In the strum and drang over the blog post What if the Feminist Blogosphere is a Form of Digital Colonialism, which resulted in the post’s authors, Brittany Shoot and Mandy Van Deven issuing this apology today, nobody seems to have taken a close l…

And there appears to be plenty of feminist content. What am I missing?

1. Sarcasm can be amusing, but it doesn’t do much to advance a sincere, good faith effort toward greater knowledge and understanding. It apparently allows you to feel that you need not contest the actual substance of my point: whether linkfluence, a metric of feminist influence, should be policing who is allowed to call herself a feminist. At this point I honestly can’t tell if you think it’s your job or linkfluence’s job to decide which blogs meet the criteria for being deemed feminist, or if people — including Christina Hoff Sommers or Hugo Schwyzer — are free to call themselves feminists even if you or I don’t believe they are.

2. It’s not quibbling. If someone goes to community.livejournal.com, she won’t find a single thing about feminism — it’s a technical information site explaining how to start a livejournal diary. Putting that URL on the list is a failure in delivering information. In contrast, if someone goes to amptoons or Schwyzer’s blog, she might find a brand of self-declared feminism that she personally finds distasteful, but feminism will be under discussion.

Ah, now I get it. It’s all about link-love. Although, I’m curious to know which sites were included in the initial study, and what the parameters were.

Gayle, click on the “list of top 30 sites” in the post. That takes you to a page with links you can follow to explore the map, learn about the methodology, etc.

Ah, now I get it. It’s all about link-love. Although, I’m curious to know which sites were included in the initial study, and what the parameters were.

Regardless, Thanks, PG!

I don’t think linkfluence considers it part of their job to police who can and can’t call him/herself a feminist. I might be skeptical of whether a self-proclaimed “conservative” or “equity” feminist like Christina Hoff Sommers, who has made her career on attacking contemporary feminism, is *really* a feminist. But if she calls herself one, and I’m trying to measure the influence of various feminists based on how much they’re cited, it’s inserting my own biases to declare that no matter how many citations she gets, she doesn’t go on my list.

Indeed, the influence (as measured by links) of Alas A Blog and Hugo Schwyzer on several of the other sites, which you don’t complain aren’t *really* feminist, would indicate that they are popularly accepted as being part of the feminist blogosphere, even if some people don’t consider them feminists. (For an analogy, think of most people’s generally referring to Obama as the “first black president,” even though some other people protest, “no, he’s biracial,” or even “no, he can’t be black because he’s not descended from slaves/ he is descended from Muslims.”)

If I were going to complain about an obvious screwup on this list, it would be http://community.livejournal.com/. That’s not a blog; it’s the base URL for a bunch of sites like /feminist_sex, /feminist_rage, /radfemvoice, /feminist, etc. Linkfluence seems to have had this list made by a bot.

I would say some of those sites have absolutely no place on the list, and I’m not just talking about Amptoons and Hugo.

Other sites, like Riverdaughter, Peacocks and Lilies and Women’s Space should be on the list. I’m sure there are others, I’m just going off the top of my head.

Of course they did get a few right: Violet, Ann, Twisty, Echidne, Shakes– all great picks in my humble opinion!