Blogging and Group Discussion

In Monday's class, my group discussed the Pew article on blogging by Lenhart et al. (http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP%20Bloggers%20Report%20July%2019%202006.pdf). One fact our group found of interest was that while blogging is equally split between men and women, their reasons for blogging differed. For example, Lenhart and her colleagues found that men are more likely than women (67% to 52%) to say that they blog to entertain people. In contrast, women who blog and younger bloggers (age 18-29) are more likely than other groups to say that keeping in touch is a major reason for blogging (p. 8).

Today, I was reading an article in First Monday titled, "Mining the Blogosphere: Age, Gender, and the Varieties of Self-expression (2007; http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_9/argamon/index.html). In this piece, the authors outline their findings from a study on language use and blogging. They found a pairing that was similar to the one presented by Lenhart and her group. In "Mining the Blogosphere," the authors note the following:

"Factors and parts–of–speech that are used significantly more by younger (older) bloggers are also used significantly more by female (male) bloggers. Thus, Articles, Prepositions, Religion, Politics, Business, and Internet are used more by male bloggers as well as older bloggers, while PersonalPronouns, Conjunctions, AuxiliaryVerbs, Conversation, AtHome, Fun, Romance, and Swearing are used more by female bloggers as well as younger bloggers. "

It's interesting that not only do women and young people share similar reasons for blogging, but that the language styles of their posts are similar as well.