A couple of things of late about gender differences on the web.
Researchers at the University of Glamorgan have been looking at the relative appeal of websites to men and women:
“We started off by looking at the personal websites created by 60 university students, 30 male and 30 female, to discover whether there were any major design differences. We looked at factors such as language, visuals, and navigation – the differences were immediately apparent,” explained Gloria Moss. “We compared the sites on 23 factors and differences emerged on just over half of these. This is a massive number”. [Press Releases – Key Website Research Highlights Gender Bias]
In a piece on many2many noted in several places, Danah Boyd discusses variable patterns of linking by men and women bloggers.
After reminding folks at Blogher that there are gender differences in networking habits, i decided to do some investigation into the network structures of blogs. Kevin Marks of Technorati kindly gave me a random sample of 500 blogs to play with. I began coding them based on gender (which is surprisingly easy to do given the amount of personal information people put about themselves) and looking for patterns in links and blogrolls. [Many-to-Many: the biases of links]
