Chris at Crooked Timber takes the GlobalRichList test (
202) and realizes the real need for diversity in the world of weblogs isn’t white or black, male or female:
Crooked Timber >> On being super-rich (7):
[O]ur place in the local distribution makes us radically misperceive our position in relation to the vast majority of humanity (my ex ante guess would have put me in the top 5 or 10 per cent—but the top 1 per cent!). My guess is that most active bloggers and journalists (in the developed world) are in that top 1 per cent also. One effect of this is that the blogosphere casually trades in assumptions about what is normal, where those assumptions are just a projection of what is normal for that top 1 per cent.
I would guess most people who communicate this way are in the extreme upper ranges, so let’s not get too carried away about the democratic nature of this medium just yet. Even at the price of an account on LiveJournal or Blogger, you need reliable net access and the infrastructure that underpins it to get a seat at the table. Even our newly liberated brothers and sisters in Baghdad are dealing with daily power cuts and that’s one place where we could all use more unfiltered information.