Writer Way

Veteran blogger Jim Benson posted a comment here teasing me about going public with Writer Way because he knows I’ve been blogging for more than three years elsewhere using a pseudonym. My defense: The whole blogging thing was in its pre-teen years, and an avatar seemed like a good idea at the time.

Once, when I published a post questioning the business practices of a local social networking startup, the startup’s founder shot me a vituperative email that began “Listen, dude, if you worked in tech, and lived in Seattle…”

Being, of course, female, working for Apple at the time, and living less than a mile from his North Seattle office, I enjoyed that email for days. Now I’ll miss the anonymity that prevented people from stereotyping me based on my name or my gender. It resulted in such amusing correspondence! But, yes, Jim, blogging has come of age and I want to play with all the other grownups.

This, verbatim, from Craig’s List today:

Reply to: gigs-220999939@craigslist.org
Date: 2006-10-15, 1:14PM PDT

At last weekend’s Politics & The Media with Janeane Garofalo, it came up how few women bloggers there are in Seattle.

Anyway, I’d be willing to donate use of my TypePad Pro account to help a group of women set up their own group blog. (I’m male). You’d own the blog together.

I was thinking that something multi-generational (one woman from 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s) would be cool – but I’m open to whatever the most talented folks propose.

This guy must be kidding about the lack of women bloggers. (Since Janeane Garafolo doesn’t live in Seattle, I’ll let her off the hook.)

Has he ever attended a session of the Seattle Weblogger Meetup (founded and run by blogger Anita Rowland)? Checked out the community reader blogs at the Seattle P-I (most of them written by women)?

As for a man “donating” his TypePad account to “help” women blog, how incredibly patronizing. Blogger accounts are free and my cat could set one up.

Now my disconnect here may be because what this anonymous fellow is terming a lack of women bloggers in Seattle is instead a lack of women blogging about media and politics. Or perhaps just a lack of women blogging about media and politics in blogs devoted exclusively to those topics.

Consider this: The best-known Seattle blog about media and politics (HorsesAss.org), while well reported and well written, is characterized by reader comments at the level of “f*** you, s***head.” I don’t know many women who would consider this a particularly edifying or productive type of discussion.

I suspect that Seattle women bloggers are coming in under the (narrowly directed) radar because they write about media and politics in the context of real life instead of in a compartmentalized “media and politics” blog.

Let me illustrate with this opening from a lengthy analysis of Al Gore’s recent movie by a female Seattle blogger (her site is Nerd’s Eye View):

There’s an episode of The Simpsons in which Martin, one of the nerdy kids, spends his last ten bucks on a talking Al Gore doll. “You are hearing me talk,” says the doll. It cracks me up every time. Plus, it’s a fairly accurate assessment of the production version of Al Gore. Stiff, not that interesting, but honest, very very honest.

Last night I attended a screening of Al Gore’s new movie, An Inconvenient Truth. It’s a film version of Al Gore’s slide show on global warming. His science is undeniably thorough and accurate. His passion about the issue is palpable, even on screen. This man has done his homework, exhaustively, and when the movie is over you have no doubt that his case is clear and that action is essential.

But I fell asleep in the middle anyway.

Oh, yes, what a pity we timid li’l Seattle gals don’t have a thing to say about the media and politics!