Gina Minks from Dell/EMC recently wrote up a post on her site as a reaction to a tweet of mine alleging that I (and apparently others) ignore female vBloggers. I can assure you that this is simply not true and as a matter of fact I ignore both male and female bloggers equally. What I mean by that is I really don’t have the time to constantly search for new bloggers that might be not listed on my vLaunchpad blog list. Bloggers come and go constantly and right now I maintain almost 500 blogs on my blog list. Between a day job, maintaining 3 websites, link collecting and blogging I rarely have time to even relax these days.
What I rely on to keep my vLaunchpad up to date is you coming to me and telling me you are not listed and need to be added. I typically add 40-50 new blogs a year to my site and do it in periodic batches as cutting and pasting table cells up and down to keep everything alphabetized is a lot of work. The reality is only a few female bloggers took the initiative and filled out the simple form to get added, Jane Rimmer, Amy Manley and Melissa Palmer, in fact Melissa was the overwhelming favorite in the New blog category last year and placed in the top 50.
Concerning female vBloggers this year I had a new category nomination in my Top vBlog voting for Favorite Female Blogger. Again this is all self-nomination as I can’t possibly keep track of who’s male, who’s female, who’s independent, who’s new, etc. I only had 2 nominations so I didn’t add the category to the final ballot. That was a bit disappointing as I was hoping there would be more, I even tweeted the below out hoping to attract more:
The bottom line is female vBloggers I’m not ignoring you, I just don’t have the time to search for you or any other blogger for that matter. I would love to have more female vBloggers on my list, so if you’re out there and your blog is related to virtualization simply use this form and I’ll get you added and hopefully next year we’ll have a much better response in that voting category. You can read my full response to Gina’s post here.
2 comments
Hi Eric,
As a female blogger that used to work for VMware and now works and blogs for Intel will you accept topics that are related to virtualization that may not be direct virtualization topics but ones about the infrastructure that supports virtualization? For example, how persistent DRAM is going to change how hyper visors work and process data or NVMe will change how VMs and virtualizaed applications store and retrieve data without using the SCSI stack in the hyper visor, etc… Would you accept those?
As Gina brought out there are so many topics that support virtualization though the changing infrastructure technology that are so important to consider in deploying a virtual environment.
As a female blogger how can I help you with awareness so that so many female bloggers are made aware of what you are doing so they can participate too?
Author
Hi Leah,
Absolutely, my criteria for blog listing is very loose as long as it somehow ties into virtualization in some way shape or form. I have not accepted very few submissions and those were mostly because it was a very sales/marketing type of blog. I also list blogs no matter the language they are published in, they are multiple blogs listed in several different languages.
I’d appreciate any help raising awareness whether its a tweet, word of mouth, email, linkedin etc. As long as I am alerted of a blog’s existence I go out and check out the blog and get it added. For my listing page the more blogs the better, I only remove blogs if they have been inactive for 1 year and then I just dump them into an archive section. The blogging world is huge these days and it’s been very difficult for me to keep up with it all so I mostly rely on people spreading the word by re-tweeting me or following my blog.
Regards,
Eric