Be heard on the issues that matter most to you!
Dear friend, Amanda Brooks, has an excellent post at Bound, Not Gagged. In it she discusses a certain big blogging kahuna and his ignorance of blogs & websites run by sex workers. Seems he's never bothered to look, just assume he's cooler than anyone else because he believes in his own 'blogger authority'.
Here's what I have to say about it .
I run Sex-Kitten.net.
Gracie, thanks so much for linking to that post. I've been thinking a lot these days about what it means to have "authority" outside the mainstream media or academic circles, and it's an interesting puzzle, but I think by focusing on the intended community of readers, as you do, and by focusing on tools like Technorati, as you do, you're hitting the proverbial nail on the head.
Scholars often judge the authority of a piece of research by how often it is cited by other researchers. This can be in a very very small field, so it isn't about raw numbers, really. Tools like Alexa and Technorati do essentially the same kind of thing for bloggers: show how many times a piece is accessed, or how many links refer back to it. Again, the smallness of the interested community doesn't necessarily diminish the authority of the piece.
Those are not perfect indicators of course (lots of people might link to a very superficial piece just because it's amusing, for example) and this also makes me think about the responsibility we have as interested writers/thinkers/bloggers/sex workers/etc. to be out there reading and commenting on each others'work. I know how easy it can be for me to forget that part as I focus on my own writing or other work, but those discussions are another way for readers to judge the authority of an original piece. It's sort of akin to the kind of question/answer sessions after a research presentation, or the letters in response to a research article.
Thanks for raising these issues. They're really important as we keep expanding the space -- online and off -- for discussion of sex-related issues! The workers at Bound, Not Gagged have done a great job at expanding that space, and I'm glad you drew more attention to Amanda's post. Just the kind of thing that helps to build recognizable authority!
...because public space really matters!
Elizabeth
