Saturday, February 10, 2007

Making my way through blog lit

While wandering, reading, and reflecting on blogging am working to ground myself in what is known about blogs. Worked my way this evening through the PEW’s (2006) Bloggers: A portrait of the internet's new storytellers and some eye-opening statistics. Some of the blogging statistics I found of interest in the survey (n=7, 012) included

1.Majority of bloggers are well educated, 37% of the respondents had college degrees compared with the 27% of the Americans with college degrees
2. Well over a third, 38% of bloggers are American knowledge based professionals compared with 13% of the American knowledge based professionals in the workplace
3.Bloggers are overwhelming young, 84% of the respondents were under 50
4.Rather even in gender, 54% of bloggers Male and 46% are female
5.57 million people read blogs and 12 million keep them
6.Older bloggers are a minority, only 16% of respondents over 50 blog
7.51% of bloggers have less than a year’s experience

Could the lack of women bloggers on topics such as; education technology, higher education, and leadership be linked to numbers of women with college degrees and considered knowledge based professional in the workplace? Maybe there just are not that many of us to begin with, let alone enough of us in numbers to make a dent on the Technorati’s biggest blogs in the blogosphere.