Howdy, LD reader! If you were going to keep your thoughts to yourself this afternoon, great, never mind this note.

If, however, you thought you might have a hankering to engage in dialog here, I need to tell you that a mechanic is (or will soon be, or just finished) tending to the proliferation of hieroglyphics in the archival material.  You know, all this [–] poo that’s been littered all over the place? So that you can’t read through half an old post and not step in it? That stuff.

While the database is in the shop, the comments feature has been temporarily disabled.

We are brightly guardedly optimistic that all will be well as of well in advance of not too much later than Monday morning early this week, at which time I anticipate you will be greeted by not only a fresh new post, but neat n’ tidy punctuation and diacritics way back to this blog’s humble beginnings.

Thank you, and carry on.

* [Later update]

Never mind.  Attempt mounted and then dismounted.  Comments may be back in effect, but then so are the hieroglyphics.  Carry on as if nothing strange is happening around here. Even if it is.

[Mega-long post alert! You've been warned!]

By any other name, this year’s BlogHer conference would be as big a deal. I mean, not as Woodstock. But in the same way. Which is to say, it was a Happening for those in attendance, something that helped to illustrate, maybe even define a moment in our online media herstory.

Many of us have known it already: a hell of a lot of us are out there in the blogosphere writing to and for each other, and the online communities we are participating in — as readers and as writers — are clearly making a big impact on us. This may not be breaking news, but it’s news. BlogHer’s recent study of women’s use of the internet quantified this for the first time: BlogHer’s Lisa Stone’s synopsis of the study here, the findings in PDF format here; and here, the Reuters coverage, “New BlogHer Study Shows U.S. Women Increasingly Shifting to Blogs as a Mainstream Media and Communication Channel.”

The gist is that over 36 million women write and read blogs every week and “approximately half consider blogs a ‘highly reliable’ or ‘very reliable’ source of information and advice about everything from products to presidential candidates.” (From the Reuters re-cap.)

My own wee survey of LD readers a week or two back corroborates this on a micro scale (you can see the results here; use “LDsurveyresults” as your password; if you’d like to take it, please help yourself!). With a little over sixty respondents (at most recent count), over half said that the blogs you read influence your sense of community “somewhat” (this would be: your sense of community as a woman, or a progressive, or a lesbian parent, whatever community your blogs circled around). But another nearly forty percent said the blogs you read influenced your sense of community either “a good deal” or “very much.”

Now I’m no sociologist, and heaven my beloved knows I am not good with numbers. Also, this is a sampling among people already reading a dang blog. But the point is still evident: these things matter to a lot of us, in important ways. You don’t have to be a statistician to believe that over 36 million women online is a lot.

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