Don’t hate me because I have a closet full of swag – I worked really hard to get all this free stuff.

“It also comes to mind when reading this article that beauty bloggers are not very smart.” [gawker]

As for me, long ostracized by the “real” media and pushed into the blogger ghetto by polished publicists, I built a brand from the ground up that now competes with the likes of beauty pubs from Conde Nast.

What I find most appalling about the Times piece and the commentary it’s garnered is not that the bloggers get free make-up – just like the editors do – but that they’re being called out as more malleable than the editors at print pubs. And let’s be real – many PR people save all the real treats for the print mags and send the bloggers to ghettoized parties where the print editors won’t have to mingle with the great unwashed of the internet.

Check out my writer’s experience at a party just for bloggers: Just when New York City parties couldn’t get any more C-list celeb obsessed (I won’t even call them D-list, as that would be an insult to Kathy), Sunsilk launched with a trendier than thou party at Plumm. The extra m is for masochist. What was I thinking? There’s always a mixed bag of well-dressed to questionably attired attendees at these functions but one look I got bordered on the not so subtle, “OMG, I just threw up in my mouth, that dress is so cheap.” The waiters were models masquerading as waiters and it’s possible the shrimp weren’t actually shrimp, but well-crafted paper mache sculptures, who eats in public anymore? It was definitely that kind of party.

Fashion week is even worse. With editors from even small magazines getting seats, anyone associated with the internet is standing room only, the “non-Conde Nasties - standing in line, calves burning from our 3 inch heels“

SheFinds does nearly 300,000 unique visitors per month. Lately I’ve started signing all my e-mails to publicists with this note: “If you’d like to know how much traffic we get please know you can look up anyone’s traffic on quantcast.com”

I run SheFinds with one full-time employee and 20 freelancers, yet we’re creeping up on big media numbers. Vogue has an offline circulation of 1,260,316 and a far larger staff and budget than my small operation.

No wonder Vogue Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour hates the word blog. Maybe soon we’ll be taking her front row seat at the shows.