most people think of snark and satire they think of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert but in the blogosphere political snark and satire are very much the territory of Ana Marie Cox. During her time as Editor, Wonkette was THE blog for DC news and gossip. When Cox left many people continued to follow her and still follow her after she has moved from Wonkette to Swampland to Radar and is currently at Air America.

My point about Arianna and HuffPost as it's informally known is that a blog founded by a woman is one of the most powerful blogs in the world. If there is ever doubt cast on Arianna or her abilities it is almost always based on political ideology rather than any sort of chops. Similarly, Wonkette's having been headed up by a woman had little effect on its credibility.

It's not just the prominent figures either. Having worked behind the scenes on the computer end of the Obama campaign I can vouch that many of the "new media" people I encountered were women.

So much has changed about the internet and the blogosphere since 2005 that it's kind of hard to compare the web as it exists now to the web as it existed before. In 2005 cyber-activism was in its infancy. In 2008 cyber-activism helped win the presidency. Now it's 2009 and we have proven that effective organizing and support systems can be created over the web. My biggest question is what will we do with them?

Fun Fact: The person who broke the "bittergate" story was a citizen blogger (someone who is not a memeber of the traditional press corps) and woman named Mayhill Fowler. She was blogging on HuffPost and her story rocked the traditional media elite to the core, not because of what it said about Obama but because it was broken by a woman in the crowd with a tape recorder, not a press badge.