One of the things about sitting at home with a backache and blood coming out of your wang is that you have a lot of free time to sit and count the strange perforations in your ceiling.

Tonight, the counting in my head sounded something like this…

One… Two… Three… Fo–… nope - that one’s just a bug… Four… Five… Six… I wonder why Elisa Camahort thinks that female bloggers have certain gender-specific roadblocks in place to keep them from being able to leverage their blogs for money, power, and all those other things that are typically considered to be the ruin of many a good person… Seven… Eight… Nine… I really do wonder… Ten… Yup… Hmmm… Eleven…

I wondered about it so much that I decided to post about it.

“It” being the roadblocks – not the strange perforations in my ceiling (which, if I understood ceilings better, might not be strange at all, but I don’t, so they are).

Elisa left a comment in my post on “Bloghercon” in which she stated the following:

The point is that some women bloggers want to leverage their blogging in the way many male bloggers have...to get business, jobs, money etc...and are hitting roadblocks. I wouldn't say this is necessarily the conference for someone who purely blogs for their own enjoyment/edification.

Believe it or not, I am often asked how to write a “good blog.”

While I don’t always know what these questioning people mean by “good blog,” and while I don’t understand why they’d come to me to learn about such a thing, I have some generic advice that I give out, and it’s only generic because I consider it to be fundamental to the act of successful blogging, and not just because I don’t want to make up an answer on the spot.

Here’s my advice:

– You have to want to write

If you don’t want to write, then your blog is going to suck dog balls. Period. And nothing can save your little buttocks.

Have you ever intentionally listened to music written by people who don’t want to write it?

You almost certainly haven’t.

Get my point?

– You have to at least believe that you have something to say

Wanting to write and having something to write are two very different things.

To have a blog, you need the former, but to be good, you also need the latter.

– You have to have an interesting way of saying it

Your ideas are almost certainly not new. I seriously doubt that many of mine are. Somebody else, someplace else, and maybe even somewhen else, has already had them, or is having them while you’re having them. It’s your job to express an idea in such a way that people care most about your take on it (or at least care some).

You need some bling.

That’s it

Once you have those three things taken care of, you can keep one hell of a fun blog. Fun for you, and fun for your readers.

Forget about these things, though, and your blog is going to stink, people will smell it, and they won’t give you the time of day, let alone a comment, link, or trackback.

In other words, the only “roadblock” that I can think of here is a crappy blog. What gender has to do with that roadblock, and why a gender-specific blog conference (bloghercon) would help, is utterly beyond my understanding.

Is there something different about the way women write? Don’t they just type out one word after the other the way men do? When I watch my girlfriend type, she seems to be typing the same way I do. I don’t detect a difference.

Is there something different about the way women are entertained? My girlfriend and I seem to enjoy the same movies. Is she “faking it” just to please me? I don’t think so.

In other words, men and women have the same tools and talents at their disposal to create good, successful blogs that people want to read.

However, judging from this bit of Elise’s comment [emphasis mine]:

some women bloggers want to leverage their blogging in the way many male bloggers have...to get business, jobs, money etc.

…I might have to assume that she is looking at blogging as being a sort of road to fortune that it most certainly is not.

And that problem isn’t gender-based.

I know greedy males, too.

Has this blog helped me get business, jobs, or money? Yes, but it was never a goal. I never set out with the intention of having a successful blog that would get me my dream job. I’m just one lucky bastard.

What got me to this position, though, is that:

1. I want to write

2. I believe that I have something to say

3. I try to be interesting

Worked for me.

And that ought to clear up your roadblock. Not some conference where people sit around and whine about the tech elite.

Now I’m going to get back to counting ceiling perforations…