Lisa Stone, Elisa Page and Jory Des Jardins started BlogHer with some mumbo-jumbo about "empowerment." Smart move — empowerment sells! Somewhere along the line, they started selling ads for other blogs. MediaMemo reports that BlogHer is cutting ad payments by 10 percent. Sounds terrible, right?

But then you read the email Stone, Page, and Des Jardins sent, and you learn that BlogHer had been giving bloggers a fixed share of the ad revenues. That's a share of gross revenues, not net — no allowances made for commissions for salespeople, servers, bandwidth, and so on. What's changing: BlogHer will now take 10 percent off the top to cover costs, and pay bloggers a share based on 90 percent of the gross ad revenues. (Page tells me the share is now 50 percent, and will effectively drop to 45 percent after the change.)

Compare that to Google, which typically pays 88 to 89 percent of revenues to websites it represents — but those are net revenues, not gross revenues. (Google has a reputation for paying much less to smaller sites, and more to big partners like AOL and MySpace.)

Sounds to me like a woman-on-woman crime — but Stone, Page, and Des Jardins were the victims here. It escapes me why women like these three have such a hard time asking for the money they deserve. They managed to get venture capital from NBC and Venrock, after all. But the way they've been running their business sounds like the opposite of empowerment.

(I updated this post to clarify how BlogHer's revenue sharing works, after getting an email from Page.)

... though women and men are creating blogs in roughly equal numbers, many women at the conference were becoming very Katie Couric about their belief that they are not taken as seriously as their male counterparts at, say, Daily Kos, a political blog site. Nor, they said, were they making much money, even though corporations seem to be making money from them.

This is exactly why some women won't sacrifice femininity for fame, whether blogging about typical "women's" topics, or doing so while looking typically womanly. Take Julia Allison as the illogical extreme: a woman more blogged about than who blogs herself, but who can't seem to launch a business without it being about Julia.

Allison and other me-bloggers far less shameless about their attention-grab are what drives women to disavow ladybloggers almost altogether. Yet these women find a home at BlogHer, as well — like Patricia Handschiegel, an entrepreneur who can both sell her smarts and get chatty on her personal blog about dresses, parties and similar froth.

Neither of these camps need be exclusive: ambivalence is one reason why women come out for things like BlogHer in the first place. No one should have to give up girliness to get ahead. But to produce the woman Kos, the woman Arrington? We'll have to let go of this blogging business being all about ourselves.

(Photo by Jessica Brandi Lifland/New York Times)

En route to BlogHer's San Francisco conference this weekend, which has blossomed from 300 to 3,000 attendees in four years, four mommy bloggers geared up with sponsored cars and EVDO wireless broadband are documenting their pilgrimage. For a conference and a community with a nigh-religious following, many are eagerly embracing their own monetization as a form of proving their girl-powered devotion. Sisterhood, meet syndication. (Photo by Sarah606)

“The lack of evolution is disappointing to me. Back in 1996, it was going to be this brave new world where women were finally going to take control of their stories."

The girl utopia the early women of the Web have been holding out for? It's arrived, sandwiched neatly between tampon and diet ads. The only question is why we ever expected anything different. (Photo by Caterina Fake)

I think it's interesting that I met two of my favorite bloggers for the first time at BlogHer (both of whom are men, Guy Kawasaki and John Battelle).

You can lead a horse to water...

What I learned from BlogHer [Scobleizer]
Photo by Alex Feldstein [SmugMug]

Wow. Way to go, Dave! He's like Jerry Garcia at the Lilith Fair.

Dave Winer's blog for July 28 [Scripting News]

Scripting.com's Dave Winer (right) gets hot with, from left, Douglas Rushkoff, unkown, and Mark Hurst. Justin Hall was cruelly edited out of this sauna pic.

Robert Scoble to Shel Israel: "Keep grinning for the camera, baby, and our royalty checks will keep getting fatter."

Chris Pirillo rents out the last ad-free space on earth. His partner Ponzi must be thrilled.

Geeks of the world! Please keep your shirts on! But if you don't, send photos to tips@valleywag.com.

By the way, one of the Blogher bloggers intends to go topless soon, according to her colleagues. Which leaves Valleywag with an ethical question: do we run the photo on the blog?

Or do we charge you $50 to see it?

Earlier: Tech pundits getting naked: a worrisome trend [Valleywag]
And then: Geeks gone wild: Dave Winer takes off more than his shirt [Valleywag]