Hello One and All,
I just want to be clarify my position on a few things. I feel that some of my sarcastic remarks in my post: A Sad Day for the BloggerIdol Contest 2012 & I divulge personal info may paint the picture that I to quote:
You are incorrect to assume that a woman with children is nothing more than a Mommy Blogger who does not blog about diverse subject matter.Please don’t define a woman by her reproductive status alone.
That wasn’t what I was trying to say and I want to take a moment now to state specifically what I meant.
The Numbers
There were a lot of blogs on parenting listed in the top 13 by my count 10 blogs which is about 77% of the blogs listed in their about page parenting as a central theme. That means on average out of every 10 blogs 8 will talk about or have parenting as one of their major themes. On the basis of statistics alone that raises 2 questions namely:
Question 1:
Is this number 77% reflective of the total number of applicants that applied, meaning lets say for the sake of argument that we had 100 applicants, my questions rephrased would be: were 77/100 applicants writers of blogs that discuss parenting. If that is the case then then I know statistically why I see what I see.
Question 2:
If I had again 100 applicants and 20% of the total number of applicant wrote about parenting, then the question is why is there such a significant representation in the final 13 from a smaller fraction of the total sub-population?
If this was a statistical study other questions would be asked namely:
- Was there something about the scoring process that could have lead to to this result?
- Were parenting blogger highly prevalent among the the judges ?
- Did the type of sponsors play a role in the selection of the final 13?
Of course that would require inferential statistics – describe systems of procedures that can be used to draw conclusions from datasets arising from systems affected by random variation, such as observational errors, random sampling, or random experimentation. I would have to find a model that would fit the data, like a chi squared test or a student t-test, etc but this is not that serious.
My Reasoning
Because I work a lot with numbers these kind of question are always on my mind. I want to point out that in my selection of 10 bloggers talking about parenting 2 of them are men who talk about being fathers. I am saying this to be as specific as I can be that I am not targeting females or mommy bloggers.
Again the fact that there is a contest is a great benefit to the blogging community and bloggers everywhere. My observations were not meant as a slight to the contest, it’s sponsors, mommy bloggers, parents or anyone else. It was just an observation. It was also in the interest of fairness an objectivity to share personal information with you all. This is the reason why I shared about my life and my son dying and my domestic partner leaving. Because of that course of events, I am kind of biased, biased in the sense that like attracts like. Since I am not a parent yet, its hard for me to relate deeply to things like being tired and covered in strange bodily fluids although for a period of time I did party hard with this bad ass chick in Vegas well its not the same [that was a joke sort of she was pretty bad-ass]
Edward Hotspur was one of the only contestants I could relate to so when he was booted it was tough/sad for me. I mean I gave him a fiefdom in my imaginary kingdom. I nominated him my champion. And because of the fact that I received the mandate of the people and considered myself singular despot of reality, I bestowed upon Mr Hotspur the ranking of Sir Galahad. As my therapist will tell you I dont come off my meds and dive into lunacy for just anyone.
In Conclusion
So in conclusion I am very thankful for the author of the Dumbsainthood blog for bringing this topic up and giving me this opportunity to clarify. I am not a reductionist in the sense that I limit my definition of a mommy blogger is. If the more feminine of a gay couple decided to create a blog talking about raising his adopted kid I would consider that a mommy blog ad have no issue with it. It would be hard for me to undertand it because I am not a parent and havent been around children since my sister was born about 25 year ago.
My issue was the statistical representation of parenting blogs in the final 13. I may not have said that so clearly and my sarcastic comments may have painted a different picture but I hope I was clearer this time around.
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ASpoonfulofSuga 
Boss shit ____a___ –like the double six in dominoes. Hurry and get back with Happy; I’m ready for some Pho 🙂
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You are correct to assume that a person who does not blog about diverse subject matter does not blog about diverse subject matter. Zing!
Thank you once again, MrMary!
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I totally understood what you were saying in your earlier post. It wasn’t an insult to parenting blogs per se, but a question of why there were so many in that category in the final 13. It certainly makes me suspicious of bias in that case, and I happen to be a mother, though I don’t classify my blog as a parenting blog (not with my coverage of 50 Shades for sure!)
It does make you question who the judges were, and why blogs were not fairly represented. Yes, you’d need to know exactly what types of blogs were presented, their statistics, etc, which would be complicated, but I have to think there are a lot more than just the parenting ones. It rather reminds me of WordPress’s fondness for cooking blogs with lots of pics. I see a large percentage of those, and it makes me wonder. And it’s not sour grapes either – I have quite a few blogger friends who are enormously talented who were Freshly Pressed. On the other hand, I have many other talented friends who have not been noticed, despite extreme popularity in some cases. Their selections seem oddly random – some blogs are great, but many more are very so-so. I don’t get it.
I think it would be much more representative of WordPress as a whole to allow blogger participation in selection of their Freshly Pressed choices. Sure there would be some who’d just self promote or promote their buddies, but generally speaking, I think people would vote for blogs that were really good. That’s kind of how you become friends with other bloggers – like attracts like, as you said. I also liked your suggestions for making the Blogger Idol more representative as well.
Sorry for the novel, but you touched on a lot I’ve been thinking about lately. Sorry for the loss of your baby, that had to be horrific, but thank you for sharing your experience – it helps others to know they are not alone in such situations. Also, I wanted you to know that I like the new look on your blog.
Alice
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Alice,
Please no worries, size does matter for me. The longer the comment the better, that’s my philosophy at least lol
I think wordpress talks so often about the blogging community and yet I find it ironic that the blogging community isn’t included in the freshly pressed decision making. I think your right, there will be jack asses that will just self promote and promote friends but I think if we had both bloggers recommending and a team of people choosing it might be a little more just. Maybe there should be an open letter to wordpress and everyone can reblog it or perhaps we can all pic a day when we will post on the wordpress blog with a singular shared sentence, like we need to talk about the freshly pressed nonsense going on.
As for the competition I think as it continues on in time it will get better. It would be nice to take suggestions from bloggers that did and didn’t not participate. I think they have the basis for an excellent context. But from the math alone it would be nice to know what it is we see what we see. I really do think that there should be different categories: Parenting, News and Word Reporting, Comedy or satire, Artistic etc . I think that way there would be a guarantee of diversity in the results. I look at the yearly webby awards and they have cool categories.
Thanks for liking the new design. I’m always experimenting with the look of the blog or trying to put out really cool content 🙂 Loosing a son was tough. I noticed that when a couple is expecting the father doesn’t count for shit. He is only an afterthought. As long as everything gets paid on time lol
It was really nice to hear from you today thanks for that!
MrMary
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Blogger Idol facts: 50-75% parent-based blogs, all Caucasians. Not like American Idol at all in that regard.
Freshly Pressed does focus on certain types of posts. I realize there are something like a million posts a day, and they can’t get to them all, but once a post got FP’d that was literally one picture of a rake leaning against a wall, and one picture of three newspapers in a driveway. That’s it. After that, I stopped giving a crap, because FP is off the rails.
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Freshly Pressed is definitely off the rails, or rather it is nothing more than the circle-jerked clogged drain of the public high school showers. There is not much diversity at all. There is nothing there that makes you think nothing that makes you laugh, its just the same shit food , pictures of insects or nature, sports or travel.
But Ed I think your blog is gonna be even more successful than it already is, I think at some point you will look back on this and not even remember this because you will be so successful. You may also say
1. I’m so much cooler that everyone else
2. Im the Captn of Team Edward !!!
🙂
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Aw, this was a really nice post. Taking a few minutes and actual effort to create a good article but
what can I say I procrastinate a whole lot and don’t seem to get anything done.
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Have you ever thought about including a little bit more than just your articles?
I mean, what you say is valuable and all. But think about if you added some great photos or video
clips to give your posts more, “pop”! Your content is excellent but with images and videos, this site could definitely be one of the most beneficial in its niche.
Good blog!
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Everyone loves it when folks get together and share ideas.
Great blog, stick with it!
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