Searching for women

Bizarre title, but there we are. I have spent the last two days trawling the net looking for women bloggers in the UK. According to my research timetable, by today I am supposed to have identified my 100 male and female bloggers from the UK, all ready to email them begging them to take my survey. As I have said before, I think, the criteria are that they have to be resident in the UK, over 18, have blogged at least once in the last month and have an email address or other way of emailing them on the page.
Using Britblog I managed to get the men together very quickly by randomly hitting every first blogger in a particular geographic area. But this random method provided me with all the men I needed but only about 10 women. So now I am trawling through Britblog trying to find women!!
What gets me though is that all the commentators on blogging state that women make up at least 50% of bloggers, particularly journal bloggers. So where are they all? Can we assume that women don't want to publicise themselves through Britblog?
If you are a woman blogger who fits my criteria and wouldn't mind taking my survey - please get in touch!!

Glasgow break

We spent the weekend in Glasgow, which was absolutely great. Apart from passing through to get to the airport, I had never been there before, which is a bit shameful considering we have now been living in Scotland for 11 years.
We house swapped as usual. That's how we have arranged all our holidays for the past four years and it is a great (and cheap) way of having holidays, particularly if you have children. We are members of Intervac and usually house swap three or four times a year. The longer holidays we go abroad but it's nice to swap for a weekend with others in Scotland.
Anyway, Glasgow was superb. We went to the reopened Kelvingrove and had a great time looking at all the stuffed animals. Then we went to the Museum of Transport, which may have been one museum too far as far as DS2 was concerned. On a positive note, it did have a display of all the vehicles used in Balamory, which kept him moving around. Then we went shoe shopping for me and I bought a great pair of surprisingly flat heeled boots from Jones the Bootmaker (not cheap). Saturday was fantastically sunny, but Sunday tipped down all day. We went to the Burrell, which was very impressive and DH insisted on buying me a scarf from the museum shop (has he forgotten that it's my birthday next week?) before we went on to have the obligatory row in IKEA.

The last few days I have been working on finishing an article so it can be sent off to the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. The article is based on the pilot project that C and I undertook last year, so it has been quite helpful to refresh my memory about certain things.
I need to start thinking about adding more of my favourite blogs to my blogroll. I have only put two there at the moment - Nee Naw and Finslippy. These are the two blogs I check every day. They don't post every day, so it is an exciting moment when I click and see a new post. They are both excellent writers with a lot of humour mixed in, which is what I look for in a blog, to be honest.
I've started compiling my 100 British bloggers list so that I can email them with the survey as soon as it goes up. Have not been able to get the survey up as soon as I want to because the technician who is going to help me (and do I need help with all the technical stuff) is on holiday until the 29th, which is a bit annoying but can't be helped. My theory is that I will gather all my email addresses first and then will be ready when she comes back.
It is so difficult to find email addresses on some blogs! I would say that a good 50% of the blogs I click on I can't find an email address and so I have to move on. I go cross eyed with looking for an address sometimes! There also seems to be much more spam and marketing blogs out there. I have decided that I am only interested in personal blogs, not marketing tools. Also my criteria are: over 18; must have posted at least once in the past month; based in the UK or US; must have an email address so that I can contact them. Right, now I have written my criteria down so must stick to it.

Literature review

Today's thoughts are all linked to some of the literature I have been reading (or re-reading) over the last few days.
As I said before, I have been working on the subject of motivations for blogging for the past two years now, on and off, but this is the first time I have had the time and space to concentrate on the subject. So I am starting off by reading all the literature that I have found and also everything that C., my hard-working research assistant last year, found.
Mortensen and Walker suggest that academic researchers can use blogs to store and sort through their research ideas and this was one of the main motivations for my starting this particular blog. I can see that blogging about what I am reading may help me remember it - and also my thoughts on various matters better than writing notes.
One of the things I think I want to research a little more in my survey is why bloggers choose their particular blog name. Mortensen and Walker mention the metaphors used in naming academic's blogs - 'all point to a structure not submitting to an academically accepted logic, but to a personal logic'. I am not sure that anyone has done anything else on choice of name so that might be an interesting way to go.
Other things that I might want to look more at include the use of images of self in the blogs - I am strangely troubled by my decision to put my photograph up on my blog despite the fact that it is going to be supremely easy to find out who I am, particularly if I continue to do as first envisaged and put a link to this blog into the survey.
Also more work on the blogroll. This was, I think, the most interesting finding of the paper I gave in Bulgaria in June on the practices of British Bloggers, and I want to look more into, not just gender, but geographic location of blogrollers (if I can call them that). What was this finding? When I broken down the blogroll of a sample of male and female bloggers, almost to a man male bloggers linked to male bloggers while female bloggers linked 50-50 to men and women. I know that this has been discussed almost to death in relation to US bloggers and the A list, etc, but it is interesting to see it happen in the UK as well. However, I also want to look into the whole issue of geographic location as well. As far as I can see from my pilot survey, UK bloggers link to other UK bloggers, many of whom they actually know in real life.
I've also been rereading Nardi et al. I can see that their very small selection of bloggers used a far more diverse range of blogging software than the survey of British bloggers we conducted last year. Is this because they were American? Because they were earlier into blogging? Again, my comparison of US and UK bloggers should help to answer this and to see if things have changed now. Nardi et al talk about motivations for blogging, but although they mention catharsis they don't talk about validation, which I think is a key motivator for the women bloggers I surveyed.
So now I need some people to read and comment on these thoughts!!

Well, so much for a frequently updated blog!! Over the past five days I have pulled a major muscle in my back and then got a very nasty case of food poisoning from a suspect chicken sandwich.
DS1 has also had the food poisoning. Poor child. He went to school on Monday morning, feeling a little odd - as was I at that time but I put it down to a slight hangover. By 11.00 I was feeling like death and correctly diagnosing food poisoning (it's not like I have never had it before - like the time I ended up in hospital on my wedding night). Then the phone went - the school needing me to go and pick DS1 up. That was a fun car journey, with both of us moaning every time the car went round a corner.
We were both in bed for two days, but he has bravely returned to school today because the first year have a bonding-type thing away at Haddo House which he didn't want to miss. I still feel shaky so I hope he is OK and not too overwhelmed by the almost inevitable building of rafts and messing about with water that happens on these sort of occasions. I have to say, however, that I think that most of my shakes are to do with the back pain now rather than the the stomach upset. My health is great.
So there has been a little hiatus in the whole 'starting research leave' thing, but I am reading Blogging for Dummies at the moment as a nice little, easy, introduction.....