Yesterday John Hawkins posted the second part of his Blogging While Female piece. I have had a pretty good experience in the blogosphere so I tend to think the talk about women bloggers having a tougher time than their male counterparts is somewhat overblown, but there are definite differences. Some of them are good and some are bad. Women definitely get nastier email and comments, but in many ways being a woman is an advantage. I know that some readers say they like reading a woman’s perspective on certain issues, for example. There are so many successful female bloggers that it is hard to argue that gender puts a blogger at a disadvantage, but Ann Althouse does make a good case that some try to bully female bloggers, and sometimes even succeed in shutting them down. John Hawkins has been writing on this subject for quite a while (I referenced one of his pieces several years ago when I wrote about women in the blogosphere) and does a good job getting some interesting information from some of my favorite bloggers. For this piece he interviewed Althouse, Kathy Shaidle, Emily Zanotti, La Shawn Barber and Mary Katharine Ham. (Thanks to MKH for saying some nice things about me in the interview, even though they were cut out in the editing process. Thanks John.)
