The great big crap-ass democracy of blogs turns out to be just another smelly old boys club. "[W]hen 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 3 women on its list of 25. 'It's disheartening and frustrating,' said Allison Blass, a BlogHer attendee whose personal blog at www.lemonade-life.com is about living with Type 1 diabetes."

"At the seminar 'How to Take Names and Be Taken Seriously as a Political Blogger,' many women said that their male colleagues and major media groups tended to ignore them, and to link to them less often (unless they are Arianna Huffington). They pointed to the Netroots Nation gathering (formerly known as Yearly Kos) for politically progressive bloggers, occurring that same weekend in Austin, Tex.

"[Lisa] Stone, one of the BlogHer founders and a former journalist who has produced blog networks for HBO and E! television, said that like other women at the conference, she was disappointed at the scheduling conflict [...]

"Other prominent female bloggers who did not attend the BlogHer conference agreed that there are unique challenges that women in the blogosphere face.

"'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.

"A few months before last year's conference, Kathy Sierra, a technology blogger, received death threats from commenters on a variety of blogs. It prompted a flurry of discussion at BlogHer about whether women were the targets of particularly vituperative online attacks." [NYT]

So it's official. The world of blogs is garbage. But, at least it's gonna die.