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…but on the web, they just swat at each other

It’s with the success of yesterday’s outing (and many of the rest of the last week, where there were many great women) in mind that I approach this latest girls vs boys piffle. I heard from Niall yesterday about the Technorati/AO 100, the headline for which I had seen go by on SharpReader when Dave posted it on Friday. I didn’t think it a big deal at the time or even truly pay attention when Niall mentioned it, but when I get back I see Susan Mernit’s post. And realize that of course there’s a chick angle.

Some of this stuff is getting a little worn. Yeah, there both are no chick speakers and there are lots of chick speakers. My problem with the speakers of both sexes is that too often those that put themselves forth, especially in the vanguard, like to speak more than they are worth listening too. Hell, isn’t this all less about the “speakers” than the “writers”, or better yet “the participants”?

That’s what I find most fascinating about blogs. Gives voice to those too remote to attend or keynote these rarefied events, too shy to put themselves forward, and giving the mic to everyone concurrently. The trouble with any event where you have a speaker or a list or any anything is that it’s hierarchical and ranked. Despite our best efforts, in real life only one person gets to talk at a time.

Link ranking is interesting up to a point - it helps break through and order the simultaneous cacophony of asynchronous online chatter. And thus for me link ranking it works best at the topic level. But fame doesn’t make me believe someone’s opinion more. It only seems to impact the info they sometimes receive or the depth of their perspective (influenced by whispered offline conversations), both of which I benefit from.

In reading through all this, I am processing in a different direction. I have no reaction to this contest in a feminist context. Always On has a lot of chick activity, and in my view, it’s chick participation on the senior side with a lot of sensible things being said. But does that come into this? Women who contribute there are largely lost to the wider world. And no, I’m not sure what I think about that, which is why I’ve never posted. Captive audience vs. owning my microcontent. You tell me.

But still this controversy rages, as if people forget that lists of any sort remain a self-aggrandizing thing. And why not, it’s freakin’ business. These ain’t just bloggers, these are media guys looking to make a buck.

Tony Perkins — one must never forget — ran hype machine Red Herring even as he wrote a book on its demise, The Internet Bubble: Inside the Overvalued World of High-Tech Stocks . Don’t roll your eyes - that’s what the man did. Maybe I’m just biased because I happened to be receiving Business 2.0 at the same time, when in 1999 B2.0 expanded to bi-monthly based on the volume of advertising and Red Herring was just as bulging. Now, he’s now trying to make the AO Blogozine hunt, among other elements of the AO business. I have the first issue, being an AO member, and the cover says “Happy days are here again!”. That definitely goes in my trophy box, along with my Digiscents schwag.

And Dave, well Dave is the frontman for an enterprise which is still looking for a business model, and thus motivated to do PR things like this. Dave needs the a-listers, pioneers, influencers and up-and-comers more than anyone else - they’re the backbone of Technorati’s model: their very picky and somewhat fickle user community/content library. Unlike Tony, Dave’s “customers” don’t pay for the interaction, but rather view Technorati (ed. note - corrected clumsy wording) as a public utility (even as they monetize the free content given them).

So this makes far more sense to me from Tony’s view than from Dave’s, except to show that all this chick kerfluffle and questioning of linking-as-merit-meter has started to chip away at the certainty that Technorati’s paradigm of ranking by link is the end-all. And it’s not - it’s just a model, just one observation of how people use the web.

This is business, and being a businessman, Dave’s responding to “market need” and playing with moving from the generated Technorati 100 to some new 100 with a cattle-call vote experiment . This is progress folks.

I’m incredibly frustrated and saddened to hear all these “won’t somebody please just think about the children” cries about women’s inclusion at seemingly every occassion. I agree with the Founding Fathers bit here, and yes, Dave changed it quickly, and great - but that’s a lame ass Google-type error that shouldn’t have been made in the first place. So that part rounds out to a solid eye-roll from me. But there the chick debate should end.

Any merit-based ranking now, whether by influence or readership, will include almost all men if it runs from now back. I don’t think that if we look over the start of blogging til now we can credibly expand too far beyond Liz’s chicks. And those are great strong women. But this 100 should be a nice obvious hall of fame, not a political statement. It’s ridiculous to cry that it needs to change to reflect some normative goals and I’m totally opposed to ballot box stuffing by chick swarming to have our voices be heard.

Far more constructive from my view would be a list of up-and-comers, separate from this list which is honoring the past and immortalizing the right-now state. Can you imagine it? This would give world-changers metrics, rather than the shifting results of the Technorati 100. Data one could measure with to gauge progress.

So far, I found Shelly Power/Burningbird’s post most in synch with my thinking (when we jive we jive). And she wrote all that before this mess started. It’s an interesting sidenote that, contrary to what she says, I find myself moving toward creating a blogroll that is more dynamic and linked with what I’m reading (as yet unimplemented). I am finally becoming fascinated by blogs as a tool for knitting together networks, not just as a personal mouthpiece.

But so my take is that the fight for any top 100 spots is about personal aggrandizement, but it’s also supposed to be about truth. I take Dooce’s scat-blog a smidgen more seriously when I’m told it’s consistently in the top 10, but that’s goes in the same category as other things that are inexplicably popular. As a marketer, I’d certainly value the data, and I suppose it’s only human to jockey for position since there is renumeration tied to this. And that’s what this is about - but there shouldn’t be crying about it: “there’s no crying in baseball.” People at the top make money. They deserve that money not because they deserve it as humans, but as compensation for entertaining, appeasing, and appealing to a wide audience moneyholders want to reach. You don’t get the money until you do that.