Analysis of blogrolls

55% of US female respondents had 10 or less blogs in their blogroll. 6 of these respondents (21%) had no blogroll at all.
33% of US male respondents had 10 or less blogs in their blogroll. Again, 6 of these respondents had no evident blogroll at all. There were examples of US male respondents with very long blogrolls – two had blogrolls containing 206 and 425 blogs, although at least a quarter of the longest blogroll had links which did not work. In addition, many of these excessively long blogrolls appear to have taken a large amount of their content from an extant list, for example the Methodist blogroll, and therefore their blogrolls do not reflect personal selection but rather an interest in or commitment to a particular group of bloggers. The Methodist blogroll, for example, invites readers to add their own blog to the list, thus encouraging a lengthy blogroll.
Again, 6 of the UK female respondents had no blog roll at all. 52% of respondents had 10 or less blogs and 84% (26 respondents) had 25 or less blogs in their blogroll. One respondent was a member of another self-nomination blogroll – ‘Women who blog’ – and this blogroll is particularly long (110 blogs), all of the members are female, but again with a high number of failed links or abandoned blogs (30).
8 of the UK male respondents had no blog roll at all. 55% of respondents had 10 or less blogs and 76% had 25 or less blogs in their blogroll.

What sort of bloggers have the very long blogrolls? Analysis of all bloggers whose blogrolls were over 100 blogs in length:
UK male blogger, Methodist minister. Mostly blogs about Methodism, Christianity. Was using links from a self-nomination blogroll.
UK male blogger, interested in mental health issues and therefore a lot of links relating to mental health. Also a lot relating to politics and culture.
UK women, all links entirely taken from the Women who blog self-nomination blogroll.
Another UK male blogger, minister, with a lot of Methodist and Christian blogs. Again, using a self-nomination Methodist blogroll. Also links to blog aggregators.
US female blogger with an interest in a particular state has a list of bloggers who are based in that state.
US male blogger with an interest in birdwatching has a long blogroll of birding bloggers. He has actually set out to produce the definitive list of birding blogs. He also analysese his blogroll and has made several postings about it.
Another US male blogger who is a minister. His blogroll was divided into two sections. The first, and shorter, section was called ‘Daily reads’. The second was the Blogroll of Reformed Bloggers, and again seems to be a self-nomination blogroll.
Another US male blogger with a long blogroll was interested in Christianity. Although not a minister, he had worked as a member of an evangelistic gaming ministry online. Most of the blogs in his blogroll were religious in nature.
It therefore seems that the longer blogrolls can be associated with a particular interest or hobby. Several of the male bloggers were ministers or in other ways connected to Christianity. They in particular are likely to offer their readers access to self-nomination blogs related to a particular religious group. It should be noted that such self-nomination blogs are long and not always updated regularly. Many of the links were out of date, abandoned or lost.

Blogroll analysis relating to gender
US male bloggers: of the 24 US males who had blogrolls, 5 blogrolls had no links to female bloggers at all. In all, 17 US male blogrolls had less than 20% of their links to female bloggers. 2 blogrolls had over 50% of their links to female bloggers but no blogroll had more than 80% of their links to female bloggers.
US female bloggers: of the 22 US females who had blogrolls, a surprising 5 had no links to female bloggers at all. 2 had 100% of their links to female bloggers, ie no links to male bloggers. 11 had over 50% of their links to female bloggers.
UK male bloggers: of the 22 UK males who had blogrools, 7 blogrolls had no links to female bloggers at all. In all, 13 UK male bloggers had less than 20% of their links to female bloggers. 3 blogrolls had over 50% of their links to female bloggers, but no blogroll had more than 80% of their links to female bloggers.
UK female bloggers: of the 21 UK female bloggers who had blogrolls, a surprising 3 had no links to female bloggers at all. 2 had 100% of their links to female bloggers, ie no links to male bloggers. 11 had over 50% of their links to female bloggers.
Indicates that male bloggers are more likely to be linked to via the blogroll. Female bloggers are more even handed in their linking to male or female bloggers while male bloggers are more likely to link to male bloggers.

Willingness to link to blogs from foreign countries
US male bloggers: 17 bloggers had less than 20% of their blogroll linked to blogs from outside the US. 7 of these bloggers had no links to blogs from outside the US. The blogger with the most links to outside the US was actually a German living in the US who wrote a blog on International affairs and culture, primarily German. Only one blogger had more than 50% of links to blogs outside the US.
US female bloggers: 14 bloggers had less than 20% of their blogroll linked to blogs from outside the US. 8 of these bloggers had no links to blogs from outside the US. The blogger with the most links to outside the US was writing a blog about Jane Austen. Only 2 bloggers had more than 50% of their links to blogs outside the US.
UK male bloggers: 7 bloggers had less than 20% of their blogroll linked to blogs from outside the UK. 4 of these bloggers had no links to blogs from outside the UK. 9 bloggers had more than 50% of their blogroll linking to blogs outside the UK
UK female bloggers: 7 bloggers had less than 20% of their blogroll linked to blogs from outside the UK, of which 3 bloggers had no links to blogs from outside the UK. 5 bloggers had more than 50% of their blogroll linking to blogs outside the UK.
It is not that surprising that UK bloggers link more to blogs outside the UK since there ARE more blogs outside the UK. However, the limited amount of linking that the average US blogger does to blogs outside the US should be noted.

Stuff about education - comments welcome!

Employment
105 out of 120 of respondents were employed, with many of those not employed being either retired or looking after dependents in the home. The number of those employed part time was evenly split across the two countries. However the number of women working part time was much greater than the number of men in part-time employment: 40% (21 out of 52 women who stated that they were employed) in comparison to 11% of all employed men (6 out of 53). As will be seen later, this may be related to the high number of women who were attempting to gain financial reward from their blogging.

Respondents were also asked where they did the majority of their blogging. Few indicated that they blogged at work outside the house – only 14% of all respondents. 43% blogged at home but, interestingly, 30% stated that they blogged at home, which was their place of employment. It seems that 30% of the respondents worked at home, either fully or partially, and thus blogged from there.

Thus respondents were more likely to blog at home than outside the home. This is also related to when they blogged, with the most popular choices being evenings and breaks in the day. US bloggers were somewhat more inclined to blog in the mornings before they went to work, with 35% of US respondents admitting to this in comparison with 17% of UK bloggers. Again, this was discussed on the blog with one commenter suggesting: ‘Americans are familiar with a fast-paced, over-time-heavy schedule, which means that getting up in the morning to blog is a convenient way to blog each day but still get to work and/or started on the home-based work before the 8am rush.’ A report in The Guardian of 29 November 2006 of a survey conducted by European Interactive Advertising Association also supports the finding that Europeans access the Internet later in the day:
‘The survey also looked at when people access the internet. From 6am to 10am the majority of European internet users prefer to listen to the radio or read a paper. But that picture inverts dramatically as the day wears on. From 5.30pm to 9pm, three-quarters of web users are watching TV but almost as many are accessing the internet - suggesting many are doing both.’

68% of all respondents admitted blogging for up to 5 hours a week with another 18% blogging for between 5 and 10 hours a week. However, one or two respondents were blogging for up to 35 hours a week, although it should be noted that some respondents were what might be called professional bloggers, either setting up blogs for others or using their blogs as part of newspaper columns.

Respondents were asked to indicate whether any of the following skills relating to blogging were necessary for their current employment: IT skills, journalism and creative writing. Respondents were allowed to select as many skills as they wanted. Certain differences between the groups appear here. UK respondents saw the IT skills from their current employment as the most relevant to blogging, with 46 out of a possible 54 respondents clicking the IT skills button. This in comparison to US respondents with only 26 out of a possible 51 respondents. Interestingly, American male respondents were far more likely to see creative writing skills as necessary for their current employment and a skill that they could bring to their blogging. 22 out of a possible 27 employed US male respondents indicated using such creative-writing skills in their blogging suggesting that US respondents, and men in particular, see blogging as a much more creative process than the Brits who see it as more of an IT based phenomenon.

I know, I know, I haven't blogged for over a month, but I will be better from now on because I am in the process of writing up the findings, so I thought I will add whatever I have written for the day here:

So:

Age: Sampling across the board from 18 to 73.
Dividing the sample into UK and US, there were more young UK bloggers and more old US bloggers.
40% of UK respondents were under 30, in comparison with US respondents where the figure was 26%. 4% of UK respondents were over 56, with the US figure being 18%. This shows that, for this random sampling, there were more older US bloggers and more younger UK bloggers. Is blogging more attractive to younger people in the UK, more associated with youth culture? More accepted as part of the general culture in the US? Need to check blogging rates from Pew Internet survey.
More UK respondents had started to blog relatively recently – could be related to the more recent arrival of the blogging phenomenon in the UK, second wave of blogging.

Educational attainment
Differences between the two countries: US respondents seem to have higher educational attainment, 47% having a bachelors degree compared to 32% of the UK respondents and 35% having a postgraduate degree in comparison to 18% of UK respondents. 28% of the UK respondents reported that their highest level of educational attainment was as a school leaver compared to only 10% of US respondents. To a certain extent, this is probably linked to the youth of the UK respondents, although it should be noted that 11 UK respondents were currently undertaking education compared to 13 US respondents. Previous studies into the blogosphere have characterised bloggers as usually educated to graduate level or beyond, however, these studies were based in the US and investigated the first wave of bloggers. Some of these studies even focused on university bloggers through their selection of survey participants. It may be, therefore, that the second wave of blogging outside the US is attracting a different type of person to the blogosphere.

Employment
105 out of 120 of respondents were employed, with many of those not employed being either retired or looking after dependents in the home. The number of those employed part time was evenly split across the two countries. However the number of women working part time was much greater than the number of men in part-time employment: 40% (21 out of 52 women who stated that they were employed) in comparison to 11% of all employed men (6 out of 53). As will be seen later, this may be related to the high number of women who were attempting to gain financial reward from their blogging.

Any comments, as ever, gratefully received!

US bloggers and gender genie

OK. The results are in.
US male bloggers: 20 out of 26 correct (78%) and 6 out of 26 wrong (22%).
US female bloggers: 8 out of correct (32%) and 17 out of 25 wrong (68%).
Bear in mind that not of all of the surveyed blogs were used - those which are mainly photos, for example, were not useful for this exercise since it needs a good amount of text to work with.
However, the finding appears to be that gender genie is a lot more accurate in identifying male bloggers than female ones!

Using Gender Genie

For a bit of fun I have taken the latest posting of all of the UK blogs that I am studying and have put them through Gender Genie. Obviously this is more of test of Gender Genie than it is a test of the bloggers! The results so far are mixed. Gender Genie uses a simplified version of an algorithm developed by Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, to predict the gender of an author. You put a piece of text in (they recommend that it is over 500 words for the most accurate results - sometimes not possible with my bloggers), choose whether it is fiction, non-fiction or a blog entry, and then ask it to analyse the words and indicate the gender it thinks the writer is.
How well did it do with my UK bloggers?
For the male bloggers, it spotted 23 out of 33 correctly (70%), got 9 out of 33 wrong (27%) and 1 unknown.
For the female bloggers, it spotted 12 out of 26 correctly(46% - not so good) and got 14 out of 26 wrong (54%).
So is it better with men than women? I will see what the US bloggers do for it.
Funnily enough, I know that it does not analyse the subjects of the posts, but it was funny to see it decide that the blogger who had just posted about going to have her first scan because she is 3 months pregnant was male!

Financial recompense for blogging

I am interested in the amount of responses to the survey which emphasised the financial side of blogging. This might be indirect, ie one of the reasons that they blog is to market a product or part of their business. It might also be more direct - money raised by hosting advertising for example or career opportunities such as writing columns for newspapers or being contacted by publishers as a direct result of their blogging.
I begin to see that I should have asked for more detail about such financial recompensation for blogging in my survey. Although it now gives me the perfect opportunity to put together another grant application looking into this. How many bloggers are blogging because they think they can make money out of it? How many of these people will actually make money?

Useful Guardian article

Article from the Guardian today offers further evidence that Europeans don't use the Internet in the morning - the prefer to read the paper or listen to the radio until 10.00 am apparently.

Many thanks to all those of you who offered suggestions about the differences in when Brits and US bloggers blogged.
The paradox for today is the following one: Why did so many UK female bloggers agree in their response to the survey that they blogged mainly for their own records?
The majority of all other respondents stated that they did NOT blog mainly for their own records. UK males: 26 no to 6 yes, US males 27 no to 4 yes and US females 21 no to 7 yes. However, 14 UK females said yes, they did blog mainly for their own records, against 14 who said no, they didn't. So 50%, a much greater percentage than for any other group. Why?