Bloggers and diversity

Steven Levy picks up on Halley & Rebecca's discussion of the lack of diversity seen at Harvard conferences about blogging and media, but doesn't link to either of them.

Now, we do track Millions of blogs at Technorati, and all human life is there. Steven describes our top 100 as 'a list dominated by bigmouths of the white-male variety', but there are Japanese, Brazilian and Iraqi men and women there too.

The blogosphere is big enough now that my 'Caliban's Mirror' rule applies - what you see in it is what you go looking for; it reflects you and your interests.

While I am reading Jeneane, Shelley, Dorothea, Suw, Halley, Liz, danah, Denise, Megan, Stephanie and others regularly, you might not be (and it is your loss).

If you look at which bloggers the mainstream media have picked up on, the men tend to talk about politics, and the women talk about sex.

This superficiality is pointed out by Brian Micklethwait but he holds out hope as we can and do discuss ideas at length online, cross-linking, interjecting and, as Shelley does masterfully, satirizing.