Follow Friday. On the Blog! With flower photos.

Lyn the Lazy, who writes game reviews for Part Time Monster, had a brilliant idea last week.  She gave the Monster a Follow Friday on her blog. It’s a beautiful post. You can follow them both on Twitter @the_lyn and @parttimemonster. The way Lyn did it, focusing on one blog, is the way to go. For this first post, though, I need to include a few.

I’ve been following all these blogs almost since day one, and six months later, I’m still keeping up with them and having conversations with them. I can’t kick this feature off with just one, because they all deserve the mention. They’ve all encouraged me and helped me improve my game.

Here are five blogs I’ve been following since last year. I’ve had conversations with the bloggers who run them, interact with them on other social media, and sometimes link to their work. They’re listed in the order I met them. Links to the titles go to their about pages, because that’s a good place to start with a new blog. I’m including links to their Twitter handles in case you’d like to follow.

Six weeks of Feminist Friday Discussions: A Reflection

Nine weeks ago I had the idea of using Feminist Friday posts to generate discussions about gender inequality and women’s issues. I was surprised by the interest it generated. We kept these discussions going for six consecutive weeks on three different blogs.

You can find the links to the discussions from the first five weeks here. The sixth week was at Drifting Through My Open Mind.

I like all the threads so far. I find every one of them useful, and I’ve learned things from them, but the first one (on the usefulness of Feminism as a political label) is my favorite. Here’s why.

• The discussions were just an idea until I published that post, and I did it because other bloggers encouraged me to do it.
• I expected 15 comments, and the thread ended up with 99.
• There were lots of people with different perspectives on that thread. Not everyone agreed, but the discussion was productive and civil.
• The folks who commented didn’t just talk to me about the post. They talked to one another about the questions I raised.
• It was my first original Feminist Friday post, and it gave me the encouragement I needed to keep writing them.

Here’s why I think the first post worked so well: