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October 31, 2006 Motherlode Part I: The Talk 
I think I'm the last one to get to this, but you know you're dying to read it: Links to the slides and handouts are embedded at the appropriate spots so you're not left scratching your heads and wondering, what is she going on about? A bit of the post-talk discussion is included at the end. On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're a Dog: Blogging About Mothering a Child with Physical Differences The New Yorker published a cartoon in 1993 that has come to symbolize the supposed anonymity of the virtual world. “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Now, I have dear friends, old friends, friends who are kind and generous and loyal and who say that they admire my tenacity in debate, who call me a pitbull. And let me tell you, if I can’t hide my metaphorical dogness online, there is no way a literal canine could ever get away with it. Sadly, not only can everyone see who you are, but it matters. In my nineteen months as a blogger of a child with a physical difference, I’ve realized that other bloggers whose children are different receive, on average, less traffic and attention than bloggers whose children are healthy and develop typically. Two questions present themselves: How do we know this is happening, and why is this a problem? How do we know this is happening? I pursued two lines of research: a literature review and a statistical analysis of blogrolls (my own and several others). The literature review was surprisingly fruitful. Bloggers are a self-referential bunch--if we didn't like to talk about ourselves, we wouldn't blog, after all--as shown in the annotated bibliography (http://www.athenadreaming.org/bibliography.doc ). Clay Shirky's paper "Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality", known as Shirky’s Law is the most frequently referenced. His thesis was that in any field where there are too many choices to be aware of them all—say, the blogosphere, which Technorati now pegs at over fifty million—the choices of those who have come before will have increasing influence on the choices of those who come after. For example, blogrolls function as advertising, making more people aware of the existence of a linked blog, and therefore more likely to read it and link to it than to another, unlinked one. Shirky argued that the inequality was fair because the system is a meritocracy. Other researchers take issue with this and trace how gender and age affect a blog’s perceived legitimacy; in one paper, the lower status of LiveJournal as a blog medium is argued to be in part a result of its dominance by women and teenagers. However, there is nothing in the literature I’ve found that covers mothers. On to the blogroll analysis. I first determined the connectedness of the various communities represented within my blogroll—that is, I visited each blog on it and read through its blogroll to see which other blogs that I read it linked to. I then divided it roughly by community—diabetes, adoptive, special needs, and so on—to see to what degree blogroll links were segregated by community. As you can see, segregation was dramatic. (http://www.athenadreaming.org/connectedness_chart.pdf) (The lines separate various vaguely defined communities (adoptive parents, post-infertility, 'regular' parents, and what SarahLynn from 'Yeah, but Houdini didn't have these hips' calls "Double Dutch Mamas"--after much reflection I think I'm stealing that phrase.) Anyway, the pink squares are the links between the blogs, and there are definitely more links between blogs in the same community.) I also collected some basic statistics on each of the blogs I subscribe to through bloglines—number of bloglines subscribers as a proxy for readership, number of blogs that linked to that blog, and the number of blogs that blog linked to; these were labeled “subscribers,” “links in” and “links out” respectively, in case your head is starting to ache from the number of times the word “blog” is repeated in the previous sentence. I then calculated the number of links in per subscriber and the number of links in per link out and ranked the list by each metric, then analyzed it. I found, again, segregation. One might argue that my blogroll is not representative. I agree. It’s not. It’s likely to be optimistic, because I participate in so many different communities. But assumption is not proof; so I incorporated data from five randomly chosen blogrolls. I chose the first five mom blogs on each of these blogrolls that were not previously included in my research, visited them, and gathered the same information. I found the same patterns. This list of blogs and their data was then incorporated into my own blogroll list and analyzed as a group; again, the same patterns emerged. The recitation of the statistics alone would take all of my remaining time; but I’ll point out a few of the more suggestive ones. Moms of children whose children have a physical difference or a physical, emotional or cognitive delay were more than twice as likely to occupy the bottom quartile of blogs when ranked by any metric than the top quartile. (http://www.athenadreaming.org/Statistical_Summaries.doc) (This summarizes three of the metrics; I think the results are fairly dramatic.) In fact, while five of the ten blogs on the bottom of the list when ranked by the number of bloglines subscribers are written by SNM bloggers, only one of the top ten is. (http://www.athenadreaming.org/subscriber_rank_list.pdf) (The coloured bars are the Double Dutch blogs.) Even worse, blogs featuring children with physical disabilities--coded purple--were twice as likely to occupy the bottom quartile than the top three quartiles; and blogs featuring children who were different or ill but not disabled or delayed suffered less of a penalty. This list summarizes the SNM bloggers separately so that this can be seen more clearly. (http://www.athenadreaming.org/snm_bloggers.pdf) (Purple is physical disabilities; green is T21; orange is for health issues; yellow is rare or generally unspecified; blue is autism.) In other words, even within the world of SNM blogging, there is a hierarchy. This was not what I expected to find when I was putting my proposal together last year. I intended to stand here today and tell everyone about the wonderful support and community to be found in the momosphere for moms of children with special needs—but this is hard to do when you don’t have a community. My daughter has a genetic syndrome resulting in dwarfism so rare that it’s never been diagnosed and isn’t likely to be. I have yet to find a single other family online with a child who has Frances’s particular mix of symptoms. However, I have managed to dip my finger into many online communities to which I have a connection. It’s afforded me an opportunity to witness how these communities interact, or rather, don’t. The strongest example I have is when a mainstream radio station, movie or TV show uses the word “retard” or one of its derivatives (fucktard, blogtard, etc.). There are posts from dozens of DS blogs for weeks about what a hurtful term that is, how it devastates them to hear it in popular usage. This has never, to my knowledge, moved outside of the DS community. Arguably, it’s the folks who don’t live with DS who need to hear this message, but I have seen little proof that they do. So there’s the first part of my answer to the question: Why is this a problem? Because we can learn from each other; but not if we never step foot outside of our own communities. When I began to put my talk together, I blogged about it. While the overall response was positive, in some quarters it set off a minor firestorm of incredibly useful blog posts. For instance, I hadn’t before considered that people might not see segregation as a problem. Several alternative explanations for this phenomenon presented themselves on multiple occasions, and I will take a few moments to refute them: 1. maybe they don’t write as well There’s no reason for writing ability or a desire to promote oneself to be unequally distributed between mothers depending on the health or development of their children, so the first two can easily be dismissed. It is possible that SNM bloggers are so enlightened that they simply don’t care about traffic or visibility; but I don’t think it’s relevant, anymore than it would be relevant to argue that we shouldn’t care about the gaps between men’s and women’s wages because maybe women don’t want to earn more money. Besides which--again--there's no reason for mothers of children with special needs or differences to be less desirous of validation and feedback. It is true that the segregation is partially voluntary, as evidenced by the first chart, (this goes back to the first slide: note that outgoing links and incoming links are both segregated to a large degree; however, also note that half of the Double Dutch blogs have outgoing links to blogs by 'regular moms,' whereas only 3 of the regular mom blogs have links to Double Dutch blogs) except for those SNM bloggers like myself who have no community to self-segregate to. But SNM bloggers need to have more outgoing links for each incoming link they have, for instance, which shows that it takes more effort for the same reward if your child is different. (This goes back to the statistical summaries slide.) So voluntary self-segregation doesn't fully explain it. And it is a waste of the internet’s potential. Our lives are already segregated. Most of us spend our days surrounded by persons whose class, racial and economic backgrounds and levels of physical ability are equivalent to our own. The internet offers the increasingly rare opportunity to learn about the first-person, real-life experiences of persons in radically different circumstances, unfiltered by experts. There is lots of rhetoric on the momosphere about how valuable this is. About how the momosphere represents the “real voices” of “real moms” and can front a new mother’s movement by fearlessly voicing our truths. As one woman said in one discussion on this topic (http://urbanmoms.typepad.com/the_mother_hood/2006/09/politics_101_a_.html), “I was amazed when I first happened upon a few blogs how profound and raw they were. Here was the true voice of the modern mom! This voice was not stifled or sanitized but was honest and true...I felt understood as a mother and challenged as a free thinking woman. I immediately knew that other women, non-bloggers, needed to hear this voice and know that someone, a whole community of 'someones', was speaking their truth, articulating beautifully their struggles, their woes, their fears as well as their passions, their joys and their dreams. This is the value of 'mom bloggers' from the perspective of an outsider.” The consensus appears to be that the truths about regular moms are not represented by books and magazines about moms—so why would that be less true of other groups? The internet is where we can learn first-hand from people different from ourselves. Who cares? First, the same people who overlook or dismiss these children online will do so in the real world where it has real consequences on jobs, housing, school, bullying and so on. Ontario implemented legislation to make all of our public spaces accessible to persons in wheelchairs. But why aren’t our public spaces accessible already? It wasn’t because architects and urban planners hated disabled people. It was because they simply never thought of them. It doesn’t have to be malevolent, it doesn’t have to be intentional, it doesn't have to be a conspiracy; overlooking a class of people through ignorance will have significant real-world consequences. Secondly, exclusion and invisibility hurt, no matter the environment. One of my favourite bloggers, Bad Mama (badmama.blogspot.com), writes not only of the typical mom struggles and triumphs but also of mothering a child with arthrogryposis, a skeletal dysplasia. In a comment on one of my posts on this subject (http://www.athenadreaming.org/Beanie/archives/2006/08/more_with_the_v.html), she wrote: “I've thought about taking the name of my daughter's condition out of my profile, so that people wouldn't read it and be turned away, thinking that they'll end up feeling sad to read about the poor crippled kid, but I want others to find it with a search for AMC. I've already been the subject of more than one 'pity post', as in 'reading this blog made me realize just how blessed I am with my beautiful children', and while I can appreciate what I think they are trying to say, I can't say it doesn't sting a bit. “I can tell by my stats that there are a *lot* of people who come to the blog, click on the links to the posts where I explain what she has and what we went through, and then are done. Apparently my writing isn't scintillating enough on its own to keep them reading--they just want to find out what is wrong with her and move on. “I can deal with my blog being boring. But few people read beyond the explanatory posts to find out. I don't know how to get people to look beyond to see that while my mothering experience is different in some ways from theirs, most of it is more alike than not alike.” The third problem is representation. The momosphere in Canada is relatively homogeneous. Fewer than 40% of Canadian women qualify for maternity leave; yet how many Canadian mom blogs are started by women on mat leave? And what does it say that the voices of women who don’t share this “universal benefit” are not included? What experiences and perspectives might they have to offer on the bloggy hot topics of the day, whether it’s the Choice in Childcare benefit or division of household labour? Over ten per cent of Canadian mothers return to work by six weeks after the baby’s birth; yet I can’t say that ten per cent of the blogs by Canadian mothers I’ve found were written by mothers working when their babies were six weeks old. Similarly, if the voices of Canadian mothers with children who have special needs are not represented in the momosphere, then the discourse is lacking a vital element that reduces its ability to represent Canadian mothers as a group. We know things that other moms don’t get a chance to learn, about access to health care, doctors, how the fear of CAS can influence your parenting decisions, the accessibility of playgrounds and schools. Can there be a mother’s movement without our voice? I don’t think so. This is a problem inherent in feminism since its earliest days. Robert Allerton Parker wrote an essay in 1915 in Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth magazine in which he said, “ [feminists] grow eloquent over ‘work’ and ‘economic independence’—revealing a pathetic detachment from the woman that does work, who might tell them something of the ‘glory of Labor.’ They would open all careers to women; but it is painfully evident that they desire only well-paid servile posts of the middle class.” If the internet as a medium is not capable of bridging such divides (which I am too much of an optimist to believe) then at least we need to be honest about who we can represent, which voices are included and which are not. It is simply wrong to state that the momosphere represents “mothers.” It represents a specific, relatively privileged subset of mothers. Those mothers have legitimate interests and concerns that deserve representation, but they do NOT deserve to be represented as the interests and concerns of all mothers. Lastly, as Jennifer pointed out, blogging is becoming a career choice for a few lucky individuals. Such opportunities as mainstream media exposure, advertising revenue and freebies for review are offered only to bloggers with the traffic and visibility to make them worthwhile. If traffic and visibility are allocated based on such markers as race, class, sexual orientation or the physical or cognitive abilities of one’s children, then the money and goodies will be awarded based on those markers, too. Right now, we have the opportunity to make blogging what we collectively want it to be. The unedited real-life first-person experiences of real mothers have the potential to be very powerful—the question is, who gets the power? We can stay with the status quo, and the already-privileged can benefit even further from the increased visibility that blogging will afford them, as well as the financial benefits that the corporate world is starting to bring. Or we can challenge ourselves to move beyond privilege so the benefits of blogging can be enjoyed by all communities, so that all voices can be heard. If we do, the momosphere could be revolutionary. To begin this, we propose a Mom Blogger's Manifesto--a Momifesto, if you will--to incorporate the principles of transparency, honesty, bridge-building, dialogue and community that blogging does so well and so uniquely. This would be an evolving document--since we don't have all the answers--that other bloggers with an interest in these issues could contribute to, link to and publicly declare so the reading public can know where we stand. We hope that during the Q&A session--in just a minute, and thanks for your patience so far--you will contribute your own ideas about what it should include and how to make it work for all of us. The five of us care deeply about blogging. If we sound critical, it is because we have invested perhaps too much of ourselves in this medium, an art that has also connected us to many other amazing women. We want to see it become what it is capable of being—a revolutionary tool, a political tool, an art-form, a community. A real community, not one that is built around a brand name, and not one that is restricted to a narrow demographic group. ~~~~~ It's true, as Dani said, that I was so nervous I almost electrocuted all of us; but so what. It was a good nervous, a nervous that steadily heightened because I could see, as I spoke, people nodding in the audience, or scribbling notes while I talked. 'People are listening!' my brain chirped; and it's hard to concentrate on one's notes while one's brain is chirping at one. Sadly, we didn't get to the momifesto bit during our Q&A, because we had such a fabulous discussion on various mom blogging topics. What was incredibly gratifying was the number of people who said one of the two following things: "I remember ... what happened a month ago, and I could not believe that anyone would argue the homogeneity of the momosphere." "I'm so glad you brought up the homogeneity issue in your panel, because it's so true!" Depending on whether or not the speakee blogged. Both of which set of an internal cheering section. You know, I never thought it would be a controversial topic. I mean, what am I saying? That human beings are human beings, and continue to be human beings on the internet, including their less savoury aspects. How can that be shocking? Yet apparently it was. The first time someone put her hand up, introduced herself, and I realized that I knew her name from a major newspaper article about motherhood activism, I thought maybe I had electrocuted us all--it was a shock, literally, to see that some real movers and shakers decided our panel was worth their time at a conference jam-packed with interesting and inspiring sessions. Eventually I got used to it. Sort of. The discussion portion went to almost 7:30 (we were supposed to end at 7), which is always a good sign; and once we'd decided to wrap it up I had a chance to meet Emily and Cooper from Been There, a large portion of the Toronto mama blogging scene, and Andrea Gordon from the Star. Everyone was so complimentary, which was kind, and happy-making. The next post on the topic will be on that evening's Mother Talk, the lunch beforehand, and breakfast the next morning. Now that I put it that way, I realize there was a lot of eating involved. Posted by Andrea at October 31, 2006 6:18 AM under Web EMAIL this entry (comments fields are below this section) Comments I wish I could have been there! It sounds like you were great! Posted by: Casey at October 31, 2006 8:14 AM
This is a great paper, Andrea. Part of me is afraid to comment simply because when I do read other blogs and comment on them, my time is in such sort supply. Usually this means that I am flippant and terse. Your blog tends to demand more than that and I sometimes feel at a loss for what to say because of it. I do try to be politicized in my own blog here and there (and earnest here and there and goofy here and there) but there are so many places where I want to throw my political attention that I sometimes feel at a loss--pro-choice, pro-arts, pro-feminism. I live in a depressed region in Canada where there are so many local problems that I end up chipping away at things but often get overwhelmed. I also find that my politicized posts either get no coments at all or get a series of comments that have glossed over the point I was trying to make. This all likely harkens back to the problem with commenting that I outlined above--and that is a key problem with Mom blogging--even those with the most time to devote to it are stretched thin. One other thing that I would like to say is that, even if we fight for a more equal blogosphere, it will still only ever represent the voices of a very priviledged class b/c of the literacy factor. A person needs to be a fairly decent writer to maintain a blog and to attract and maintain readers. This harsh reality does contribute to the class problem of the mom blogosphere b/c even though literacy need not always break down along class lines, it too often does. I come from a working poor family and I am the only woman in as many generations as I can remember who has had high enough literacy skills to take on blogging. OK, none of this even touches on your key issue: that of parents with children who have physical differences but all these issues have been swirling around my head since the Urban Moms thing blew up last month--a time when I was just starting to read other blogs. I love reading your blog and will continue to do so. I will also continue to be politicized in my own writing (and earnest and goofy). I will also do my best to expand my reading horizons as broadly as I can, as time permits. Thank you for all this, for all these thoughts. Posted by: Mad Hatter at October 31, 2006 10:46 AM
Thanks, Casey and MH. MH, I like your theory: that I don't get a lot of comments because the posts demand too much thought. :D I'm not sure if I buy it, but I like it! I do notice the same thing: that the serious posts get fewer comments than the less-serious (for an example, the post directly below this one on the blog makeover is getting significantly more comments), and probably for the reasons you mention. But seriously, I appreciate what you say here. Of course, you're right: literacy and access will make us a privileged group regardless. Thank YOU, and you're welcome. Posted by: Andrea at October 31, 2006 11:07 AM
Damn, I wish I had been there. Happy Oct. 31! Posted by: liz at October 31, 2006 11:52 AM
That's interesting. There's something A.W. Tozer describes as "the fellowship of suffering" that theorizes that those who have experienced deep pain of one kind or another have a special connection with one another. I think we tend to blogroll those with whom we feel a connection (duh!). I know that part of what draws me so intensely to Moreena's blog is not only her beautiful family, but the fact that my mother is an organ transplant recipient and I have probably a 50% chance of needing a transplant myself in the next decade or two. My baby's health issues are (hopefully) relatively minor, but still they, and the fact that I've had a life frought with health issues in myself and in loved ones, do make me connect more strongly with others who have experienced or are experiencing pain. Even though those health issues are what I would consider minor in comparison to what some of the people I blogroll are going through. So I probably have a larger percentage of people on my blogroll with health issues or other difficulties because of that than I might if I'd led a perfectly normal, healthy life full of normal, healthy people. Of course, you can't really see who's on my blogroll because it's hidden at the moment and I've only made it about a third of the way through the alphabet in the first of about 10 categories in transferring it from bloglines to blogrolling. Posted by: Purple_Kangaroo at October 31, 2006 12:45 PM
PK, absolutely. Communities are wonderful things. I'm not anti-community, by any stretch; I enjoy the relationships I've built online tremendously. But at the same time, I'm aware that the communities seem, at times, impregnable; that each community has built itself its own castle and principality, and communications between them are sometimes fraught, and sometimes lacking. I don't think communities shouldn't exist--I don't think people shouldn't feel stronger bonds with folks who are more like themselves--I do wish, strongly, that we ventured outside of those communities to talk to each other more often. Or even better, listen to each other. It's a wonderful feeling to connect with someone online and feel we've forged a bond. But I learn more from people I don't have that bond with. Posted by: Andrea at October 31, 2006 2:07 PM
Andrea, first - I love the new look! Second, I hope my teasing of you about the water-glass came through with the affection with which it was intended. It really was a rush to be heard and acknowledged and understood with real faces instead of just typewritten comments, wasn't it? Posted by: Danigirl at October 31, 2006 2:38 PM
I can't get comments page to refresh, so bear with me if I'm repeating what has already been said. Purple Kangaroo's point resonated with me, and as I looked at my blogroll, I could see the quality of "fellowship in suffering" in many of them. As I think about the issues raised by your talk, my mind keeps coming back to two compounding things: time and money. Money, first, because it costs money to maintain a blog, and it costs even more if you don't have the tech skills yourself and have to farm that out to someone else. I am actually in this camp, only I farm it out to my husband, who is tech-savvy, so it doesn't cost me any coin, per se. Time is an issue in two ways. First, the obvious factor of having time to do it, whether it's during maternity leave, after it, or while working from the/ in the home. It simply takes time to write, and even when a person has the intention to blog, the cash to do it, the time to do it right now, it doesn't always mean that those circumstances don't change. Since it takes time for a blog to develop a readership, if the blog only endures for a year or so, or it takes a hiatus, then it won't have a chance to make connections outside the original, homogenous group. This is just thinking while typing, so my thoughts don't feel well-formed. Feel free to point at this and laugh. Posted by: amy at October 31, 2006 5:18 PM
That was an excellent, excellent post, and I'm sure, an even better talk. Posted by: suze at October 31, 2006 7:17 PM
Really well written paper! I like the way you have tied the issues of children with physical differences to the broader issue of the reproduction of "real world" socioeconomic/class/privileged conditions in the momosphere. Happy October 31! Posted by: kris at October 31, 2006 9:49 PM
Andrea was more than just brilliant: it was the way she presented. She was so calm and so stately: so together. I was so proud of what she said and how she said it that I wanted to hug her 50 times, but that would have been undignified. And I might have scared her. :-) Posted by: Ann Douglas at October 31, 2006 10:41 PM
Andrea, I have been reading your blog for a couple of months now and I think this post is saying some really important things. I would've loved to hear the Q&A session after you presented it! I feel I should say that I haven't commented here before because of a certain amount of disconnect: I'm not a Mom, although I am a Canadian woman. Posted by: Stacey at October 31, 2006 10:48 PM
This is totally unrelated to your post (which is brilliant). But. At my house the floors are always covered in kid stuff -- crayons, little pieces of paper, scissors (!), blocks etc. I am trying to teach the kids to clean up; but here's the thing. They're too short. They have to do all their projects on the floor because the chair/table ratio isn't right. I do have a kid table but it's not wide enough; my kids would need a four-foot square table! Anyway I was thinking of this dilemma I have and wondering how it is for you, when your daughter is the size of a 9-month-old. Do you have a solution, or does Frances play on the floor too? Posted by: Jennifer at November 1, 2006 2:43 AM
Jennifer, she does play on the floor a fair bit. But thanks to my parents, we also have a few pieces of kid-sized furniture that's useful--my Dad made her a table and chairs that are the right size, and he installed a lazy susan in the middle of the table so that's where her paints and crayons go. And my mom bought her a tiny little bookcase that's shaped like a castle, and that's where her downstairs books and puzzles go. We also have a few laundry baskets and rubbermaids arranged strategically for toys to go in. But yes, there's a lot of stuff on the floor. Ann--thank you. But I was not calm. At all. I'm glad to hear I looked calm, though. kris and suze--thank you. Dani, you goose, yes, I got that. :) And yes, it was a rush. Amy, I would not point and laugh. Even if I disagreed, I wouldn't point and laugh, it's just not in me. Time is an issue, I agree--though I think it's worth pointing out that I've only been around for 19 months and I've managed to parachute into a lot of communities where I don't, really, have any business being. I mean, I'm not adopted adn I haven't adopted, but there I am, reading away and commenting on various blogs in the different adoption communities, and I've learned a LOT from doing so--a lot that I hope has made me a better and more thoughtful person. Also--again--I'm not anti-community. I just wish we spent more time talking across these perceived boundaries; and where we can't, I wish we were honest about who is truly being represented in our communities, whose truths are being spoken. Because it's not everyone's. There are a lot of people whose truths are either fetishized and elevated (which is a problem, just as it's a problem when men put women on a pedestal) or ignored (more obviously a problem). It has gotten mainstream feminism in trouble a thousand times to claim to speak for "all women" when it doesn't and can't. I think it's important to try to avoid that, where possible, even if all we can do is say, "You're right, we can't speak for all women or all moms. The only people this particular community can speak for is x." Stacey, thank you. Comments like that mean a lot to me. And you're right, I'm a very lucky mom--something I tell Frances every day. Posted by: Andrea at November 1, 2006 8:02 AM
Andrea, I agree that we learn much from those who are different from us. Interestingly enough, some of the blogs I frequent most regularly are from people who seem on the surface about as different from me as one could get. But there's always some similarity or connection; some spark that makes me feel connected enough to them and interested enough in what they are saying to keep coming back. It would be nice if we could somehow foster more people developing a skill of finding that spark or connection with people who are in most ways quite different from themselves. I think it's when we're willing to look for the ways someone different from us is not actually so different after all that we really start branching out and beginning to relate better to a wider variety of people. I don't know if that makes sense the way I said it. BTW, I'm not going to be able to take part in the holiday extravaganza thing this time around. Just so you know I didn't accidentally miss the deadline; it's just not going to work out. It sounded like fun, though. Sorry. Posted by: Purple_Kangaroo at November 1, 2006 8:29 AM
Three things: 1) Your presentation was excellent Andrea. A real eye-opener, and I think you covered some very important topics. 2) I need to point out something niggly that has been bothering me. You said: "I visited each blog ... and read through its blogroll to see which other blogs that I read it linked to. I then divided it roughly by community—diabetes, adoptive, special needs, and so on—to see to what degree blogroll links were segregated by community. I ain't no statistician, but I don't think it's fair to categorize people merely on their words or their "about us" page. Your results would have more impact if you asked the bloggers what category they belonged to, why they write what they write, and why they link to some people and not others. Is it not knowing that those other blogs exist? It it because they don't make compelling reading? Both are valid reasons. There was when a blogger in the panel audience who mentioned that she never mentions her race in her blog. In reading her blog it would be easy to assume she's Caucasian because the majority of bloggers are Caucasian. But she doesn't identify herself by race at all. My point is that we don't know. We can't know unless the person mentions it. It stands to reason that some of the blogs we're reading may not mention the health details of their children. Also, the parents who have differently-abled children are in the minority of parents, so doesn't it also follow that they wouldn't be linked to as much? I dunno. These are just a couple things whirling around in my head. I don't mean to be confrontational about any of this (and I hope that my words aren't interpreted that way) but I have enjoyed the discussion so far and I appreciate that you are asking the big questions. :) Posted by: andrea from the fishbowl at November 1, 2006 12:55 PM
No; respectful dialogue is good. However, I have actually thought about this: re: the communities, it's true that I might have missed some. But, first of all, I took every effort not to. I didn't just read the about us page, I read over the category titles, any information about any children wherever linked, and a page or two of entries. It's possible that I still missed some, BUT. What is this really saying? That bloggers with children with differences but who hide those differences on their blog are more visible and get more traffic than bloggers who are open about their children's differences? I don't think that makes it better. I think that makes it worse. (Besides which, it's just as likely to be true on the bottom of the list as on the top; so very likely if all the closeted SNM bloggers were outted, the overall distribution would not change much.) Much as N's point (I'll maintain her anonymity here) actually reinforces the racist substructure of the blogosphere: in a non-racist world, anyone could talk about their ethnicity and heritage without worry that their readers would form a different opinion of them, or be less interested. It is a form of white privilege to be able to assume that everyone who doesn't mention their race is white. It is a form of racism to have to grapple with the question of whether or not to disclose your racial background for fear of the consequences. So those top ten bloggers I was talking about either have totally healthy and normal kids, or they don't and are hiding it; but in either case, they are being rewarded for the appearance of having totally normal and healthy kids. Both ways, it's not good. re: "Also, the parents who have differently-abled children are in the minority of parents, so doesn't it also follow that they wouldn't be linked to as much?" NO. No no no. I can't say it enough. No. That's like saying that a blog by an asian woman should naturally have fewer links, because she's in the minority (here in N America; not globally, obviously). That only makes sense if you believe that a person's ethnicity--or their children's abilities or appearance--determine what they can and will say, what they can write about, and how universal it is. I'm sure you, as a writer, would be horrified if anyone were to tell you that you shouldn't expect non-parents to enjoy your writing, or to be able to write about subjects or issues that extend beyond parenting. Or that, if you ever write about parenting, you should expect non-parents to be bored or to avoid you because you have now limited yourself as a 'mother writer.' I don't spend the majority of my time w/ Frances thinking about her size. I spend it thinking, she's cute! She's smart! Did you hear what she just said? I love being her mom, what a great person, I'm so lucky. And then, maybe once a week when it comes up, geez dealing with her size is tough sometimes. But that's it. As Carrie said in her comment, the vast majority of my experience in mothering Frances is identical to your experience in mothering your girls. And it is the same with every other parent of a different child I know of. LauraJ, for instance, does not spend her time with her son bewailing his wheelchair. Her blog is almost entirely--he's cute! he's happy! I love him! Look at his smile! He's learning x! What a great guy, I'm so lucky to be his mom--just like you. Except that every once in a while, the wheelchair is an issue--normally when they're going somewhere. But that wheelchair is not their lives together, and it's not her mothering experience. Carrie does not spend most of her time writing aobut her daughter's inability to walk or her hip placement issues. She says, she's wilful! Terrible twos! I love her so much! POtty training! Sleep issues! Toys! Feminism! Raising a daughter! I love her so, I can't imagine my life without her--just like you. And then sometimes she writes about the surgeries, too; but anyone's child could have surgery, at any time. And the whole point of this is, that the experience of parenting (even when our kids seem different because of some surficial characteristic of ability or cognition or development) is vastly the same. We all adore our kids. We all think we won the parenting lottery. We think more aobut our kids as individuals than as representatives of some group, and we relate to them as individuals. We are all sleep-deprived. WE all worry about barbies or guns or princesses or bullying. We all struggle with getting our kids to eat nutritious food. The barriers erected between these communities are essentially artificial. That these artificial boundaries end up defining a blog's or a writer's reach or audience is a crying shame, as much as when a female author is limited to "women's fiction" because people can't believe that a woman could have something interesting to say to a man; it also reflects badly on our abilities to see beyond our relatively trivial differences into the vast and substantial bedrock of our similarities as parents. Posted by: Andrea at November 1, 2006 1:59 PM
Brilliant! I loved every minute of reading this! You are a wonderful writer and I bet you were an even better presenter. Way to go for throwing your rock and setting ripples in the water! Posted by: LauraJ at November 1, 2006 5:25 PM
I suppose my comment was more about the actual information gathering process... we can argue methodology forever... All that aside, I think you made a great point in your presentation about how effective blogging can be in terms of communicating the issues facing differently-abled members of our society e.g. playground equipment in schoolyards. Someone needs to talk about it, because I think the mainstream media hasn't been doing a great job of raising this kind of awareness. Posted by: andrea from the fishbowl at November 1, 2006 7:57 PM
I too think this was a great presentation, and it isn't because I was a good chunk of it :-) (thank you for that, btw, it was very flattering and made my mom very proud). I wish I could have been there to see it. I specifically took the categories out of my blogroll, because I felt that if I didn't want be categorized, it wasn't fair to assume others did either. Plus, I hoped that people would click on a link to Moreena's blog or Kidneys and Eyes and read for a bit before realizing that there is something "extra" going on. Also, I am also one of those people who don't comment much on long posts, usually, because they are the kind of posts that make me want to write thoughtful and reasoned responses, which I rarely have time to do. I suppose a quick "me too!" is better than nothing, so I'll have to work on that. Posted by: Carrie at November 1, 2006 8:39 PM
I found this interesting from a non-blogger perspective. I am a reader of blogs without my own blog. I do find communities of bloggers and when I find one I like to explore as much as I can find of it. I am interested in blogs about children because I love children. From reading mom-blogs I connected to infertility blogs. In exploring those I found adoption blogs. Right now I am exploring China adoption blogs and trying to find more blogs from birth mothers, discussions of international adoption and adult adoptees. It is not always easy to find your way to the individuals you are seeking. Each step creates a new awareness and understanding -- gives me a perspective I cannot otherwise have. That is compelling to me. In every area I have visited there are blogs that I can't let go of as I move on to another area. I suppose it could be said that the authors are good writers, but there are a lot of good writers on the web. The blogs I have to follow are the ones where I feel an emotional response to the author. I feel affection or respect or admiration or tenderness. The question whether these feelings are 'real' since I never meet that individual IRL seem pointless to me. I want to stay connected to those individuals and so I do. In the case of blogs of children I have links to a few that I have come across, such as yours. But I don't feel that I know or understand Frances through your blog. I am coming to know you a bit and I have an admiration and respect for you. I am also facinated by the fact that I don't understand you well. You open up doors to me that are new and expansive. It is you that I find in your blog. I experience Frances through your eyes but I would feel false sending an e-mail to Frances herself. I would feel like the false person my daughter always described as one who spoke to her in 'a kindergarten teacher's voice' when they didn't know her. I won't change my blog exploration to be less segregated because it makes no sense to me. If I reach a blog that I don't like the ideas, or the tone or even the black screen with white letters I leave. I don't have any desire to be combative or challenging to an author. I move on until I encounter something that snares me. It might be humor, honesty, insight or something I don't understand that draws me in but it is always that particular person. I would be one of the readers who might read the bad mother's archives to understand something I didn't understand. I might return to explore more or not. It would depend if I was snagged by the author. But I would leave with an awareness that I didn't have before. I keep returning to 'A Letter to my Children' because I find that woman's character so admirable. It is difficult to collect too many beloved blogs because I can spend the whole day lost in reading blogs. I have to discipline myself somewhat. So, I move on. That might make a blogger like 'bad mother' just looking at statistics feel rejected, or that she didn't get a chance to be heard. If I read your archives, it was not just because I wanted to understand a diagnosis - I can google the name for that. It is because I wanted to meet you, the author. I try to leave a comment but I may have nothing to say about the current post, I just enjoyed getting to know you a bit. For me, the fact that there are groups of blogs that encompass an area, whatever it is, gives me a chance to explore a community with some dimensionality. (If that is a word at all it cannot be spelled correctly.) Then I move on because I there is always more to find. Posted by: Gillian at November 2, 2006 3:05 AM
Gillian, to me, what you describe is the essence of non-segregated blog reading. Segregated would be if you found a handful of people in roughly the same demographic and lifestyle spot as yourself, and read them exclusively. This, in particular: "I move on until I encounter something that snares me. It might be humor, honesty, insight or something I don't understand that draws me in but it is always that particular person. I would be one of the readers who might read the bad mother's archives to understand something I didn't understand. I might return to explore more or not. It would depend if I was snagged by the author." What jumps out from me in that is what snags you isn't superficial lifestyle choices or differences in appearances, but that you can and do see the person underneath and feel a connection to them. And that's exactly the sort of thing I'm trying to get at. Segregation isn't that there are communities of common experience; it's when people inside those communities of common experience batten down the hatches and repel all intruders, and often not intentionally at all, sometimes just by forgetting who isn't in the community. Carrie, LOL Good! I'm glad you're comfortable with that; it made me a bit nervous to quote you but you so perfectly said what I was trying to get at, and it's always helpful to have someone else say it. And please don't feel any comment guilt--I know I personally have just adapted to the idea that the more thoughtful posts will get fewer comments. andrea, agreed, the methodology issue is tricky. I think my process is defensible, but it's not iron-clad. I'd love it if someone with more tools and time at their disposal was able to take a go at this idea more rigorously. Posted by: Andrea at November 2, 2006 7:50 AM
I've been mulling and mulling, and I guess I'll jump in again, simply because I'm not convinced that I've managed to articulate, yet, the crux of my resistance to some aspects (certainly not all) of what you're presenting here. As you know, I have trouble with the idea that blog traffic is a "good" that is significantly comparable to money or job opportunities. I think it's inevitable that the kind of statistical analysis you're doing here (counting hits and links, etc.) will present the blogosphere in terms of individuals competing with one another for the resource of blog readership. Undeniably, we bloggers are individuals, and we (often) want more readers. But the dominant metaphor I use to think about the blogosphere is a set of rooms in which conversations are taking place. Some of these rooms are larger than others, and each blogger has to decide for herself which room to enter, how much time to spend there, and how many other rooms she wants to stick her nose into. When I started blogging, I pitched my tent in the room where MUBAR and HBM and Mom-101 were holding forth, surrounded by various admirers who were having their own (quieter) conversations. This seemed like a pretty big room to me (it was the only room I knew about), so I jumped in. Shortly thereafter, I discovered a whole network of Christian bloggers (mostly through links from Rocks in My Dryer). They have their own awards (Blogs of Beauty) and their own, ever-so-slightly-different conventions from the "secular" room that I had been a part of. I listened in on that conversation for awhile, and then made a conscious decision to stay put, so to speak, rather than joining that community. I made that decision for a variety of reasons: I would feel constrained in both environments, in different ways (feeling that there are certain things I can't or shouldn't blog about). Ultimately I felt more comfortable in the "non-Christian" part of the blogosphere. (Though, of course, I have discovered gradually that there are lots of Christians who are a part of this particular community, and who acknowledge their faith comfortably even though they don't make their blog an explicitly Christian all-God-all-the-time sort of thing.) Of course I can write about whatever I want on my blog, and I have written about my faith occasionally, but the fact is that, like most bloggers, I'm aware of my audience, so I'm not going to write about Christian topics every day when I'm in the room I'm in. If the purpose of my blog were primarily to reflect on the relationship between my parenting and my faith, I would go elsewhere in the blogosphere to do that. One factor that I was aware of when I decided which "room" to enter is that the two communities were roughly the same size: the top Christian mommy-bloggers are well-represented in the top twenty of Blogtopsites (Parents), and the number of comments seems roughly equal to those I see in the blogs I read regularly. I suspect that would not be the case if I were reading Muslim mommy-blogs. I would suspect that women who write specifically about the topic of parenting as a Muslim woman are part of a smaller community than the women writing about parenting as a Christian woman. The principle of segregation is the same: both communities are segregated for basically the same reasons, but only in one case would that segregation translate into lower traffic. I don't think that's because people are more prejudiced against Muslims than they are against Christians (although they might be) - I think it's because the Christians are writing about Christian topics for a Christian audience, while the Muslims are writing about Muslim topics for a Muslim audience. In the second case, that audience happens to be smaller. Since then, I've stumbled across various other rooms. There's a HUGE room full of women discussing infertility, a smaller room full of mothers discussing their twins, and a room for women who want to talk about parenting a child with autism. The fact that some of those rooms offer the opportunity for a more intimite conversation does not strike me as an entirely bad thing - I'm not convinced that the biggest rooms necessarily have the most to offer. As I've moved around my particular room a bit more, I've also discovered women who have chosen to be there even though they have a child whose specific health or developmental issues are being discussed in depth in one of the smaller seminar rooms. Like me, these women have chosen to enter this particular room because on the whole they feel most comfortable there - certain topics may be met with a less knowledgeable response than they would be in a more specialized room, but this is where they want to be. If those women are consistently occupying the lower echelons of readership within that community (and the various other non-specific large-room communities), then I agree that discrimination is occurring. But if your stats are reflecting the fact that smaller rooms exist for people who wish to write primarily about a specific subject (whether it's their faith, or a health issue, or a disability), I'm not convinced that the discrepancy in readership is a problem. I do agree that there is much to be learned from sitting down awhile in another room: an adoption room, perhaps, or a Down's Syndrome room. But I don't regret the fact that the rooms exist, nor am I convinced that there's something wrong with staying in your own room. Blogging is only one of the ways of being in the world, only one of the ways of learning about people. Lucky for you, my battery is almost gone, so I'll leave it at that. Posted by: bubandpie at November 2, 2006 3:27 PM
I was wondering about the religious aspect, too. It must be a challenge, especially in a relatively small sampling, to take all the different variables into account: length of time blogging, frequency of posting, use of feeds and search engine optimization, involvement in community-building things like memes and carnivals, amount of time spent reading and commenting on other blogs, religion, politics, topics posted about, etc. etc . . . I find that all those things affect my blog traffic in different ways. When any one of those elements changes, my audience and amount of traffic changes. I'm really interested to hear, as you share more about your study, how you accounted for all those variables. BTW, I'm sorry I didn't finish filling out the survey. If I'd realized it was you instead of some random "how did they get my e-mail address?" person, I would have made getting more involved in the study a greater priority. Posted by: Purple_Kangaroo at November 2, 2006 3:57 PM
PK, I collected that info, but it became impossible to use it. There were too many confounding variables--for instance, many bloggers regularly shift domain names and hosts, but bring their readers with them. So their archives indicate that they're three months old, but they've been blogging for the same audience for three years; you just can't tell. But there's no reason to assume that Double Dutch bloggers are, as a group, more or less likely to engage in memes or carnivals or community-building exercises or whatever. That's why I dealt with group statistics, and not case studies. In fact, considering most of them were from my blogroll, I know that memes and the rest of it are fairly evenly distributed (even though it would have taken more time than I had to prove it). B&P, I don't think the metaphor matters. First, true, a lack of blog readers doesn't take food out of Frances's mouth. However, as I pointed out in the presentation, but would have had more impact if you were there listening to the others, MUBAR's talk was about the commercialization aspect. Commercialization is tied to audience and visibility. Bloggers with high levels of visibility and large audiences will get more opportunities for financial remuneration for blogging. That's a real, quantifiable good. However, even leaving that out, the rooms metaphor suffers from some significant problems. For one, you assume that someone from a smaller group is necessarily writing for a specialized audience intentionally. That is, that they have chosen a smaller room. There are some cases where that is undeniably true: to use your religion example, a person writing about muslim theology or wiccan theology from the perspective of 'how to live the faith' is clearly writing primarily for other muslims/wiccans. There are, as well, undeniably some parents of kids with special needs who primarily view their blogging endeavour as a way to raise awareness about specific aspects of that difference within their own community. They've chosen the small room. However, there are at least as many bloggers where other people chose that small room for them. Consider a person writing about islam or wicca for a general audience, to raise awareness about what the faith is really about and increase tolerance. They don't want the small room. Consider the parent of a child with T21/Down Syndrome who considers their blog a form of advocacy to raise tolerance and comfort around persons with T21. They did not choose the small room, even though they primarily write about a certain technical subject that affects a small number of people. A small audience may still be an inevitable result; but they didn't choose it. And I would argue that the small audience that results has more to do with the prejudices of the audience than anything inherent in the subject matter. But even more common is the blogger who writes almost entirely of general interest subjects, and still finds themselves stuck in that small room because once a month or so they write about something more specialized. For instance, BlogHer has me permanently categorized as a health blogger because last November I wrote a handful of posts during Diabetes Awareness Month. It was certainly not intended in any way as primarily communicating to other diabetics; it was specifically intended for a non-diabetic audience; and it is also certainly not representative of my normal content. But to BlogHer I will forevermore be known primarily as a type 1 diabetic. IN other words, by my difference. SEriously. Go look. I've even asked them to change it, to no avail. Similarly, with many other Double Dutch parents I know, the vast majority of their content is regular parenting stuff. My kids are so cute, listen to what they said last night, they finally walked/rolled over/said their first word/potty trained, I'm concerned about school/daycare, this is why I work/don't work for pay, this is why I breastfeed/don't breastfeed. It's exactly the same. And they're not being let into the big room that they clearly are trying to access. It doesn't take long to read them and realize that they don't see themselves primarily as "Special Needs Parents bloggers," but as parenting bloggers; and it also doesn't take long to read them to see that it's incredibly difficult as a member of that group not to be slotted into that small room regardless of what you write about. You'd damn well better believe that there are parents of kids w/ differences knocking on the door of that big room, and being politely escorted down the hall to a smaller venue that 'regular' parents think is more appropriate. It's happening. Not only have I seen it happening, parents in that situation have told me it's happening. So the room metaphor, unfortunately, does not let the momosphere off the hook. It's impossible to say how much of the segregation is voluntary and how much of it is not. Even if I sent out a survey (which I didn't--PK, see your email) the answers to such questions might not be indicative, as I can easily imagine a situation in which a parent of a child with differences, sick of knocking on that door, forswears the regular momosphere in disgust and decides to choose the small room after all. *ahem* Not that that's happened to anyone I know. Let me put it this way: You say you have blogged occasionally about christianity, and it hasn't affected your membership in the big room. Lots of parents of kids w/ differences blog occasionally about their child's differences, and find themselves locked out of that big room in short order. That's the difference. Posted by: Andrea at November 2, 2006 5:32 PM
If it surprises me that people are feeling locked out, perhaps it's because from my perspective there are many women in the "big room" (maybe it's really the medium-sized room?) who have children with differences: Em (three times three), you, T. (Redneck Mommy), Susan (Friday Playdate), Kristen (Home on the Fringe) (some children, of course, are more "different" than others). I've blogged occasionally about my fears that Bub may be on the autism spectrum. If we ever actually get to the top of the waiting list for the autism screening clinic, and he is actually diagnosed as such, I'll blog about that too - and I may start a separate blog devoted specifically to that issue, if I feel it would help me to do so. On a day-to-day basis, I go along assuming that everything will be fine, but I also know that the verbal gap between Bub and Frances, let's say, is simply immense - it's like they're from different planets. All of which is simply to say that I envision myself potentially making another choice about how and where to blog - and that I'll make that choice based primarily on what I want to get out of blogging and not on the basis of where the numbers are. Posted by: bubandpie at November 2, 2006 11:02 PM
Well, as I discussed in the talk, the degree to which that door remains closed depends in part upon in what way your child is different. Here's the chart of blogs by parents of kids who are different. Blue is autism, by the way; in the relative scheme of things, it appears to be less of a potential handicap than other forms of difference. Those most likely to be at the bottom are T21 and physical disabilities--the blogs you mention that I am aware of do not feature those particular differences. And neither does mine, incidentally; I'd argue that's a key reason why I am doing fairly well. Regardless, that sort of argument leads to tokenism. It's like saying that there's no such thing as systemic discrimination based on skin colour because you know a handful of rich black people. There's a reason I looked at the statistics of a group; most often, you just can't parse these things out based on case studies or anecdotes. I'm glad you're finding the blogging experience a welcoming one. I'm glad that you don't care about the numbers--though I'll point out that it's an easier stance to take when the numbers are treating you kindly, as they are. However, to use the same old income analogy, the choices of some women to take lower-paying part-time work and spend more time with their families does not invalidate the experiences of women who feel they are being slotted into lower-paying part-time work when they don't want it because of the assumptions of their employers. Some people are NOT able to get what they want out of blogging, not numbers, not community, not any of it; and it's related to their children's differences. Posted by: Andrea at November 3, 2006 8:08 AM
I can't get the link to work, and I do want to look at your chart. I'm not surprised that the autism blogs are fairly well-read, in the scheme of things - the number of children on the autism spectrum is chilling. As I understand it, T.'s son had some fairly significant physical challenges to deal with. The word "tokenism" implies to me that there is some degree of consciousness to it (along the lines of Stephen Colbert's joke that he has a vacancy for the position of "black friend" and he's accepting applications from interested black people). Is that what you mean? i.e. I read T.'s blog to prove I'm not prejudiced, pat myself on the back, and then blithely ignore the rest of the blogs I come across by women whose children have differences? (Using myself as an example here, not saying that you're singling me out in particular.) Part of the reason for my perspective on the research you've done is that I meet new bloggers (i.e. women who have just started blogging) fairly regularly - they show up at my site, let's say, and start commenting, and I visit them, and I see them commenting on other blogs I read, and then I see those other bloggers leaving comments on the newbie's site, and there's a gradual increase in readership and comments - it seems to follow a fairly predictable pattern (keeping in mind here that most of the blogs I read have started fairly recently). And among that group there are women who blog about their children's sensitivity disorders and global developmental delays and those bloggers seem to undergo the same process of gradually increasing their readership: I see them around here and there, I see people I know when I read the comments on their blog: the process seems to me to look very much the same for those women. And then I read the Perfect Post awards and see that several of them have been given to women who are blogging about their children's differences. And all that makes me think that discrimination is not as rampant as you're suggesting here (which is not to say that it doesn't go on, but that it doesn't seem to me to be as widespread and systemic a problem as your statistics would suggest if the sole reason for them is prejudice on the part of mothers of "normal" healthy children). I do realize that since the first time we discussed these matters, my position in the blog hierarchy has changed - my readership has gone up, and I seem to have passed a certain plateau that a lot of bloggers remain "stuck" at. I don't know how "popular" I'm likely to get - I certainly enjoy getting lots of comments. It's not that I don't care about numbers so much as that I recognize that it's absolutely essential to my enjoyment of blogging that I try very hard to discipline my natural inclination to care TOO much about numbers. Posted by: bubandpie at November 3, 2006 9:45 AM
I noticed that--I'll have to fix it when i get home. No, I'm not saying it's intentional. What I'm saying is that pointing out one or two or three individuals for whom systemic discrimination either did not happen or were not significant barriers is not cannot and will never be sufficient evidence for the claim that systemic discrimination does not happen, period. Homer was a blind slave who did pretty well for himself, but I don't think one could claim that slavery wasn't a significant barrier to life satisfaction or upward mobility for the majority of slaves in greco-roman society based on his example. That's why I didn't use case studies or anecdotes or what I 'see.' What you see does not mesh with what I see at all. Furthermore, what you see is not evidence, anymore than what I see is evidence. That's why I went out and did a lit review and collected statistics. Because what we 'see' is all too often influenced by what we expect to see. It's called the scientific method--hypothesis, experiment, results, discussion. It's not perfect, but I would much rather work with a process that has a tested approach for dealing with flaws in reasoning and methodology and new information than cast about in an endless ocean of speculation and expectations and anecdotes, with not a shore even to swim towards. I have said now, not even once but several times, that voluntary self-segregation explains part of it. Just not all of it. Seriously, B&P. It's in the original talk and it's stated again in the comments more than once, including directly to you. Not once have I made any speculation as to what extent discrimination explains the resulting picture. The farthest I have gone is to say that discrimination explains part of it, along with discomfort and ignorance and self-segregation. Please don't turn me into a strawman. Anyway, I'm done. My tolerance for repeating myself has officially run out. Posted by: Andrea at November 3, 2006 10:50 AM
Lots to think about here. I know I'll be coming back to it again and again. As a sometimes-mommyblogger, and the parent of a fairly obscure type of special needs child myself (though I rarely blog about his Tourettes/OCD/ADHD, because first I have to explain so much, but I guess you've done it and I can and probably should certainly do it), this really struck home. I notice, though, that most of my interaction online concerning SN is on forums or mailing lists - the larger numbers of people there, the ability to search for key words in certain topics in old posts, and sometimes even the moderation - well, it makes it a more useful avenue than blogging for me. Posted by: Sandy D. at November 7, 2006 12:20 AM
I can finally view the charts now; thanks for fixing them. I did find it interesting that you chose to include my blog in the "normal" category even though a majority of my blog posts over the past 15 months relate in some way or another to my child's health problems. But maybe you did this research more than a year ago, before I had a child with health issues? Or maybe Baby E's allergies and/or mystery illness isn't serious enough for you to consider her a child with health issues? Just curious. I know that there are others in your study with kids with disabilities or serious health issues that were probably discovered after you did this study, too. But maybe they aren't the specific type you were looking at. My blog and several others also use methods other than bloglines as the main way for people to subscribe to the blog. For instance, I have a Yahoo! Group set up to deliver posts via e-mail and have 15 members in that, plus at least 19 who subscribe via blogrolling. I'd be really interested to see if the rankings would change at all if feed subscriptions other than bloglines were included. This sort of thing is so fascinating to me. Someday I might have to undertake my own little study just to try to answer some of the many questions buzzing around in my head. :) Posted by: Purple_Kangaroo at November 10, 2006 7:59 PM
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