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.
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.
posted by Sarah at 2:13 PM
2 Comments:
I have a slight trouble with this method of choosing blogs because it assumes membership of that particular group of blogs. For example, not all British blogs will be members of Britblogs and whilst I am not US based I have never heard of "Globe of Blogs".
There are the quite a few systems of keeping blogs as well as Blogger and I wonder if surfing within those blogs may have yielded a few blogs that are not affiliated to any webrings/traffic rings.
However, I do know that when I've surfed through Blogger I get all these irritating advertising and semi-business blogs. That's what I forgot to put on my form, I don't like the way that businesses are hiving off the blogger community just to push their product. Businesses should stick to their business websites. I don't want to be surrounded by all their advertising. It is boring and tiresome.
OK, I'm off my soapboax and off home. Ta-ta!
Doris
It was a difficult one, but to be frank it was also a matter of time. I have 8 months away from my teaching and administration load to get this research done, and have to write at least two conference papers and two articles in return for my AHRC funding, which means all data collection needs to be done before Christmas. Using two sites which allowed me to search for bloggers by location was therefore a time-saving choice. I do know that it may have skewed my results, and need to take this into account in my discussion.
Thanks for discussing this. One of the methodologies that I told the AHRC I would be using was this blog - so that I could record the responses of bloggers who were interested in the project, but I was more than slightly worried that I could get horridly flamed. I am more used to producing a final paper for the world (not that much of the world reads academic papers I know!) than showing people how I am actually going about finding the data. It does mean, however, that I have evidence of hard work on my research if the university ever demands it!
Sarah
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