I’m definitely a messenger here – I haven’t studied the methodology used by Linkfluence at all and that’s what led to that list of 30.

Speaking only for myself, I recognize many of the names on the list, but I recognize a number of them as organizations that get linked to for resource information, they don’t link back out. And that’s a problem of one type.

I also know that if I look at my sidebar and the blogs listed under “All Things Women,” many of which are by WOC, hardly any of them are on that list of 30.

Now – that reflects me – as a general rule, I do not read any so-called big or big box blogs – by anyone, male, female, black, white. I just prefer smaller blogs in general, through which I get to know the individual author – their voice, trust them and so on. I keep RSS feeds for the larger ones, like feministing and BlogHer, but the smaller ones are the ones I really like to follow for opinion and what is striking people on any given day. I like to have conversations a lot of times, and the big ones – it’s so much harder to follow conversations there.

I’m assuming you’re writing this:

“And no it’s not the responsibility of WOC to say, “look over here, you’ve passed us by” because this has been par for the course.”

because you’ve heard that suggested to POC before. I’m hoping you mean that as a general statement to whomever is reading. When I first started adding POC blogs on purpose with a conscientiousness, I actually asked a few WOC bloggers for suggestions and then I emailed those bloggers and asked permission to blogroll them – because I’d been told that some WOC might not want to be blogrolled here. But I got an overwhelmingly positive response, and it was no problem at all to ask.

I did go through a bit of a soulsearching to figure out whether to have a separate category on the sidebar for POC or WOC blogs but in the end, decided not to separate them out. I’m still not 100% sure on that one.

Anyway – I agree with you. The list isn’t particularly inspiring – but then I was at the presentation and I wasn’t expecting it to be inspiring – I figured it would be pretty numerically-based.

What is inspiring to me about it is how seeing it motivates me to figure out who me connecting to you, you connecting to me and us connecting to others on issues and subject matter that we care about can help us maybe not get “as big” as the 30 or whatever, but at least amplify what we want to say.

Anyway – thanks. I look forward to checking out your blog.