“Physical appeal won’t get you everything, but it can get you noticed.”

Right on the money. This is, after all, the hardest part for every blogger. Robert Scoble works his ass off to be one of the leading bloggers on the planet. Does the fact that he’s not winning any awards for his manly physique hold him back one bit? I can’t imagine that even a “beautiful” male blogger would attract more readers if he was shirtless on the front page of his blog — in fact it would most likely have the opposite effect. For us, attractiveness is completely irrelevant to the content we produce.

Ann Handley was recently named the most powerful woman in social media. Fantastic for Ann, and duly warranted, but she doesn’t even appear on a recent list of the Top 25 marketing and social media blogs. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.

Just between you, me, and 1.2 billion of our closest friends on the internet, yours is one blog I will never subscribe to via RSS. I skim over posts from almost 100 blogs a day (a lot fewer than some people), but yours is one I actually sit down and take the time to read. Too much of what many of us consume online is the digital publishing equivalent of the sound bite — useful for keeping up on industry news but utterly lacking in thoughtful analysis. It’s paradoxically refreshing to sit down to a post that requires a little bit of work, maybe even a modicum of commitment — more than a paragraph long and not written at a 4th grade reading level. Keep it up.

It’s not just that “the anonymous nature of blog comments allows teenage boys (and way too many adult men) to abuse women online,” as Duff suggests: name-calling is an equal-opportunity blood sport. Women abuse women as much, if not more, as men do. And we abuse men, too.

I have a major problem with that kind of sentiment. It is not the same thing at all, and it serves to minimize the discrimination and persecution women currently deal with online. You’ve written about this yourself.