still from a promo short for 1928, used with permission.

The web is a wonderful tool and I’m always on the look-out for how people and companies are using it to achieve their goals, whether these are to meet new people or build brand loyalty.

After watching 1928 Jewelry Company’s surreal promo shorts on YouTube, I shot a direct message to Macala Wright, their director of marketing and public relations, and demanded that she fill me in on the jewelry company’s vision for integrating new media in their marketing efforts.

What’s 1928 Jewelry and where did the concept come from?

1928 Jewelry was founded in 1968 by Mel Bernie. Mel loved high-end, expensive costume and couture jewelry, made from solid gold and sterling silver, using semi-precious and precious gemstones, which made the pieces extremely expensive.

One day, Mel was in downtown L.A. and found a place that did gold plating and created faux pieces. He wondered if there would be any interest the the jewelry from department stores, so set up few appointments to showcase the pieces he had selected, all vintage and art deco style jewelry, recreated to match the couture pieces in everything but the price. In one week, he’d sold $30,000 worth. 1928 was born.

How is 1928 using the internet to drive and promote their brand?

The internet is largely new territory for us. We’ve spent the last three months developing a holistic approach to online marketing that incorporates social media marketing, PPC and search engine optimization. We’ve approached it very strategically and gone slowly because we don’t want to do what a lot of brands out there do right now, which is just create noise.

We embrace the idea of engaging our customer, but we also want to take it a step further, we want to engage them, to show them why we should have the privilege to be a part of their lives. We take that privilege seriously so anything we do has to be relevant to that goal. Every woman has a story to tell, and we want to help her tell it.

Do you have a clear-cut plan for harnessing the power of web 2.0 in selling your brand?

Web 2.0 tools are the primary focus we are using for building brand awareness. Most women over the age of 30 have heard of 1928 Jewelry. Now we’re targeting a younger market and showing a woman under 30 that we are for her too. We are where she lives–the videos and photo shoot reflect that. Modern and urban, while being timeless and beautiful. We have an online series planned for 2009 that will really help us drive this home.

So the plan is ever evolving. We have a framework for what we want to accomplish with web 2.0 marketing tools, but we’ve left a lot of fluidity and flexibility in that plan when it comes to social media, video and online promotions. If something screams, “You have to do this! And do it now!” because it’s leading to positive results, then we are able to adapt the strategy quickly.

You never know who you’re gonna meet on the web. Twitter has been a driving factor in connecting with stylists that landed us several opportunities to have a large number of pieces in independent and mainstream film. We designed Hermione’s earrings in Harry Potter. The videos have given 1928 online credibility and have started giving us an easier lead in to great partnerships for 2009 and 2010.

Do you think Twitter is the right place for brands?

Absolutely. Brands with something meaningful to say and offer belong on Twitter. I tweet as @Macala and Jen Bernstein is @1928jewelry on Twitter, but the account has her information and she writes it from her perspective. We represent ourselves, not just the company as a blind name. We interact as ourselves, and I think that’s key. Just like Tony Hsieh (@Zappos) does. It’s him, not just a blind thing.

Do you see a revival in women’s fashion toward the more iconic classic look?

Vintage is quite an interesting term, because it means something different to each person. Vintage could be straight Hollywood glamour–sleek glass accents, black, white, silver–highly refined and glamorous, or it can be Breakfast at Tiffany’s, glamorous but more soft and approachable, casual. It can even be the conservative, yet sexy and provocative style of the 1960s that provided simple, everyday elegance. Vintage is on a huge upswing right now because of the economy. Every magazine talks about thrifty finds, dressing on a budget and creating a multi-purpose wardrobes. Women–including your most favorite celebs–are starting to brag about the bargain bin finds at Marshall’s, shopping in consignment stores and antique flea market finds. It’s hip to frugal now, we even have terms for it: Bargainista and Frugalista.

But I don’t think that vintage inspiration has ever left fashion–if you look through five years of Vanity Fair or Vogue, you find vintage-inspired styles on every page. Necklaces, colors, dress cuts, the lines of skirts, they all pay homage to something that was a trend in the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50, 60s. It’s beautiful. Strong vintage inspiration is what distinguishes a classic woman from a trendy girl.

Where is the jewelry made? If outsourced, do you have control over your chain to ensure it’s all fair labor?

1928 is made in the US, our main facility is in Burbank, California. We have strict policies on the chain to ensure ethical and fair treatment of our labors.

Where can we get it?

All 1928 Jewelry collections, including Vintage Bridal, can be bought online at 1928.com. The more modern line of 2028 is available at Macy’s or online.

I’m donating my proceeds to a home for abandoned children living with HIV or orphaned by HIV/AIDS in Lima, Peru, called La Posadita del Buen Pastor.

The shelter opened its doors in December of 1996 to bring treatment and help to low income women carrying HIV/AIDS. Over the years, it began to take in the children orphaned by the virus, many of whom were infected as well.

At present, La Posadita cares for 40 children, 36 of which have been diagnosed with HIV. It provides a nurturing, stigma-free environment where children can continue to develop their skills while receiving medical treatment. It runs a school from kindergarten to junior high, each grade with its own teacher and teacher aids and offers many extra-curriculars from crafts to dance (watch a slideshow on YouTube of activities).

“They drive my life,” Celina Jugo, the director of the shelter tells Correo Peru, a Peruvian daily, about the children at La Posadita. “We work to give them the best and above all so they feel affection and shelter that very often society refuses them. I feel an enormous happiness being in charge of them. The service brought to them is integral, from nutrition, education and medical care. We show them they’re worth as much as every other child.”

In a piece on another daily, El Comercio, Marlon Ruiz, the volunteer coordinator, estimates that caring for each child costs around 1,200 Peruvian nuevos soles, which is around US $386.29.

The calendars cost $12.00, $4.00 of which go to La Posadita. We can make a difference in the lives of these children. Let’s do it. Click here to be directed to the store at E-Junkie.

In the interest of transparency, I will be putting frequent updates on this blog post with the total amount we’re raised so far. As of December 22, 2:40AM HST, we’ve raised: $16.

Can’t afford the calendar but still wanna make a difference? Blog it, tweet it or e-mail it to your friends. Whatever you choose to do, it means a lot.

The comment came via Twitter direct message from Adele McAlear in reference to Adjix, the URL shortener I use to fit long URLs into Twitter’s notoriously concise 140 character-long messages.

Adjix is an ad network that pays you to shorten links, which is essentially “a cross between Tinyurl and Google Adwords.” When a reader clicks on an Adjix-shortened link, they are redirected to the URL you input, with an Adjix-generated ad at the top of the page (example).

People who use this shortener earn $0.10 per 1,000 unique link views and $0.20 for each click-through on an ad displayed with their link.

Since I started using Adjix in August of this year, I’ve posted 90 links and made $0.70. It’s been a fun experiment for me, both in terms of tracking click-throughs, which the service does for you, and in terms of learning how to generate some extra cash on Twitter. Its main appeal for me is that I don’t have to pimp anything I wouldn’t normally put out there, I’m essentially getting something back for doing what I usually do: sharing interesting things.

What I never considered is how my followers on Twitter felt about this.

A BLOGGER’S GOTTA EAT!

Blogging can be one of the most thankless things to which a person can devote himself. Whether you’re chronicling your adventures or imparting information within your industry, you’re a person who has to eat and pay bills.

As someone who loves what I read on your blog, I feel it’s my moral obligation to support you. If that means taking 2.5 seconds to scan the ads on your blog after reading your post and commenting, I’ll do it. And I’ll click, too, if something catches my eye. It’s how I say “thank you.”

I didn’t think finding creative ways to make money blogging was a revolutionary concept until this weekend when my stream on Twitter exploded with a controversy over a sponsored post by Chris Brogan, the respected social media adviser.

FULL DISCLOSURE

Brogan writes about how businesses and bloggers can forge strong ties by creating valuable content on social networks. He’s basically the go-to guy when it comes to anything relating to new media.

He’s also on the advisory board for IZEA, a company in next-generation marketing. Per the IZEA blog, bloggers that sign on with IZEA do not receive payment, but they do have options in the company.

Working through IZEA for Kmart, Brogan received a $500 gift card to shop ’til he dropped and blog all about it, as well as another $500 gift card to offer readers who participated in a contest at Dad-o-Matic, where this sponsored post appeared.

Writing for IZEA requires disclosure, meaning that bloggers who are pimping a brand for them have to say up front that they got something out of the deal. Brogan’s piece at Dad-o-Matic (titled, “Sponsored Post-Kmart Holiday Shopping Dad Style”) opened with the following statement: “This post is a sponsored post on behalf of Kmart via Izea. The opinions are mine.”

Simple enough, right? Wrong.

LET THEM EAT CHEESECAKE!

“Bloggers should be able to make money and find synchronous opportunities that work for them. What was off-putting is that Chris benefits by writing an overall favorable review and a prominent one at that,” Damien Basile wrote in response to a post by Geoff Livingston, CEO of Livingston Communications, which puts out The Buzz Bin, a blog about marketing, buzz and PR.

Basile has long respected Brogan’s work and position in the industry, but he had beef with how Brogan handled his part for the Kmart campaign and was very vocal about it. I chased him down earlier tonight to get a handle on why he’d become such an active detractor.

“It was never about how much he profits,” Basile told me on Gtalk. “What is up for discussion is the perception that he may be in a position of conflict and that is enough for me to question it.”

Basile doesn’t feel Brogan’s initial disclosure is sufficient. He thinks Brogan’s ties to IZEA should have been mentioned right on that post, in the event readers did not know he was on their blogger advisory board and held options with IZEA.

“Maybe it was a misnomer to call him a journalist,” Basile reflected. “I do recant that later, but my point was bringing up integrity. Integrity is for everyone. Just because we’re in new media doesn’t mean there are new standards. Truth is truth. Everyone deserves to know the full truth.”

I’m with Livingston and Brogan in disagreeing with Basile that a blogger is a journalist. We could learn a thing or two from them, yes. I’m not a reporter any longer, but I have the Society for Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics up on my wall and it’s never too far out of mind when I blog: 1. Seek the truth and report it, 2. Minimize harm, 3. Act independently, 4. Be accountable.

A blogger may employ these tenets, but a blogger is not a journalist. Journalists have fact-checkers, ombudsmen, editors and publishers, those mighty gatekeepers of information. Journalists are expected to be unbiased. Perhaps most importantly, newsrooms and advertising departments are separated.

A blogger, on the other hand, is often a one-man show. I write the content for my blog, I fact-check, I edit, I publish. You know that saying: a writer who edits her own work has a fool for an editor. Quite right.

That’s not to say a blogger has no responsibility. A blogger has a big responsibility to his community: to provide valuable, quality content.

“How do you think Brogan should have done it?” I asked Basile. “Put up front: ‘Chris Brogan is a member of the IZEA advisory board and has options in IZEA’?”

“The word ‘via’ is very vague,” Basile responded. “It just tells me ‘its way of’ and the link to IZEA was to their main site [as opposed to information about Brogan’s association with the company].”

“How should it have been phrased?” I asked again.

Because this isn’t really about Chris Brogan or IZEA, you see, and to zero-in on that would be to make this a witch-hunt and what have witch-hunts ever gotten us? Nothing. No, this is bigger than that. This is the internet doing what it does best: self-correcting. Let’s not tear down, let’s build. Don’t like how someone does something? Tell me how to do it better.

Finally, Basile replied: “‘This post is sponsored by Kmart for IZEA. I am on the board of IZEA and receive equity options for being on it.’”

There is a valuable lesson here and it goes further than well-worded disclosures, debates about what makes one a journalist, or whether money invariably destroys a blogger’s credibility. As I said before, a blogger has a responsibility to his community. Mob mentality or not, I’m ultimately in accord with Basile: it’s about perception. The perception of your readers matters.

It doesn’t matter if your community thinks you did one thing when you really did another. It’s folly to stand by and call them stupid. They might be stupid, but perception is reality.

WHY SHOULD I CARE?

We should care because social media is about community. Brogan addressed several of the issues raised by his post in comments on blogs as well as in his own blog. That goes a long way.

It may not be enough for others who are disillusioned by the fact he is working with IZEA, but it’s responsible and in the end, all you can do is listen, address concerns as you best can and learn from the experience.

I CAN SEE RIGHT THROUGH YOU

Darren Rowse, my one-man resource when it comes to making money blogging had a series a couple of years ago about credibility and blogging. His series closed with transparency:

I don’t mind bloggers getting something for themselves out of blogging but what does bother me is when I see bloggers attempting to pull the wool over the eyes of their readers by not being honest about their true motivations. Credibility comes when people trust that what you are saying is truth and when there is a lack of truth the consequences for a blogger can be significant.

Transparency also comes into play when you make a mistake or need to apologize for something you’ve done or written. The way bloggers admit to mistakes and rectify them says a lot about their character.

In taking on Adjix, I was experimenting. But I never disclosed the details of my experiment. In fact, very little on my blog speaks about what I’m doing here and why. This needs immediate rectification, which I vow to undertake.

For now, the short of it is: I make some money via another experiment, this one with Google Adwords, but outside of that, no one pays me for any content, including the features. However, my blog does serve me indirectly in that through it I have landed gigs contributing to other web publications and ghost-blogging.

HOW MUCH IS INTEGRITY WORTH?

I found myself asking this question earlier this evening as I chatted with Adele McAlear, head of McAlear Marketing, who’d first objected to my use of Adjix.

“My real problem is not that I have to look at a banner or text ad, or that you’re making money from it,” McAlear told me over Gtalk. “It’s that the URL doesn’t show the true URL of the page you’ve sent me to and this makes linking a pain. It makes me not want to link to you at all, or re-tweet, etc.”

This was a definite downside to the use of Adjix, as retweets are the currency of Twitter. I explained to McAlear that in the Adjix banners, there’s an arrow on the far right that you can click to reveal the true URL.

“I didn’t know that about the arrow,” McAlear told me. “I don’t click on anything that looks like an ad because I never know what I’ll get and where I’m going to be taken.”

Coming from a web-savvy woman, that said a lot. How many other readers didn’t know how to get rid of the banner? Was I short-changing myself for the promise of a quick dime?

“Aside from linking, there’s perception,” McAlear went on. “I think you are a great writer, you have a great handle on social media, marketing, and how all of this works but, yet, this type of URL shortener reminds me of spam. To me, it kind of cheapens your personal brand.”

There it was. She’d said the key word: perception.

“It comes down to balance,” she said. “What your readers and followers on Twitter expect versus what Adjix gives you. I have no issues with anyone making money but there are different ways to do it.”

Integrity versus $0.70. Sure, I could make more if I devoted myself to better employing Adjix. But is it worth it?

Do you make money blogging? Is a disclosure enough to keep yourself from losing credibility? Have you ever unsubscribed from someone’s blogs because they wrote a sponsored post? Your opinion matters whether you’re a webcock or just a reader. We’re all the web. Tell me how you really feel.

UPDATE

December 16, 2007, 5:28PM: In an excellent display of what tuning in to user perspective is all about, Joe Moreno, President of Adjix contacted Adele McAlear after reading this post to let her know that based on her feedback, Adjix has changed the arrow on banners to a simple hyperlink that says, “Remove ad.”

Kudos, Adjix. This is what the web is all about.

Of possible interest:

• Earning Money Through Blogging: The Paid Posting Debate with Ted Murphy, the CEO of IZEA, Lucretia Pruitt of Walmart’s 11 Moms, Allen Stern of Centernetworks, and Chris Brogan at Social Mediasphere on Blog Talk Radio
• Understanding Izea’s Sponsored Blogging Service by Jeremiah Owyang
• What is Your Time Worth? What’s Worth Your Time? by Lucretia M. Pruitt
• The Sanctity of Social Media? by Amber Naslund
• The fallacy of pay-per-post or “o-pay-nions” at This Is Herd
• Being Human: Chris Brogan by Rich Becker
• Code of Ethics for Professional Communicators from the International Association of Business Communitcations (via @richbecker)

Of course nowadays, instead of watching the Pythia sway and prophesy in riddles to figure out what to do, all we need to do is put a couple of well-chosen words in Google and voilà!

Lost? Internet. Single? Internet. Job? Internet. Last minute dinner reservation? Internet. Need a place to crash in a strange city for under $100? Internet. What’s everyone doing? Internet. Where are they? Internet.

But just as we can find out almost anything with the internet, nowadays other people can find almost anything about us, too.

GOT GOOD GOOGLE?

Recently I got an e-mail from someone I’d written about asking whether I would remove her name from the piece I’d posted. The reason? She was applying for a job and my piece about her explosive love affair with a minor internet celebrity was showing up on searches of her name—along with all the gory details.

If Google has all the answers, it was only a matter of time before employers began using it to check up on prospective employees. A background check that requires no disclosure—who in their right mind would refuse?

Trudy G. Steinfeld, executive director of the center for career development at New York University told The New York Times that more and more employers are checking out potential hires online.

“The term they’ve used over and over is ‘red flags’,” Steinfeld said. “Is there something about their lifestyle that we might find questionable or that we might find goes against the core values of our corporation?”

Today, Business Week says, there are two of us: “the analog, warm-blooded version of you that who presses flesh at business conferences and interprets the corporate kabuki in meetings. Then there’s the digital doppelgänger; that’s the one that is growing larger and more impossible to control every day.”

It’s this hard-to-control doppelganger that companies are worried about.

CHANGE: A SALARY FOR YOUR THOUGHTS

Even the Obama administration understands the weight of electronic communications. Their application for employment includes a seven-page questionnaire that leaves no stone unturned. Items 13 and 14 deal directly with online communications:

13. Electronic communications: If you have ever sent an electronic communication, including but not limited to an email, text message or instant message, that could suggest a conflict or interest or be a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family, or the President-Elect if it were made public, please describe.

14. Diaries: If you keep or have ever kept a diary that contains anything that could suggest a conflict of interest or be a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family, or the President-Elect if it were made public, please describe

Would you mind defining “embarrassment,” Mr. President?

FAQ ON THE DIGITAL BFOQ

To get the inside scoop on what employers think about our online interactions, I chased down Rowland Hobbs, CEO at DMD Group, firm that unites integrated marketing, sustainability consulting, and experience design in New York City, and Brooks Bayne, a successful start-up developer and the brains behind The Graph, an up-and-coming new start-up in Los Angeles.

“I see this as a judgment for an employee, or potential employee,” Hobbs told me via e-mail. “If you think your brand should be about what you did on Saturday night—good, make that work for you, own that, and understand the consequences of how that communication is perceived. Make it a part of yourself that is also a part of how you sell yourself in the marketplace. You are a brand. What you say and do online reflects on you both positively and negatively. It is not a black and white issue, you have to decide how you wish to be perceived, and understand that part of your audience is your future employers and colleagues.”

Bayne was more relaxed about people’s online sharing when I interviewed him on the phone: “as long as you don’t have any hate or anything illegal in your streams, in my book you’re fine. I would hire somebody whose views I disagreed with if they were good at their job, regardless of what they posted online. If they wanna share, more power to them, as long as it’s not illegal.”

Bayne was concerned with companies telling prospective employees that being hired was contingent on deleting or making private some of their social media profiles, as well as other restrictive trends in hiring.

“If companies and the government and everyone else start to look at people online and their activities online under a magnifying glass, I think we run the risk of creating a homogenized society—one that I wouldn’t want to participate in,” he said. “As companies start basing their decisions on your blog or your Twitter stream or some other of your social profiles, I think you run the risk of creating an environment where you have a bunch of people not willing to engage online. I would hate to see people not being themselves online because they’re worried about whether or not they’re gonna get a job.”

Hobbs agreed that employees activities online should be viewed as more than a potential liability.

“Employees that participate in social media may be a great asset for your company’s communications strategies,” he told me. “Businesses should approach it as an opportunity, not a liability. Could they train your team on how to use social media effectively? Are they plugged into potential new talent, customers online that you don’t normally reach? Lots of points of opportunity here to consider. That being said, businesses should have a blogging policy in their employee handbooks to avoid ambiguity. This should be vetted with a labor attorney, but it should be part of a large communications decision. A firm should have its own perspective on how they want to be represented—and remember, choosing not to show up online can be damaging as well.”

YOU ARE WHAT YOU POST

I was 13 the first time I read George Orwell’s 1984. I will never forget the kind of anxiety that the phrase “Big Brother is watching you,” inspired in me. I was online back then, too, but I was totally anonymous—there was no way to link my outrageous jailbait cyber-escapades to my 4.0 GPA-holding, honor roll-regular and student body officer self.

Back then, it was easy to be anonymous and unplug whenever you wanted. You could delete blog posts you didn’t like and poof! they were gone. Now the content is aggregated everywhere. There is no ctrl+z or apple+z. Once it’s out there, it’s out there.

We have short attention spans, so most of us have already forgotten it, but a quick search on Google for “intern” and “fairy” brings up the story of Kevin Colvin, an intern at Anglo Irish Bank who played hooky citing a family emergency and was caught when his boss found the Facebook pictures of Colvin from that day, dressed up as Tinker Bell, having a jolly good time. Oops!

As we chronicle more and more of our lives, as more applications are developed to make even the most mundane tasks easier, as more of us turn to social networks to reach out to one another in our mobile world, there is a definite merging of the analog and the digital.

Big Brother is watching you? Big Brother has nothing on FriendFeed.

TAKING CHARGE

When I interviewed them, I asked Hobbs and Bayne whether they could impart some advice to oversharers and millennials joining the workforce.

“Think about some of the ramifications before you post,” Bayne said.

“We encourage online communications in the way you communicate anywhere: with respect, smarts and awareness that people are indeed listening to you,” Hobbs told me. “Saying things that put you in a bad light will probably come back to haunt you. That does not mean don’t communicate online—we now preference those that do communicate online in our hiring process—but, how you communicate tells me about who you are, and your judgment.”

Fitton, head of Pistachio Consulting and author of Twitter for Dummies was on The Federal Drive with Tom Temin and Jane Norris talking about Twitter this morning.

“I have seen first hand what this can do for people’s lives and what kind of value it can build and I’m a huge fan,” Fitton told listeners after clarifying she’s in no way affiliated with Twitter.

“The thing that’s most worthwhile is to step back and kind of forget that it’s a publishing environment,” she said. “People talk about it being microblogging and, you know, OK, we’re just pushing stuff out there–we’re really having a conversation and what it amounts to is a massive, massive flow of information between all these overlapping networks of loosely connected people all over the globe. And so there is tons of news flowing in there all the time, there’s tons of consumer data, here is tons personality, friends being made, there’s relationships being struck up.”

Fitton has always talked about Twitter as a village. Early this year, she developed the notion on her blog:

For me, connecting on Twitter with someone I’ve just met in person is inviting them to live in “my village.” Follow-up won’t be limited to the “nice meeting you” email cul-de-sac. On Twitter, we’ll cross paths incidentally and without pressure. I may bump into them “around town” for maybe a word or two at the “coffee shop” or “post office.” Over time we may discover common interests (aka social objects) in each others’ tweets, and connect more deeply as neighbors or friends.

For a contrived, weird and techy way to communicate, Twitter’s “passive conversation” fosters very natural, gradual relationship-building. I explained about the village to Dan Bricklin, who immediately connected it to the chapter on “taming” and the Fox in The Little Prince.

“You go back to sociological research on what’s called reciprocity,” Fitton told listeners of Federal News Radio today. “Even all the way back to the 70s–reciprocity is someone’s willingness to engage and help someone else. If you just had a little casual contact with someone, you’re much more likely to step up and engage with them. So we’re all having all this casual contact, constantly on Twitter and it’s really making people engage. And we saw people engage last week during the horror in Mumbai. People really were stepping up trying to help, spreading words, doing what they could–it’s an amazing environment.”

Yet many people still wonder about the usefulness of Twitter. Those of us who have been doing it for a while grasp the immediacy of news, the wealth of consumer data, the vast reach of information, and, above all, the power of connection. I have met more amazing people on Twitter than I have at any other place or through any other thing. But Fitton is right–to go from a ridiculous to amazing, it takes a village, “a critical mass of interesting people–to read and write to.”

“When my brain started to connect with the brains (and hearts) of others, it got really, REALLY cool for me,” Fitton writes on her blog. “You may be looking for like minds, or you may want to be totally shaken up by new ideas. Both work. One day I suddenly realized this was, for me, tribe-finding. For arguably the first time in my life I didn’t feel as weird and different.”

Image of Laura Fitton used with permission. Copyright @wmmarc 2008.

He’s never given me any reason as to why he thought I was a man.

Neither did the GenderAnalyzer when I plugged in my blog to analyze my gender.

Curious to see how they’d arrived at this conclusion, I contacted the team at GenderAnalyzer and asked. Jon Kågström, the brains behind the operation, wrote me back to fill me in on the details of this wondrous machine:

It all started back in 2004 when I was doing my master thesis on machine learning for spam filtering. I was fascinated by how well they worked on spam (often better than humans) and started to wonder what more than spam text classifiers could be used for. I did a big number of hobby research projects testing classifiers on different domains (e.g., sentiment, happy/sad, web page categorization).

Doing this while improving the classifier technology derived from my master thesis, I came up with the idea to let everyone have access to classifiers. So with help from two friends, Roger Karlsson and Emil Kågström, we built uclassify.com. The idea is to share advanced classifier technology that is easy to use (don’t even have to be a programmer) for free in a Web 2.0 format.

After we had finished with uclassify.com we decided to test if it’s possible to have a computer differentiate between males and females by looking at their text. We found the idea really interesting so we collected 2,000 blogs written by males and females and used the uClassify API to train a classifier. We decided to put it into test and created GenderAnalyzer.

The accuracy is lower than we expected and we believe a major reason for that is that the training data is biased (only collected from blogspot). We think we can get better accuracy by using the URLs that users test as training data (when they vote if it worked or not, we train it accordingly). In this way we would have a classifier that adapts to real world gender data. Just as machine learning spam filters do.

Today on the uClassify blog, Kågström elaborated on the Analyzer’s current low accuracy (53%):

Our training data of 2,000 blogs is automatically collected from blogspot. Running internal tests (10 fold cross validation) on this data gives us an accuracy of 75%. This effectively means “Given that the corpus is a perfect representation of real world data, the classifier is able to give any real world data the correct label by a chance of 75%”. So our training data is probably not very representative, as a matter of fact it’s very stereotypical.

When someone is testing a blog we are not crawling through posts on the blog to get a good amount of text. We are only hitting the given URL and using the text (and html) that appear there as test data. So a page with mostly images or frames will give bad test data.

We are trying to encode test data to utf-8 which is the format of the training data - it could be that we are missing some encodings.

It’s a worthwhile experiment and the technology is there to make the process of gender analysis possible. If there are any issues with GenderAnalyzer, further development of the tested blog samples will enable the Analyzer to increase its accuracy levels, and as more people make use of it and the machine gets more training, it will become better equipped to answer the question “man or woman—who is writing that blog?”

Though Kågström brings up a good question in the uClassify’s blog post, maybe “the difference between male and female writing is not significant?”

Only one way to find out. Best of luck to the team at GenderAnalyzer.

As for the college e-fling, we still talk form time to time. We’re both married now—to other people. I think he finally believes that I’m a woman. It only took him five years.

The magical thing about Twitter is that if enough users block an account or notify Twitter that they’re being spammed, the account in question gets suspended.

A lot of times, though, what appears to be a spammer is a well-intentioned user who is so new, that he or she doesn’t understand how the community works and whose only crime is the desire to have their site visited.

This was the case with @lollydaskal. I saw her multiple tweets with the same link in her stream and was about to hit block when I saw her newest one: “new at twitter ….not sure i am doing it right.” I shot her a direct message. “Send me your e-mail address and I’ll help you.”

She did. In the next few minutes, I threw together as many resources and thoughts about how to get a business started on Twitter (her objective) as I could think of and shot her an e-mail.

One of the most important things about using Twitter for business is learning to step out of the old marketing model where you just throw out information about your product into the masses. In today’s world of social media, the relationship between a company and consumers is no longer a one-stop information destination. Web 2.0 is all about the conversation and building a community.

I linked some classics: Chris Brogan’s Twitter for Business, Ogilvy’s Best Practices and Warren Whitlock and Deborah Micek’s Twitter Handbook.

Since she reached out to the community for suggestions on improving her approach on Halloween, @lollydaskal’s gathered a following of 232 people and I am glad to count myself among them.

I remember thinking at the time how wonderful it would be to have all the how-tos in a single place, a catch-basin of quick, easy-to-digest information about how to make the best of Twitter, whether you’re a business or a casual user.

So today, when Laura Fitton, head of Pistachio Consulting, announced she’d signed a contract to write Twitter for Dummies, I was thrilled. Like everything related to the micro-blogging platform, this is a community project. Fitton’s already invited her 8,494 followers to contribute their ideas.

Equally exciting is the recent launch of Twitip by Darren Rowse, of ProBlogger fame.

“TwiTip is about capturing some of the lessons that I’ve been learning about Twitter and how to use it more effectively,” Rowse writes in the blog’s about page. “It will cover Twitter Tips of all varieties including Writing for Twitter, Branding, Growing a Following, Corporate Tweeting and a lot more.”

These two are invaluable resources for the beginner—maybe even the seasoned user.

For example, one of the newer posts on Twitip, by Hugh Briss of Twitter Image, goes into detail about the importance of a Twitter background in establishing brand identity (some great examples of this are available at Mike Smith’s blog—with my friend Atherton Bartelby among them!).

It’s true that space we’re given for bios on Twitter is limited—only 160 characters!—and it’s been the practice for some time now for users to put much of their bios and contact details right on their pages by incorporating them into their background images. While many great people I follow do this, it’s not until now, reading Briss’s post on the topic, that I’ve begun to give it more serious consideration.

But it’s not all brand and business. And another recent post on Twitip touches on how to avoid making your followers feel like they’re overhearing one side of a conversation–I’m quite guilty of it and while for me Twitter is all self-expression, I don’t want to leave anyone out if I can include them in the fun.

As more companies jump on the Twitter wagon, the wave of resistance from casual users grows. Not everyone is happy to see all work and no play in their Twitter streams. Just today, blogger Jay Hathaway posted about his displeasure about the wave of business users that Twitter for Dummies would bring about:

Predictably, the book on Twitter isn’t being written by someone funny or entertaining. It’s being written by someone who posts 100 times on a slow day, and talks about things like conversations and communities and branding and … I don’t know, money? This doesn’t seem sustainable to me. Marketers can market to marketers and make friends with marketers and talk about marketing all day, and it’s not particularly interesting to regular people.

So don’t read it, right? I don’t. But a whole lot of other people do, because they’re climbing on top of each other to associate themselves with the people who have the most marketers reading them, so that they can market themselves to still more marketers, and become what I can only guess is called Market King of the Market.

That’s the audience for this book. I’m sure a lot of people will buy it, and it will make some money for the publisher. Good for them! Also, possibly good for the future of Twitter as a business, so that it can continue to exist as a place where I’m allowed to have chuckles and make friends. Fair enough. It’s just sad that a lot more people will be on Twitter, working. No time for dick jokes, ladies, I can’t rest now that I’m in The Market. Got to rack up some more followers, and some of them might even have Secrets of Success!

He’s not alone in that, either. There seems to be a bit of tension between people who use Twitter to further themselves in their industry and those who use Twitter for fun. I have been told a few times by people that they like my blog and wish my tweets were a little more industry-focused: the amount of oversharing and, yes, dick jokes, just isn’t conducive to achieving their goals on Twitter.

I’m not offended–Twitter is all about pulling people around you whose ideas are useful or amusing. Tastes vary and I come with a disclaimer. Just as some choose to further their business on Twitter, some of us choose to have fun and be ourselves in explosions of 140 characters. I do have another account on Twitter (@omgomgomfg), which I, admittedly, greedily grabbed to protect my brand, and which I intend to develop as a catch-basin for more of the web stuff that interests me and many of the readers of this blog. Now and always, my Twitter stream at @avflox is where I let it all hang out.

Regardless of whether Twitter is play or work, it’s never too late to analyze what you’re doing and whether it fits into your goals for social networking. Could you put this magical tool to even better use?

There is always room for improvement, whether you’re looking to get your product out there or pick up a date. And with this in mind, it’s not hard to see how Twitip and even the more rudimentary Twitter for Dummies are going to be valuable resources for many.

The best part is that we can build this together. No matter what our focus, we are the Twitter culture. There is value in what we know and think and this platform allows for us to share it, to reach out to people we may never otherwise have met and connect in a mutually-beneficial way.

So here’s to growth—in terms of reach, yes, but most importantly, in terms of community.

This article was redrafted at 8:15PM MST to include Hathaway’s thoughts on Twitter for Dummies and my personal thoughts on play vs. work. Million thanks to Atherton Bartelby for pointing out the importance of its inclusion in this discussion.

Broccoli Soup, by Jon YongFook, used with permission.

Open Source Food is a community entirely devoted to sharing well-illustrated recipes. The only thing more amazing than the recipes people share on there is the quality of the photographs users take of their creations.

Tonight, as I threw together a snack at 3:00AM, I cross-examined Open Source Food’s creator, the web developer, mastermind and ladies’ man Jon YongFook.

How and when did you come up with the idea for Open Source Food (OSF)?

Well, the basic idea was to make a recipe site that had pics for each recipe. I don’t know about you, but it drives me nuts browsing recipe sites where all you see is text. Ever bought a recipe book that had no pictures? Exactly! That’s all I wanted OSF to be–a place where you could get recipes and actually see the finished product of the recipe too, for every recipe on the site.

Had you been part of any food communities on the web before you launched OSF?

No. Funnily enough my interest in food came about quite suddenly, about 3 years ago. I never really cooked much before that, and never really watched cooking shows and what have you. Then one day bam, I was obsessed with cooking, my shelves are full of cookbooks and if I’m not watching Iron Chef or Gordon Ramsay on TV, I’m in the kitchen making something to eat. So very quickly after I found this interest in food, I started to think about making OSF, so I didn’t even have much time to get involved with other online food communities before I was coding away on the site.

How many people use OSF today and how many recipes are there?

OSF does over half a million page views per month and is home to over 3,000 recipes, each with a pic.

Some users have the word pro next to their names–how do you go pro on OSF? What features does being pro involve if any?

If your recipes receive a certain number of votes, you go pro. Being pro allows other users to find your recipes easier, since you have the option to filter by pro and non-pro users when doing recipe searches. It’s basically a quality assurance badge–if the recipe is by a pro user you know it’s going to be a good one.

Is OSF now anything like you imagined it would be?

I think it has worked out nicely as a pet project, yes.

The OSF2 launch earlier this year brought many great changes for users–has the site reached perfection or do you see more changes in the horizon?

It will change and improve. It’s not perfect in any way, yet. I want to encourage more interaction between users and have a few ideas for new features. It’s just finding the time, of course.

What are some of the biggest challenges you have encountered?

Nothing huge. One challenge was re-building the site from scratch for OSF2. The original version of OSF was built very messily. At the start of this year I rewrote the whole thing using an MVC framework called CodeIgniter. This helped standardize my coding conventions a little bit and just makes maintaining the code and rolling out new features way easier. I use CodeIgniter for everything now.

Twitter is known for its Tweet-Ups. Has OSF seen an equivalent where users get together to mingle and perhaps try out recipes?

That would be cool, but no I don’t think people have done that. This is what I mean about trying to encourage more interaction between users–I should figure out some features that would facilitate people meeting up for a cooking party.

Where do your recipes come from? Do you make them up as you go along or plan carefully?

Most of them are just kind of slung together. I’m not much of a planner when it comes to cooking. I’m not really much of a planner when it comes to anything, actually. My usual MO is to have a very clearly defined goal and then do whatever needs to be done to achieve that goal, with less planning and more of a trial / error approach.

What’s your favorite recipe and where did you learn it?

I think the broccoli soup recipe is one of my favorites. I learned it from Gordon Ramsay, who made it on one of his shows (it’s also in one of his books). I added the mushrooms, though. I just think it’s amazingly pure–the ingredients are pretty much just broccoli and water. Anyone can cook this and it looks stunning when you serve it. Tastes delicious, too.

Are you messy in the kitchen or do you clean as you prepare?

I’m very messy. If you took a snapshot of my apartment at any given moment in time, the kitchen would be the place I’d be most embarrassed about. It always looks like a bomb just went off.

You wrote a hilarious post once where you debated which dish would lead to a sexy time–what’s your most popular dish with the ladies?

I think the best dishes to cook for a lady are ones where she can join in a little in the preparation. I’ve never been on a date with a guy but I can imagine it would be incredibly awkward just sitting on the sofa twiddling my thumbs whilst the guy is frantically cooking in the kitchen. It just seems kind of false and disingenuous in a way, like I want you to sit there whilst I “create”, so you’re all indebted to me by the time I serve dinner and oh, by the way, you can pay back that debt by sleeping with me. Sod that. I like my women in the kitchen with me helping out so that when we eat there is a small sense of mutual achievement rather than an underlying, awkward imbalance of power.

One dish that goes down really well is bruschetta. It’s dead simple to make together (grill bread, rub garlic, top with tomatoes, olive oil, basil and salt) and tastes delicious as long as you get good-quality ingredients. So usually I’ll just make that with the girl whilst we chat and sip wine. And to those who have never seen it, the trick where you rub the garlic on the toasted bread almost like you’re grating it, is a really good tip–one that they can take away and use long after they grow bored of you and stop responding to your e-mails.

Have you ever considered having the sex before cooking?

Yes, sometimes it is appropriate to get the sex out of the way before focusing on the real issue: what to eat for dinner.

Got any advice for the uninitiated and culinary inept?

Invest in good salt and good olive oil. Your food will instantly taste a million times better.

“I don’t want to scare them off,” he said.

It’s easy to forget that in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the acronym OMG (often translated from web lingo to mean, “oh my G-d”) is basically a direct violation of the third commandment and that the F in OMFG, the last acronym, is largely considered to stand for an expletive.

I find it interesting that in the race to save time, internet culture has largely rid itself of many unsavory words and phrases by abbreviating them and that these abbreviations have taken a life of their own. Today, I hear as many people in regular conversation saying “oh em gee,” as I hear them saying “oh my G-d,” or “oh my gosh.”

Still, for many, abbreviation or not, OMG still means “oh my G-d,” and runs counter to their belief systems and notions of propriety.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to try something new in terms of advertising on my site and applied to join the BlogHer Ad Network.

Their guidelines clearly state that any blog that is submitted must be “without profanity in the title and/or URL.” I’d read these before submitting but thought nothing of it–after all, I wasn’t actually cussing. Or was I?

———- Original message ———-
From: Jenny Lauck
To: AVF
Date: Tuesday, October 28, 2008 at 4:45PM
Subject: Your BlogHerAds application

Hi, AV!

I’m so sorry for the long delay in reviewing your application. We’ve got a policy that prevents us from accepting blogs that use swear words, the names of deities or abbreviated forms of phrases that include either – I’ve been hounding our co-founders to change this policy so that we can accept wonderful blogs like yours, and I am really sorry to say that they cannot change the policy at this time – however, should they change their minds, I will e-mail you right away.

Wishing you all the best,
Jenny

Not only was the abbreviation not enough to get by–apparently the mention of a deity was also inappropriate!

An ex in a fit of rage once told me that my drama should be a franchise. “If drama was a natural resource, you’d outperform the Middle East and Russia combined in terms of exports.”

It’s a mean thing to say, though not entirely untrue, as I do, admittedly, have an amazing tendency to get myself into the most ridiculous situations. One of my dearest friends likes to joke that if she ever received a phone call from me that didn’t kick off with “O-M-G. O! M! G! OMFG!” she’d know I’d been sequestered and that she was speaking with an impostor.

As a joke, I looked up the domain name OMGOMGOMFG.com. At the time, I didn’t think I would ever have a self-hosted blog–but in a world where domains are the new real estate, why not own it?

Later, when I did decide to launch my own blog, I wondered about whether I should get a blog with my regular username online. I remember thinking, “what’s easier to convey and remember: avflox.com or OMGOMGOMFG.com?” It’s partly about recognition, but it’s also about who you are. I don’t take myself so seriously–I write because I know no other way to be. Writing is the only way I know to process ideas about topics that matter to me, yes, but mostly, I do it because it’s fun.

And if you can give your host a laugh with your domain name, well, that’s something, too.

Darren Rowse at ProBlogger is one of the best resources for anyone wishing to get started making money by publishing online. At the end of the summer, he ran an article titled 8 Reasons Why Your Blog Might Not Be Accepted Into an Ad Network that had some helpful information for people trying to get into ad networks like BlogHer.

Rowse listed the most important elements of a blog when being considered, among them: design (does it look good?), content (is the content well-written, informed, original, focused, etc.?), focus (is it personal or does it fit a niche?), hosting (is it self-hosted?), and traffic.

“Each network also has its own standards on adult content, use of language (swearing) and other topics that they may or may not cover,” Rowse added.

His book Problogger: Secrets For Blogging Your Way To A Six-Figure Income, co-authored with Chris Garrett, lays the ground rules and topics worth considering for those wishing to start income-generating blogs. Chapter 3 deals with the set-up, including choosing a domain name:

For a start, if you want to build credibility and a sense of professionalism around your blog, a domain name can help. Similarly, a carefully selected domain name has the ability to enhance the branding and memorability of a product, service business, or even person… Many discussions on domain name decisions talk about a choice between choosing a domain name with keywords in it to domain names that are more brandable or generic. It’s worth stating up front that it is possible to achieve both, but I would prioritize memorability and branding over keywords.

At the beginning of the year, Rowse expanded a little on this topic at Problogger.

“When choosing domain names do you get a keyword rich or more brandable name?” he asked.

Keyword-based domains use words about topics you’re discussing in them. Rowse listed TheMovieBlog.com and SimsGamer.com as examples.

“Firstly it communicates something to your readers very quickly with regards to what your blog is about,” Rowse wrote about these keyword-based domain names. “The other positive is that search engines take a good look at the words in your domain name when deciding what your blog is about and how to rank it.”

Brandable domains, on the other hand, may relate to the topic, but they’re largely about creating a brand identity.

“These blogs would be suited ideally to developing a blog that is aiming to build a community of loyal readers,” Rowse said. “Of course these blogs can also do very well in search engines but this is usually for other reasons (keywords in URLs are just one of many factors). Blogs that have these types of domains include Boing Boing, Gizmodo and Dooce. In fact if you look at Technorati’s Top 100 blogs, you’ll see that most of them have brandable names and not keyword-based ones.”

Problogger.net is an excellent example of a keyword-based and brandable domain name.

“It’s not always possible to get both,” Rowse wrote, adding, “in fact, it’s getting harder and harder and many bloggers are faced with the choice of one or the other.”

“Remember when putting ads on your blog was a travesty?” I asked my friend Atherton Bartelby during our usual midday coffee break. “Now I go to blogs and go out of my way to scan ads after reading posts in order to see if there is anything I want to click to help support the bloggers I like.”

“Oh! I do that, too,” Atherton replied, laughing. “A blogger has to eat, right?”

“Absolutely,” I responded. “Though it’s very interesting to see what monetization is doing to a lot of blogs as well. Very few ad networks want put up with a lot of the content that defines a lot of blogs.”

“Totally,” Atherton agreed. “It’s like, hey, I would write a piece about this tonight but my BLOG AD NETWORK wants me to rewrite Hansel and Gretel!”

“Except in my version,” I said going along with him, “the ad network doesn’t want me to talk about the witch being cooked alive. I can either have the children scare her away with a broomstick or convince her to go vegan because that’s better for her health, the common good and the environment anyway. They’re pushing for the latter!”

We burst into a fit of hysterical giggles. At the same time, though, I couldn’t stop thinking about how much blogging was suddenly starting to feel like working in a newsroom. Sure newspapers keep their advertising departments out of the newsroom, but anyone who’s been in one knows how that works sometimes. You just don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

There are two kinds of bloggers: the ones who rush in and the ones who plan every minute detail.

“A number of people regret spending too much time thinking about blogging and not actually blogging,” Rowse wrote in a reflection on a series at Problogger about all the things successful bloggers today wish they’d known when they started blogging.

Of course, “some regretted that they didn’t put a little more thought into their blogging before they started. Too much planning can kill a blog (or at least can kill the opportunity for your blog to become established as first and can kill your passion for a topic) while not enough planning can lead to a blog that doesn’t reach its potential because its foundations are shaky.”

It’s a careful balance we’re striking between profitability and continued growth and self-expression.

“The domain name and platform you choose are just two elements of many that go into making a blog successful,” Rowse says in the What We Wish We Knew series. “They are important–but if you get it wrong you are not dead in the water.”

“I’m sorry you didn’t get into BlogHer,” Atherton told me later in the day. “Are you having second thoughts about your domain name?”

“Not in the slightest.”

It’s true. The internet and the culture developing herein is a wild new world and if that’s not enough to make you go “OMG!”, I don’t know what is.

She mentioned that my writing was all right, even though it seemed to her I wrote the way most people masturbate: only caring about my own pleasure and with no regard whatever for my audience, which, I suppose, is kind of charming in a world were so many people are crucified as being crowd-pleasers. All in all it wasn’t a bad review, even if she did say I was a whore, dripped sex like a broken faucet in the Bronx and had an ego the size of the Incredible Hulk on a bad day.

What I’d never forget is that she said I was beautiful like this made some kind of a difference. I can depict myself as whorish in my writing, after all, as well as expose an oversized ego. But you can’t write yourself beauty. What does what I look like have to do with my writing?

* Refers to a blog that is no longer available.

Yesterday Michael Duff at the Lubbock-Avalanche Journal wrote about his favorite online hoax: a male political blogger, tired of being ignored on the web, painted his site pink, stole an image from a mail-order bride site and began to sprinkle his political rants with references to style and college parties. He became Libertarian Girl. The result? Pageviews and pingbacks soared.

“So what does this mean?” asked Duff. “Is the glass ceiling actually a sun roof?”

Megan Carpentier at Jezebel was quick to respond: “What Duff takes away from this is not ‘don’t trust anonymous people on the internet’ but that lady bloggers have it so much easier than men. Oh, really?”

Carpentier linked a piece she wrote earlier this year for Glamour’s Glamocracy blog titled, “Why are all the big political bloggers men?”:

Amy Richards, an author and one of the co-founders of Third Wave, thinks that the amount of attention focused on the boys might be more than just their first-mover status—it’s an artifact of their historical control of the media. Richards claims that “Political punditry has always been dominated by men and thus blogging is likely to follow that pattern.” Richards agrees that women aren’t becoming blogospheric stars as quickly as some of their male colleagues. She says, “I know that women are jumping into this debate with their opinions and perspectives, but because they are doing so in spaces more likely to attract women—they aren’t being legitimized.”

Ezra Klein agreed with Amy about the ghettoization of female voices, noting that while male political bloggers are known as “political” bloggers, women are more often known as “feminist” bloggers. Male bloggers are seen as talking about politics with a universal point of view, but when we women bring our perspective to the field, it’s seen as a minority opinion.

Despite the discrepancy in opinion about who has it easier, both Carpentier and Duff seemed to agree in their conclusion: a pretty face only gets you so many readers if you don’t have anything worthwhile to say.

This was echoed in a recent interview at SFGate: when publications around the country started to ditch their sex columnists, Violet Blue interviewed Steve Hall, the publisher and editor of the hit ad blog Adrants, about hotness and the web.

“The old adage is ‘sex sells’ and it’s come to be accepted as fact. Where do you think this notion comes from?” Blue asked him.

“It comes from the simple fact everyone… well, at least most everyone, loves sex, has sex, likes to think about sex and likes to look at sexy people,” Hall responded. “It’s just the way humans are naturally programmed.”

Initially sexual imagery can “sell”—when it comes to attracting attention to an ad. After all, humans are innately programmed to respond to titillating imagery and the possibility of sex. It’s just in our DNA. So it’s natural for marketers to use this attraction and for people to respond. But, it can be a lame cop-out used by marketers who lack imagination to create more compelling work that will sustain itself beyond the initial titillation.

Hall’s conclusion falls in line with what Carpentier and Duff are saying: sexy is good, but sexy needs content.

“It’s hard to dispute the popularity of female bloggers, but popularity isn’t everything,” wrote Duff in closing. “Libertarian Girl got a lot of readers, but not much respect…. Women walk a fine line between popularity and credibility, caught in an eternal struggle between beauty and professionalism.”

If blogging is so much easier for women, it would follow that there would be more women bloggers than men. Or do women have it easier because there is a disproportionate woman to male ratio?

It’s hard to make a correct estimate about the number of female versus male bloggers. Even Technorati, which analyzes the blogosphere annually, disclosed that out of the more than 1.2 million bloggers who have registered with them, the survey on which they based their report was based on a sample of a mere 1,290 responses. Their findings suggest that the blogosphere is split unevenly: 66 percent is male and 34 percent is female, with the gap being a little less wide in the US: 57 percent of bloggers are male and 43 percent are female.

I say we should take this with a grain of salt because last year, a Synovate/Marketing Daily survey conducted online with 1,000 adults in the US revealed that “more women than men are bloggers, with 20 percent of American women who have visited blogs having their own versus 14 percent of men.”

It’s incredibly hard to conduct a proper census.

On a whim, I looked over my blog roll and counted how my favorite blogs were split gender-wise. Women: 24. Men: 22. I was a minority among my friends, who, upon a quick survey, found their blogrolls were largely male-dominated.

Upon closer inspection, I found that the web industry part of my blogroll was heavily male and that the only reason I had close to a tie was that I had a whole section devoted to sex columnists, who are primarily female.

Kara Jesella at The New York Times, who covered this year’s BlogHer conference, touched on the topic:

There is a measure of parity on the Web. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, among Internet users, 14 percent of men and 11 percent of women blog.

A study conducted by BlogHer and Compass Partners last year found that 36 million women participate in the blogosphere each week, and 15 million of them have their own blogs…. Yet, when Techcult, a technology Web site, recently listed its top 100 Web celebrities, only 11 of them were women. Last year, Forbes.com ran a similar list, naming four women on its list of 25.

“Women get dismissed in ways that men don’t,” said Megan McArdle, an associate editor at The Atlantic Monthly who writes a blog about economic issues. She added that women are taught not to be aggressive and analytical in the way that the political blogosphere demands, and are more likely to receive blog comments on how they look, rather than what they say.

If we’re successful, is it that we’re a hot piece of ass? And if we’re not a hot piece of ass, are we just not worth reading? That’s the thing, see. Duff thinks women have it easier than men—but he seems to forget that not all women look like a barely legal mail-order bride.

“God help you if you are an ugly girl,” sings Ani Difranco in 32 Flavors. “‘Course too pretty is also your doom, ’cause everyone harbors a secret hatred for the prettiest girl in the room.”

After Duff was eviscerated by Carpentier, I shot him a note cynically stating that I didn’t think anyone would read me if they didn’t think I was hot. I don’t know if this is true or not and though I have toyed with the idea of doing a survey, I’m not exactly crazy about knowing the answer.

When I was fifteen, my mother had a dinner party and introduced my sister and me to a friend as follows: “this is my genius and this is my model.” To this day, my sister and I joke that she gave us both a complex. I like to pretend it’s not really true, but if I’m to be perfectly frank, I spent such an inordinate amount of time during my adolescence trying to prove that I had a brain that my mother forbade me from bringing up physics at dinner parties. Heavy topics lead to indigestion, darling, and who wants to think about GUTs and TOEs while eating anyway?

For the longest time I had no pictures of myself on my blog. I do now. I want to say it’s not true that it matters. But I think it does. Physical appeal won’t get you everything, but it can get you noticed. As we drift further from words online, pulling more media into our work and being more social within our industries, getting noticed becomes increasingly important.

There is no denying that there is a danger in this. The last thing any of us want, after all, is for physical attractiveness to become a bona fide occupational qualification for the blogger. It’s distracting.

Further, the man behind Libertarian Girl felt he was being discriminated against because he was male and unattractive. He’s not the only man who has expressed this idea. Remember that August article on Wired about how to be internet famous? The fifth commandment: be a hot woman with an exhibitionist streak.

I judge magazines by their covers, I judge newspapers by their front pages, and I won’t deny that I gravitate toward good looking people.

Nancy Etcoff is not wrong when writes in her book Survival of the Prettiest, which explores human tendency toward the physically attractive, that “Beauty will continue to operate—outside jurisdiction in the lawless world of human attraction. Academics may ban it from intelligent discourse and snobs may sniff that beauty is trivial and shallow but in the real world the beauty myth quickly collides with reality.” Physical attractiveness does have consequences that cannot be erased by denial.

But what we can do is bring the focus back.

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.

We see fights on the daily explode across the blogosphere that invariably go there: fat, anorexic, old-looking, twig-legged, troll-footed, lazy-eyed, bad-complected, ugly, fug. Hey, even the most decorous of us have thought it at some point if we’re to be honest with ourselves for one moment.

Let’s commit ourselves to staying on topic. Don’t bring the body into it unless the body is central to the discussion.

Even if it’s a compliment like “beautiful.”

Now can someone send me names and links to female web bloggers and male sex or relationship bloggers? Blogs are made popular by the masses and that means that evening out the playing field is largely in our hands.