A-list

I said I would post some links to academic articles which discuss the 'A-list' phenomenon in blogging - or among bloggers. Of course, both of these articles mainly discuss the US context, although the central point that Susan Herring makes is surely applicable in Australia too:

Media reportage about weblogs, even when ostensibly concerned with the phenomenon of blogging in general, tends to focus on adult male weblog authors. To quantify this impression, we conducted an informal content analysis of 16 articles about blogs from mainstream news sources that happened to come across our desks between November 2002 and July 2003. ... The results reveal that:

• more males (88%) are mentioned in the articles than females (12%);
• males are mentioned multiple times in the same article more often than females;
• males are mentioned earlier in the articles than females;
• males are more likely to be mentioned by name than females; and
• all 94 males mentioned are adults, except for one adolescent male blogger.

By contrast, Herring's gender and age related content analysis of bloggers showed that the numbers of males and females, and of adults and teens, are roughly equal.

Comments

[Valerie]

I've been thinking about the types of blogging that males and females do. I'm overgeneralizing, of course, and there are plenty of exceptions, but overall it seems to me that females tend to blog about their family and their day-to-day life, as a way of communicating with friends, while males are more likely to have the type of blog that aims to change the world with briliant new political insights. I think this is partly because it's more often males who have the free *time* to spend 18 hours a day combing the web for news and thinking about what it means and synthesizing it into insightful new blog postings. Females are more likely to end up with household chores and childwatching, which gives females less time to synthesize new political insights, plus more to say about the mundane everyday matters. Like I said, this is a massive overgeneralization with plenty of exceptions, but I think there's a real difference in the types of blogging that males and females tend to do, and that makes a difference in who their readership is, how big it is -- and whether they are likely to be quoted in the newspapers.

Which I guess is mostly the same thing that you were saying about A-list and M-list bloggers.