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!
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!
posted by Sarah at 9:15 AM
11 Comments:
There are some networks in the female bloggers I know - I'm thining of the crafty, homemaker type of personal blog, many of which I'm linked to, and the same names come up time and time again. We all tend link up with each other, and sometimes a new name joins in after 'making friends' with everyone and the circle gets bigger.
Blogs like this nearly always link up with other women - maybe this is why they are not very visible - their blogs are an informal network of friends/family and they don't want to promote themselves in that way. I have several male illustration contacts on my blog, but only a few male 'other' blogs - personally I feel more comfortable that way. If these female networks are being kept quite tight that may explain why they are hard to get hold of via blog rings.
So you think it is more a female choice than - as is being suggested in the States - male bloggers ignoring or even pushing out female bloggers?
In the paper I gave at ELPub 2006 I have some statistics showing that the male bloggers I studied had blogrolls which - in the vast majority - only linked to other men whilst women bloggers linked to both men and women in a much more even handed way. I want to do the same sort of analysis for this project, but also look at geography. Are bloggers blogrolling others who are all over the world or geographically closer to home?
Sarah
I agree to some extent with pg.
There are certain topic areas where you will hit rich 'seams' of women bloggers, not necessarily just friends and family, and while women will promote and blogroll themselves within these topic areas, they don't seem to be so keen to promote themselves on more general directories.
Topic areas which are good places to start are design and interiors, knitting and crafts, fashion, food and infertility.
Look for example at the blogrolls on www.karineriksson.se/blog www.ohjoy.blogs.com http://www.tertia.org/so_close/2006/05/lots_of_bloggit.html. On these blogrolls you will find women from all over the world, though obviously there are many more US blogs to reflect the size of the US population. You will find that the 'A-list- blogs in these areas tend to be US based as well, but again not necessarily.
Check out a directory called http://www.delightfulblogs.com/ as another example of a women-focused directory.
Paola - many thanks for those links. I will check them out.
Andy - yes, this had occurred to me too, but I decided it didn't matter. So I get lots of people called Andy and Andrea in the sample. This will of course turn out to be the most significant thing about the sample and will completely dominate my conclusions, but until then, I decided not to worry.
Sarah
Did you have time to read any of the blogs before you picked them?
Yes, I realised that mine (my blog title) was at the beginning of the alphabet too! Don't think it matters too much though. . .
Susan
Susan
Yes, I think it can be safely said that I read most of the blogs - although this had nothing to do with whether or not they were chosen, although I was checking that all my criteria were in place. The problem with this research is that if I am not careful, I end up just reading blogs. That is, of course, also the best bit of the research. Also the fact that, whatever is on the screen when a colleague walks near my computer, it's 'research'.
That's interesting - I would never have considered male bloggers 'ignoring' female ones, is it not more than likely they simply aren't interested in the things 'we' often talk about - I've never encountered obvious sexism in my life, so I wouldn't be on the look-out for it.
Do you think your previous study might be like the survey (a couple of years ago) which showed that men tended to read books by men only, (or non-fiction) and rarely read women authors, while women were shown to read both male and female authors?
These (your studies) are really interesting, by the way!
PG - I am always reminded of a finding of Dale Spender's (I think it was her anyway. Will check later).
She undertook research firstly about face-to-face conversation and then computer-mediated communication. In both studies (which were conducted some years apart) she found the following: if a conversation was made up of aboout 30% women's responses and 70% men's, both men and women considered the conversation to be equally balanced. If women's responses were 50% both men AND women considered that the conversation was dominated by women.
Actually, don't quite know where I am going with this at the moment, but I found this interesting.
Sarah
Greetings Sarah! I’m glad to have had the chance to participate in your survey. Thanks for the invite – I can’t wait to hear more about your research.
As for the male vs. female inquiry, I think that several of the comments above reflect what I have observed: often times, there are distinct pockets of female bloggers centered on particular topics like homemaking, family, crafting, cooking, etc. I’ve also found that my blog Arboreality attracts a greater female readership, which I’ve attributed to the tone and the material. On the other hand, my Brainripples blog seems to have an even balance of readers, but it has a broader-reaching topic.
Even more than topics, I’ve always really felt that what attracts and determines a readership and a blogroll is the tone and the blogger her/himself. Bloggers who write with an even-handed voice and focus on topics which are of interest to people of all backgrounds attract a greater diversity among readers, and are usually themselves more likely to blogroll a diverse group of bloggers.
I’ll have to think more on this one!
Cheers,
JLB
This is a really interesting survey you seem to be involved in. I read about it in pg's blog. She is one of my circle of bloggers. I have only come across two british male bloggers, who have commented on my blog and one american male. I seem to have an ever widening circle of female bloggers. The common denominator being things we are interested in, arts visual and written, gardens, myths, and really just our lives. As we become friendly with some of our fellow bloggers, we usually end up exchanging emails. We are also all very supportive of each other. I note you have not ventured as as far as Australia, where I have some good blogging friends. Amongst my English bloggers I have yet to find one that lives in my county Cumbria, although I know of a couple in Northumberland. Through our blogs we join in other ventures such as an American site called Sunday Scribblings, where every week we are given a prompt, usually one word or a short phrase and on the Sunday we post a piece of fiction or non fiction based on this short phrase. We add our link to the comments section of the site and they put all the links on site and you can go around reading everyone's take on the prompt. There is a lot of real interest going on in the blogging world. Sorry for the length of this but I find all this very interesting.
In my "circle", I suppose, there's a pretty decent mix - but that's mostly because I'm a religious blogger.
In that sort of group, the gender doesn't matter especially much. I have a fairly good mix in my voluminous blogroll.
I will venture to add a comment, though.
Technorati, ttlb, or any of those measures will NOT give you a good rating of where the blog actually IS in readership. Mine is fantastically overrated due to an overly good job of promoting it, early on.
To put it another way - all of these aggregators and directories only inflate your own importance, as you add yourself to them.
I really only have a readership which rarely tops 20/day, if that means much to you. I haven't posted in quite a while, with any sort of meaningfulness.
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