I’ve been trying to figure out this trend of blogger girls and what it takes to break into their circles to get remote friends via readership. It doesn’t seem worth it.
I’ve been hanging out at Emily’s site, reading here and there, writing about little things. She was gracious enough even to send me a book thong built to order. So I feel bad in thinking any of this, much more so in writing it down.
I’ve noticed a phenomenon of female bloggers on the internet. They are distinctly different from the male bloggers online. (Assume we’ve thrown away all of the “I broke a nail today” blogs and are just looking at the interesting blogs here.) I notice this in that male bloggers are usually talking about typically male things, such as computers or video games. You don’t see a lot of guys talking about sports, perhaps because there isn’t a lot of crossover, but they are out there.
Female blogs tend to be more about community, or at least, forstering a community of worshippers around themselves. Sure there are a lot of “What I did today” and “What I ate today” and “I hate -boyX- today” type of blogs, but they suck, generally. What’s left, with little exception, are interesting reads of personal experience that are tuned to gather audiences. Rather than put text out there for the purpose of making it available, the point seems to be to put the text out to attract more readers to subsequent text.
There is an additional aspect, though, that I’m picking up. It seems that all successful girl bloggers belong to some kind of clique. Look over toward BlogMoxie, for instance. It’s a group of folks who paid some (admittedly talented) chicks a lot of money (on the order of $100 per skin developed) to design their web site and buy admittance to this unspoken “club”. It’s like when all of the cool kids were wearing Swatches in school.
I admit that the idea of joining such an elitist group for this comparative pittance is alluring. Especially if I can get readers in who will spawn dialog. It’s possible even to buy “advertising” space on one of the cliqued-in websites by buying gifts from an Amazon wishlist, which might gather some readership. But I guess that’s the difference in what I’m looking for here and what buying membership in one of these cliques gets.
My bottom line is that my content is just not what people want to read. Really, I don’t care too much about that. I didn’t start this blog to entertain, if you remember. But occasionally, I would like there to be dialogue about things I have to say. And it would be nice if not everyone agreed with what I have to say all of the time. It might be nice to get a thoughtful word now and then.
So will someone please tell me what I have to do? How many LiveJournals must I comment on? What functions do I need to attend? Exactly how many hours do I need to devote to this before I make par against one of these blog divas? Yeah - never gonna happen.
