The State Of The Berkshire Blogosphere: Gender Balance

One of the simplest ways to analyse the blogosphere is to compare authorship of the local blogs according to gender.

Assumptions are often made that there are predominantly more male than female bloggers, but previous studies have shown this is a blunt generalisation.

Since blogging became accepted as a relatively mainstream activity in 2004 the pure numbers have evolved and the level of men and women who are active in the sphere has largely equalized, but interestingly a clearer distinction in the pattern of blogging behaviour has become apparent.

So for my purposes a simple count of the blogs on the 'Top of The Berkshire Blogs' charts will effectively show how maturely developed the local blogosphere now is (for ease of calculation I'll use November 2009 as the most recent source list of active sites and exclude guest contributions).

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Men: 86
Women: 27
Multiple male: 6
Multiple female: 4
Multiple both: 9
Unknown author: 11
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Total: 143
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This means there are 101 listed sites whose principle authors are male, compared to 40 who are female and 11 of unknown gender (a 5:2 ratio).

Of course this is not a definitive sample as there are several examples of highly active bloggers who contribute to more than one weblog and there are numerous local blogs which are not included on the chart. I've also failed to identify almost a dozen authors. So any conclusions should be treated sceptically.

Nonetheless, as an early indication of the relative maturity of the local blogosphere I think this can be said to indicate a good baseline from which similar future analysis will have some value.

NB. Based upon the assumption that the defined geographical blogosphere reaches maturity when gender ratios reach 1:1.

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Previous analyses of The State of the Berkshire Blogosphere

The State Of The Berkshire Blogosphere: General

According to Wikio's chart for August, Berkshire can number 114 ranked blogs.

Of this 2 are within the top100 (2%), 18 are within the top1000 (1.8%) and 104 are within the top10,000 (1.04%).

Compared with an estimated population of 812,200 in 2005, or approx 1.4% of the total UK population, this provides a rough indication of the level of quality and interconnectedness of the online population in the county.

It confirms a tendency towards greater popularity and better networking skills, as would be expected by the location at the heart of the Thames Valley where more UK technology firms are clustered.

So a big well done to all you Berkshire bloggers - keep up the good work!

The State Of The Berkshire Blogosphere

I originally analysed the Berkshire Blogosphere in this article, ascertaining that there were

"9 Conservative bloggers, 8 Liberal Democrat, 5 Green Party, 2 Libertarian, 1 Liberty & Solidarity Party, 1 Common Sense Party and 1 Independent blogger."

This has changed somewhat in the intervening period, as it has been possible to investigate deeper into the murky depths beneath the surface, so I'll also be regularly providing an update on these matters.