It’s no longer a man’s, man’s, man’s world

Men continue to dominate the blogosphere’s most prominent real estate, but women soon may overthrow them in an under-the-radar revolution.

At first and even second blush, the blogworld’s boys-club status appears to be unchallenged:

• Two in three readers of blogs on the Top 10 U.S. newspaper Web sites are men, according to a new Nielsen/NetRatings report. And newspaper blogs tend to be written by other guys. (Men pen 75 percent of the ongoing, single-author Spokesman-Review blogs, for instance.)

• The latest Forbes Web Celeb 25 list includes 15 people known primarily as bloggers, but only two are women. One, Xeni Jardin, created Boing Boing with two men. Critics say the other, Amanda Congdon, rode her sex appeal from the Rocketboom tech video blog to ABC News.

• Search engine Technorati’s list of the 100 most linked-to blogs yields relatively few influential women. In addition to Jardin, they include political opposites Arianna Huffington and Michelle Malkin; the sisters in snark at Gawker and Go Fug Yourself; alterna-mom Heather Armstrong of Dooce; Meg Frost of Cute Overload; Wendy Cheng of Xiaxue; and Kathy Sierra of Creating Passionate Users.

• Meanwhile, Malkin and Jardin rank as about the only female “higher beings” in the Truth Laid Bear’s link-based Blogosphere Ecosystem.

These days, even Wonkette is a man.

But BlogHer network co-founder Lisa Stone refutes assertions that women still ride in the back of the blogging bus. And the numbers appear to be on her side.

Popularity lists by Forbes and other male-dominated outlets reflect gender bias, the journalist said via phone last week from California. (She also informed me we went to high school together, which I hadn’t realized.)

What about Technorati’s practice of ranking blogs by their number of inbound links? “It’s great if you’re one of the white male engineers who launched the Internet,” Stone said. “But it doesn’t measure what women are interested in achieving or finding on blogs.”

She cited statistics indicating women now outnumber men online, and noted they’re just as likely to create and read blogs. With women controlling 83 percent of household spending, she added, marketers are rushing to find blogs they frequent – and paying top dollar to advertise on them.

She should know. BlogHer celebrated its first anniversary last week with 8,000 members writing nearly 7,200 blogs. BlogHer.org generates 250,000-500,000 page views a month even though it’s “essentially a phone book” driving traffic to women bloggers, Stone said.

The BlogHer ad network now commands rates of $10-$20 per thousand impressions on the 165 blogs it serves – 105 of which are parenting sites. The network delivers 15 million ad impressions and 5 million page views a month.

One reason for this success: The user- generated content boom plays to women’s strengths. “Men are transacting for information; they hunt it down and they kill it,” Stone said. “Women don’t stop with the transaction; they then communicate it. They e-mail it to their friends and family, they post it on message boards, they publish it on their blogs. Women are the power users of Web 2.0.”

Or, as Janet Eden-Harris, CEO of blog market-research firm Umbria told Denver Westword recently, “Men use the blogosphere as a podium: ‘This is what I think.’ Women use it as a dialogue. The number of words that women use on a blog far exceeds that of men.”

Both Stone and Eden-Harris admitted those are generalizations. Combined with user stats, however, their statements suggest women bloggers are more than holding their own.

But if men and women create and consume online content so differently, could we be headed toward a partitioned blogosphere?

“I don’t anticipate a Balkanization of the Web,” said Stone, noting that men comprise 20 percent of BlogHer’s membership.

I hope she’s right. Without continued cross-pollination, men might be the ones who end up on the blogworld’s margins.