What have American men got against blog rings?

Having done some number-crunching on the question 'Do you belong to a blog ring (web ring)?' I have come up with the following results:
37% of UK male respondents do (11 out of 30 respondents); 52% of UK female respondents do (14 out of 27); 42% of US female respondents do (10 out of 24) but only 10% - that's two out of 21 US male respondents do.
So what do US men have against blog rings? I will be analysing the comments soon.
By the way, if we divide the results by gender: it's 25% male respondents and 47% female respondents.

Bloggers do it at home

Probably not the most earth-shattering piece of news. With the fear of retribution from employers, if you blog at or about work, then it is perhaps not surprising that so many bloggers choose or are restricted to blogging at home. However, what has surprised me is the number of respondents whose place of work is actually at home. As a previous commenter has said, perhaps people who work at home are more likely to blog a) because they have the time which would otherwise be used commuting and b) they are keener to interact with the human race after working alone all day.
Remember that the figures below are very provisional (I am still hoping for more responses - particularly from the US!).

So far, I have 110 responses to the question 'Where do you do most of your blogging?' Remember that it is possible to tick more than one response to this question and so this does not mean 110 respondents!
Of these 110 responses, 86 state that they blog at home, 17 blog at the office, 4 blog as students and 3 are 'other' - mostly on the move, when away from home.
Interestingly, of the 86 home blogging responses, 36 state that home is the place of work.
When you break this 36 down into sexes and countries, we get 6 UK males, 12 UK females,7 US males and 11 US females. I obviously need to research work patterns in both countries, but I bet that more women than men work at home in the first place.

Monday's update

Many thanks to all those of you who have so far completed the survey. If there is anyone out there still dithering about whether or not to do it, I would really appreciate it if you did!
Am planning to start number crunching soon and plan to post some of the statistical findings on the blog.
Without any number crunching at all, can I tell you that, so far, 100% of respondents use their own computers for blogging and have a high-speed connection at home for their computer. This information may seem slightly redundant, but following on from various US research findings that many bloggers are recent graduates or still at university I thought it possible that bloggers could be using university computers for blogging. In addition, with many high-profile sackings related to blogging about or at work I wanted to know whether people were using work computers. Answer seems to be not really!
So far, this next comment is based on an impression as I read through the survey returns rather than statistics, but a tremedous amount of the respondents seem to be working at home. This is interesting.

Statistics so far

Having sent out 200 surveys, 100 to Brits and 100 to Americans, the number returned so far stand like this:
43 Brits and 28 Americans.
I am hoping that some people have saved it to do over the weekend and that there will be a flurry of activity over the weekend!

Blogroll Analysis

Following on from some of the comments on yesterday's post, one of the methods I plan to use on my chosen bloggers is blogroll analysis. I have done this before in my small pilot study, looking at gender - with the interesting result that male bloggers tend to link to other male bloggers while women bloggers have a more even-handed approach. People have commented that this may be due to the subjects on which men and women choose to blog - many female bloggers choosing to blog about family, children or domestic matters that might only attract other women (?). So what, you might think? Well, I do think that the matter needs to be debated - as they are doing at BlogHer - simply because of the economics of the situation. If advertising is creeping on to blogs, advertisers are going to want to advertise with the most 'popular' bloggers. So male bloggers become more attractive to advertisers? Of course, if you want to advertise family-related products, a female blogger would have a more targeted audience.
The other part of the analysis of blogrolls that I want to do is geographical. I haven't done this before, but from a cursory glance at blogrolls so far I am gaining the impression that locality is important. For example, I have seen several blogrolls with sections devoted to 'people in my town'. Do Brits link to Americans and Americans to Brits?
Someone asked yesterday why I hadn't enlarged the survey to include other English-language bloggers such as Australians, or - for that matter - why I hadn't considered surveying non-English blogs. I am afraid time and resources is the reason. I had to present the AHRC with a concrete plan for one woman's research (and writing up) in 8 months. Of course, the plan is to conclude that more research needs to be done in this area and then to put together another research proposal...

How did you pick ME?

Many, many thanks to all of you so far who have kindly taken the time to complete my survey. Today start emailing my 100 Americans, who I hope will be equally forthcoming.

Several people have asked to know how and why they were chosen. As far as the Brits were concerned, I used Britblog. Taking each part of the country in turn, ie Gloucestershire, Aberdeenshire, etc, I clicked on to the first blog on the page. Some parts of the country had hundreds of blogs, some only a few. I had some basic criteria - had to be over 18; had to have an email address or some way of contacting the blogger; had to have posted within the previous month; had to be identifiable as male or female. If the first blog did not satisfy these criteria, I clicked on to the second blog, and so on.
This method, as I have said earlier, gave me the 50 male bloggers I wanted very quickly, but I was surprised to discover that I only found about 15 female bloggers at the same time. So then I had to start at the beginning again, clicking on and on until I had found my 50 women bloggers. The lack of visibility of women bloggers confirmed to me the dicussion that has been running in the States over the last few years about the invisibility of women in the blogosphere despite claims that women bloggers are at least 50% of the blogosphere. See someone like Dave Pollard for an interesting discussion of this question, also Culture Cat and BlogHer.
However, when I came to collect my 100 US bloggers I found that the opposite was true. Using Globe of Blogs I clicked through each state with my criteria, and found my 50 female bloggers very quickly. It was male bloggers I had to trawl to find. Interestingly, I then took a look at the Globe of Blogs location finder for British bloggers - once again, lots of men and not many women.
What does this mean? One thing I think it does is justify my reseach, which is a comparison of the UK and US blogosphere. There obviously are differences and we don't know a lot about them at the moment. Secondly, despite US female bloggers' complaints about invisibility, they are a lot more visible than their counterparts in the UK. Thirdly, I need to know whether a) there are just fewer female bloggers in the UK and the magic 50% of the blogosphere is a purely US phenomenon or b) UK female bloggers do exist but don't promote themselves as much as their counterparts in the States.
If anyone has an opinion on this I would be glad to hear it!

About to send out first emails

I am about to send out my first emails to ask for participation in the survey. In the email I plan to direct anyone interested in the project to this blog, where further information about my previous work on blogs will be available.

So here it is:
Previous articles/conference papers on blogging include:
Sarah Pedersen, 'Women Users' Motivations for Establishing and Interacting with Blogs', The International Joural of the Book, Vol 3, issue 2, pp 85-90
Sarah Pedersen and Caroline Macafee, The Practices and Popularity of British Bloggers, ELPUB2006. Digital Spectrum: Integrating Technology and Culture - Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Electronic Publishing held in Bansko, Bulgaria 14-16 June 2006 / Edited by: Bob Martens, Milena Dobreva. 2006, pp. 155-164

If you are someone who has been asked to complete my survey I really hope that you will be able to spare the time. Many thanks.

Technorati rankingsH

Have spent all day working out the Technorati rankings of all of my 200 bloggers. Have also finished setting up the survey, so tomorrow hopefully I will start sending out my begging emails to the bloggers, hoping that they will participate in the survey.
So far, it is as I guessed it would be, the Technorati rankings of the American participants are far higher, on average than those of the Brits.

Now I'm searching for men!

So I finally managed to make it to 50 British women bloggers, taken from the Britblog website. It was really tough and made me doubt whether 50% of bloggers really are female.
However, now I am working on my 100 US bloggers. Instead of Britblog, of course, I am using the Globe of Blogs site. I have set myself the task of finding 25 bloggers a day so that I have finished all this preparation work by Friday.
Imagine my surprise when I find that most of my first 25 bloggers are female - and that it seems to be difficult to find male US bloggers on this site!
Now this may be because it is not Britblogs. So I have decided that, once I have finished collecting my 100 US bloggers I will have to take a look at Globe of Blogs for UK bloggers to see whether it would have been easier to raise my 50 women on that site. If not, it seems that I have already found a major difference between UK and US bloggers, and maybe there simply aren't 50% women bloggers in Britain.