I am planning to post every day this month, as I've attempted to do each November since starting this blog. But unlike the previous three Novembers, I will not be participating in National Blog Posting Month.
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I have mixed feelings about what I'm about to write; in fact, I was about to skip Day One entirely, rather than talk about it at all. So I'm churning this out quickly. Which is probably the worst thing I could do -- publishing a rant without the benefit of a sober second thought.
But I'm doing it anyway.
This year, NaBloPoMo moved from its original 'home' at ning.com and is now being hosted at BlogHer. BlogHer, as you might guess (if you are not already familiar with it), is women-centric online community that "creates opportunities for more than 27 million women who blog and their readers to gain exposure, education, community, and economic empowerment."
Which is fine. Great, even. I'm all for celebrating women's blogs. I am, after all, a woman. A woman with a blog, in fact. (A sadly neglected blog, to be sure, but it's a blog, damn it!)
But for me, NaBloPoMo isn't about celebrating women and women's blogs. It's about celebrating blogs, period. And I'm not really comfortable with this event being hosted on a women-centric site.
To be clear: BlogHer is not discriminating against NaBloPoMo blog posts written by men (or dogs, cats, balls of sock yarn, or anyone else, I presume). There appear to be plenty of blogs written by men on the November blogroll.
Yet something about BlogHer hosting NaBloPoMo just rubs me the wrong way. And this bit of encouragement from NaBloPoMo's founder, Mel, in a parting e-mail, The Old NaBloPoMo Site Closes Tonight, doesn't assuage that feeling:
And yes, yes, 1000 times YES, guys are welcome to blog on BlogHer -- not only on NaBloPoMo, but anywhere on the site.Maybe I'm cynical, but methinks she doth protest too much. If you have to keep reassuring men (and let's face it, the main target of that sentence is men) they are welcome, you're doing it wrong. And it just rubs me the wrong way.
So no NaBloPoMo for me this year. I will, however, be back tomorrow, with another post (this time, with knitting content!), and with luck, another the next day, and the next day, and the next day...
