MediaVision Blog : Search Engine Marketing

Over the past three weeks I’ve been thinking about how print journalists, advertisers and PRs have made the cross into cyberspace, and wondered about the problems they’re encountering. I read this article (I wish I could say stumbled upon this article, but I think that the phrase is taken), which explores various women’s presence on the Internet. It implies that the online communities run by women resemble their print glossies, with mommy bloggers and weight-loss bloggers and Sex and the City-type chicks attracting generous traffic volumes, and both representing and dictating what women read and think about online. I’d add that in response to these communities, bloggers like Violent Acres, Greta Christina and College Call Girl also attract large volumes of readers who react with antipathy to the latest hairdos-type discourses.

Caterina Fake, one of the founders of Flickr.com who has been in the news lately, surprised me by saying, “It is a rule of Web development that if you want a vital community, it has to start with women. It is just a higher level of discourse and behavior. If a site starts male, it stays male.” If I’m reading her correctly (and I may be doing so out of context), she’s implying that an essential, animated or alive community needs to be spearheaded by women in order for it to integrate genders. This comes from a woman who co-founded her incredible photo-sharing website in collaboration with her husband. For me, a site that represents a “higher level of discourse and behavior” would be Reddit. Apologies if you disagree, but to my mind, Reddit’s quirky humour, bizarre news and political debate creates a community that I can understand, interact with and gain knowledge from. Yet, the site was begun by men, and in this reddit poll, 86% of its contributors are male.

I don’t want to get lost in a gender debate, or to shoot my mouth off about feminism or any of those tricky concepts. Bear in mind also, that my country of origin is behind others in its embrace of online business and interaction, and so the people I see and speak to are surprised when I, a girl, know what Python is and can sing “Never Gonna Give You Up” at parties.

Putting that aside, I am your typical girl online who thirsts for what Fake dubs a “higher level of discourse and behaviour”, and the majority of the communities I interact within and the sites that I read are occupied by and run by men. In many, many cases I feel proud of a woman’s contribution to publishing online. But I don’t think that those sites which are dreamt up and put into practice by women all offer crucial content, and I don’t think that there are enough women online to convert a site that “began male” into a balanced readership. It has nothing to do with which sex thought up the great ideas. I think the difference lies in who is there to interact with them.