[Air-l] personal homepages

Frank Schaap architext at fragment.nl
Thu Nov 27 02:55:25 PST 2003


I wrote:
 >>Did you do a breakdown according to gender?

Gregor Petric wrote:
> My aim was to inspect producers of web sites with regard to various socio-
> psychological motives, emerging from the state of being in contemporary
> society, but I didn't put much focus on genders issue. Well, I checked it
> and
> found the following result: between men 44% are producers, while between
> women 18%. But it should be noted that men are also more intensive users
> of interactive systems, are more lonely and more narcissist, which are
> strong predictors of web site production.

Thanks for this reply Gregor :)

This is an interesting mesh of results and factors. It's nice to see a 
reflection of my small scale, qualitatively gathered data in a large 
quantitative data set.


Just for fun I figured I'd do a really quick breakdown of Dutch weblogs. I 
hit the weblog tracker at 11:10 and looked at the 50 last updated weblogs.

22 are by men
6 by women

and the remaining 22 are inconclusive about who actually is blogging, but 
according to content, probably break down like this:

8 by men
1 by a woman
6 by a collective (almost exclusively men)
1 by a common variety garden gnome (a "kabouter"), probably a female one
1 is a fake weblog redirecting to a pr0n site
3 are really hard to classify
and 1 appears to actually be written by a dog, giving a whole new meaning to 
that New Yorker cartoon, 'On the internet nobody knows your a dog.'

At first glance this would seem a bit counter intuitive, as some of the most 
high profile Dutch weblogs are by women and, indeed, weblogs are often 
perceived as a more feminine format. The quick and dirty breakdown I just 
did of course doesn't carry much statistical weight, but, viewed in the 
larger context of production and consumption of the Net, could be indicative.


Frank.






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