10 New Voices - Wrapping it up here...

Of necessity this will be one of those internally referential posts, a bow to Kekule and the bezene ring, if not to Kekule and the benzene ring, if not to  Kekule and the benzene ring.

Jeneane started it, others rolled it around, and Halley took a stab at meme-ifying the whole thing  by challenging the lucky few at a Cambridge, Mass. invitation only event to seek out and link to ten new voices, people who blog and who are not white, USian males.  (The event had started in a cloud of bad publicity after the organizers were sued "for violation of The United Nations long-standing trademarks, including the United Nations name, image, and patented seating configuration.")

Since I have long been considered a man of the peeps, and a party-crasher to boot, I took up Halley's challenge. 

On March 13 I identified my first two "new" (to me) voices.  Number One was Keith Jenkins. I continue to read Keith and my respect for his balanced professionalism grows stronger the more I'm exposed to his work.  I don't always agree with him, of course.  Anyway, number one was a keeper.  His blog is beautiful and deep.

Number Two was Lisa Stone. Lisa has been a disappointment.  She's a working single mom, engaged with web publishing projects like the NASCAR blogs and she's a concerned feminist advancing the BlogHERcon project.  The disappointment is that she hasn't had time to post in the last ten or eleven days since I started tracking on her.  I'm waiting eagerly for her next blog posting.

There's a blogger named "Memer".  He's a black, middle-aged male writer from Toronto.  Memer, or "Norm de Plume" as he has also been known to call himself writes a good blog and is always engaging when I see him in a comment thread.  Memer's sick today.  Get well soon Memer.  While not a new voice, Memer's qualification for the diversity game is shaded by his anonymity.  There are a lot of really good writers writing anonymously.  The (other) Peter at loosepoodle comes to mind, and of course the brilliant Harry.  Bruce at the River is another one, and the Happy Tutor -- less anonymous today than he was a few years ago.   

And white males... I wish the offshore limit on white males could have been raised.  Niek, in Holland, whose bout with the flu has passed is just another white male.  As is Stu in Germany.  And Mike in South Africa.  And Chris in Boulder (wait -- Boulder is mostly not offshore, is it).  And Gary near London.  And Allan in Tasmania.  And Doug in British Columbia.  And Brian in Toronto.  What about Ray Sweatman?  He's from Georgia which is as offshore as Boulder and we're pretty sure he's a white male.  Well, none of these voices are really new to me, so I don't mind excluding them from my ten new voices list which is a good thing because they are basically white, male and a couple of them are the more seriously proscribed USian white male. Where did this rant come from?  Am I conflicted maybe?  I read Doc and Dave every day too, and David W. and David I.  As I work to become more inclusive, I wonder what I'll be forced to exclude based on the fact that I'm not a lightning fast reader.

A few years ago, maybe three, I thought that to attract readers maybe I ought to offer interesting content.  I interviewed quite a few bloggers, posted the interviews and indeed my work reached a wider community than the six people and a ferret who were initially logging in and occasionally linking to my otherwise non-distinguished blog.  I started out interviewing women.  I really really liked interviewing women.  I could ask them all kinds of personal questions and then have my little Beavis moments at the keyboard ("Heh, she said WET").  I liked interviewing women enough that I had to consciously make the effort to add a few men to the mix.  I'm not a shoulder-punching, sports-watching, golfing/bowling/hunting/fishing kind of guy.  It's easier for me to talk to women.  Opening up to men, be they white, yellow, brown, avocado green or harvest gold, has been a rewarding experience.  I'm definitely not a Robert Bly/Male Bonding/Drum Circle kind of guy either.  I'm really just a smart-ass with a heart of gold.  I'm really pleased to have met so many fine people blogging and I'm aware that it's my privilege to listen when people address issues of exclusion or marginalization.

So back to the list...  Number Three is Sooz.  I met Sooz (Susan Taub) at the first BloggerCon but it's a big blogosphere and I never checked out her site.  In the face of the challenge to identify new voices, I read Sooz, and I'm proud to recommend her Boston based blog (rhymes with scrod - slant rhyme, of course) and to share her more widely.  That makes three of three that I'm keeping on my blogroll.

Numbers four, five and six are a little dicey... 

Number Four is Tara Calishain.  Tara is a web pro with an emphasis on search.  Staying current with her research buzz offerings would be a full time job, but it's nice to know that she's maintaining the resource.  She stays on my blogroll.

Number Five was LaShawn Barber.  I picked her because her work, while conservative, wasn't particularly strident.  Some folks said that they thought I was joking.  I wasn't.  I just made a terrible mistake.  She's a right wing smurf, adding power to the right wing A-listers and contributing nothing original or even admirable.  She's fired.  I'll take Memer's advice and substitute Avery Tooley. 

Number Five is now Avery Tooley.  His "Stereo Describes my Scenario" is a pursuit of truth that looks like it touches on some provocative stuff.  Like husband beating... when is it okay for a guy to hit back?  And the top five running backs.  The guy won me forever with the definitive "pop drinkers" map.

Number Six was and remains Faye Anderson.  Just go read her.  She's arch, sarcastic, conservative. She's conservative but she's not stupid.  Here she is on the current Republican cause celebre...

Republican efforts to force-feed brain-damaged Terry Schiavo over the objection of her husband and legal guardian represent a new low in partisan politics. The party of states’ rights sees no limit to the role of government in a family matter, the bedroom, back seat of a car or voting booth. The GOP’s "grotesque" pandering to its so-called right-to-life base again raises the question: What the hell is wrong with the religious right?

(I grabbed the now deleted LaShawn off her blogroll though so it could be said that she panders a little to the Coulter/Limbaugh claque).

Number Seven is Ka-Ping Yee.  He was at SXSW, and he's at a python conference now, and on the 18th he saw Alvin Ailey at Zellerbach.  I'm going to follow this guy and see what I can learn from him.

Number Eight is Paula Offutt.  Paula is working with a WordPress blog and the Gila theme. She's been gracious sharing thoughts in email, and it was her comment on a preceding post that got me off my butt to consolidate my Ten New Voices list.   Paula's in a chair and she points to stuff like the Topica CripHumor list ("By and For the Severely Euphemized").  She's on my blogroll for good.

Number Nine, Ten, and beyond I found at hewnandhammered.com.  Here's what I wrote about them.  It seems a reasonable way to close out this lengthy post!

I found my way in through side door at hewnandhammered following a link to someone calling him/her/themselves Cong Khi at Pho King. 

The sidebar at Pho King includes a list of links to "All our sites."   All their sites are wonderful:

• Urban Cartography
• Pho-King
• MoCo San Francisco
• Hewn and Hammered
• Typographica

There are people working on these sites who are mostly Americans, probably white, and in the case of Typographica at least, predominantly male.  So perhaps I've come full circle to reading what I like regardless of gender, ethnicity, nationality. 

It was a silly game Halley, but it served a purpose, evanescent though the conversation was in the gnat-life attention spotlight of blogaria. The meme seems to have crumbled.  A "month long challenge"  seems like an entire career in the life of this blogger. 

Comments

[Doug Alder]

You had a ferret? Damn I've never had a ferret reading my blog! A troll or two for sure but never a ferret. I'll have to up my weasel quotient I guess :)

[Elayne Riggs]

Dang, I thought I started it on March 1 with Estrogen Month (celebrating non-male bloggers who are new to me), which is going on Day 27 now...

[SB]

I have a really serious problem with this meme.

Too many of the blogs I read are doing it.

And I already read too many blogs.

[fp]

I know SB. But it's a good idea, especially for USians, because of the slow work we've made of tearing down the walls of male dominated white privilege. It's a true thing, no matter how much it makes some of us gag to address it.

[moe]

re: hewn & hammered and the rest of ours - mostly right. Typographica readers/writers are actually mostly European, not American, but probably 65%+ male. Pho King readers are mostly American but we have as many Asian contributors as anglos, and probably more women submit articles than men, but I'm not sure that can be extended automatically to indicate readership, but it probably can. Hewn & Hammered readers may be primarily anglo and are definitely mostly north American but more of the editorial boardmembers - at least those who submit articles - are women than men. And urbancartography.com's ed board is 75% male but one woman writes more than half the articles.

[Lisa Stone]

> "Lisa Stone has been a disappointment.

Thanks for the ping. I assure you that I've been hard at work, blogging daily over at Legal Blog Watch (http://legalblogwatch.typepad.com), my daily blog column for Law.com, covering Schiavo and Grokster. (Hmm, but then again, who hasn't...)

You've given me a good nudge - I think I'll start linking my daily Law.com headlines from Surfette so that folks know where I am. I don't want that move to be perceived as whuffie, but there's enough crossover between media and the law that I think I can get away with it. Let me know!

[fp]

Lisa... yes, I think cross posting referents are good things and you should do it so readers will have an opportunity to follow your broader body of work. I'm crafting a new wordpress blog that I hope will be more normatively balanced than my spewings here at Sandhill. I expect it will make me rich. And famous. Anyway, it's my intention to crosspost here to listics.com and vice versa. My mentor and illicit weapons connection Chris Locke does this from time to time between EGR and CBO, two blogs that I now realize are identified by TLAs and therefore have a certain infotech panache that's lacking in a lot of lesser sites.

Well, I'm in a "bidness center" in a Miami Airport hotel. Think I'll sign off now and head south.