Blogs and the Blogosphere

By 2000, the availability of blog host sites like Blogger, Typepad, Wordpress, and LiveJournal, made keeping a blog, short for weblog or web log-an online journal with dated entries-easy for people who do not possess Web coding skills. Women create and produce content with blogging tools, and many advance beyond online diaries to self-publish their platform to a broad audience as well as create communities.

Women's blogs range from the personal to the political. In 2003, there were 4.12 million blogs. Over 90 percent were maintained by people under the age of 30, with women having a slight edge over men in the practice. The highest rated blogs are male-dominated, yet scholars agree that there are more women bloggers overall.

Ideally the blogosphere (the world of blogs and blogging) provides a positive democratic space, a public sphere, where everyone expresses themselves. Bloggers participate in communities and create conversations by commenting on posts and cross-linking or creating blogrolls. Gendered behavior online falls into traditional forms. Equality has not occurred in the blogosphere and a neutral space where women's voices would have as much authority as men's is an unrealized ideal. Differences in communication styles contribute to the inability of men and women to communicate well online and gender segregation is the norm. The absence of strong women's voices in the blogosphere comes down to the perception that men write about politics and women write about the personal. The problem is that both arenas are defined too narrowly. Many political blog are filters and provide links to what the blogger found and do not contain original content.

The majority of blogs are personal journals expressing the writer's thoughts and daily activities. Fifty percent of journal bloggers are female. They offer greater levels of self-revelation than do men. Additionally, [Page 166]they tend to mix genres while male bloggers stick to one topic exclusively.