Shoptalk in Local Orbit

I have been asked to appear at an event sponsored by the Cincinnati Programmers Guild and The Women's Circuit. It's a panel discussion about weblogs, and the other participants are a mix of personal and corporate bloggers. I’m looking forward to it, but it's given me pause to reflect on what exactly I have been doing here with Spacetropic.

It’s tricky to find a niche. Other blogs offer partisan red meat for Left and Right. National behemoths like Instapundit offer astonishing link aggregation on a daily basis. Cincinnati Blog and The Dean of Cincinnati have a more comprehensive take on local politics and infighting. And a million others write funnier stuff about the day-to-day of children, families and the dog according to the Dooce model of blogging.

My blend of earnestness, ironic humor, and fed-up centrism seem to be an acquired taste, based on the response I see on e-mail. But I think about Joel Hodgson, who was once asked about his offbeat approach to comedy “Don’t you ever wonder if people will get it?” He quickly responded “No. We just assume the right people will get it.” That freewheeling philosophy appeals to me. I’d rather shoot for Mark Twain with a twist of Stephen Jay Gould than try to pretend to be a chump-change, small city David Brooks or PJ O’Rourke.

Too much talking about myself is dull. Hopefully, given the nature of the audience at this event the discussion will trend toward the technical aspects of blogging. It will be nice to talk shop with other geeks about issues that fire up the Slashdot demographic – privacy, Microsoft, digital rights, etc. Maybe I can even cop some advice on my bluetooth woes, or bum help with web design.

Help which, were it to be offered, might more likely to come from the Women's Circuit. I hate to drag sex into it - but if the Guild is, conversely, a bunch of dudes, than a quick comparison of the websites will convince you of the pervasiveness of gender differences. The Guild has sparse gray HTML tables. The Women's Circuit has drop shadows, nice pictures, and a pleasant color palette. If these were rooms in a home one would look like a page from Pottery Barn while the other would be decorated with Frito Lay products and an X-Box.