In the weblog world the words 'gender' and 'personal blogging' go hand and hand. In terms of blogging, gender refers to the way that males and females use blogging, what types of weblogs they use and the purpose that blogging serves in their lives.
The Case Study, Women and Children Last: The Discursive Construction of Weblogs discusses how gender, age and weblog type affect what bloggers write and examines the relationships between those variables (Herring, Kouper, Scheidt and Wright, 2004). According to Perseus Development Corp. random survey of over three thousand blogs, there are currently about 4.12 million blogs on the Internet. Of these, Perseus found that 56 per cent of bloggers are women, which represent 2.31 million blogs worldwide (eMarketing Digest, 2003).
The Case Study shows that gender varies according to blog type. There are three basic types of weblogs currently used by bloggers' journal, filter and k-log. The personal journal weblog is dominated by teenage females and is also favoured by females in general. The content of personal journals is internal and includes the bloggers thoughts, usually an account of their day. Adult males predominated in the creation of filter-type blogs and k-logs, which are news, politics and technology oriented (Herring, Kouper, Scheidt and Wright, 2004).
Lisa Guernsey (2002), journalist for the New York Times says that men write about everything apart from their personal life, mostly politics, while women write specifically about their personal life. The reasons surrounding the question of why men are more likely to write about news and politics than women is concealed in cultural trends that span centuries. It also has a great deal to do with the stereotyped roles of males and females in society, such that men rule the business world and women rule the house (Guernsey, 2002).
One blogger named Raymond Yee said, 'I suspect that more bloggers are men since most are those who have easy access to networked computers and aren't there more men than women who fit this description? My personal experience with blogging has made me think that it is no more male dominated than other forms of media and I have encountered very significant female voices in the blogging world (Yee, 2003).
Clancy Ratliff believes that some of the reasons that women find blogging attractive is because it is a promising, positive activity where they can discover their own interests, and learn the value of their opinion (Ratliff, 2002).
Ms. Sessum and Elaine Frankonis, from Blog Sisters say that they are witnessing some slippage between the stereotypes as men and women become more comfortable with the blogging medium. 'I think that what's happening is that we're meeting in the middle. The men started by writing about technology and opinion and the women were writing personal diaries. Now the men are putting more of their hearts into their Weblogs and women are talking about the issues', Ms. Frankonis said (Trimbath, 2004).
Through statistics, trends and personal opinions it can be seen that gender does have a major impact on the type of blog that people use and their reasons for blogging.
Hailey Puller 15:15, 25 Oct 2004 (EST)
