I’m going to be honest and tell you that I have never written a blog before. Now I come to think of it, I do not even know anyone who blogs regularly about their daily lives, travel blogs excluded. Being someone who clearly doesn’t know a lot about blogging, I started to google the word ‘blog’ and came across something interesting about the word blog which I would like to share with you.
Ever wondered where the word ‘blog’ came from? I think we all know that the word blog is short for weblog, a word introduced by a guy named Jorn Barger to describe the process of ‘logging the web’. I started wondering why we call it a blog when the word weblog is clearly constructed of the words ‘web’ and ‘log’. After some more research I came to find that a guy named Peter Merholz jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase we blog on his own blog. This short term caught on and since then the word weblog has been abbreviated to blog.
After stumbling about this little fact about the word blogging, I started to randomly visit some blogs to see what people in general would blog about and a thing I noticed while surfing for blogs, is that women blog more often than men. Nothing new there. What I observed too though, is that when men blog it is a more pragmatic blog, i.e. a travel blog to keep everyone updated at once. I spent some time looking around a blogging website set up just for men (http://www.blokesontheblog.co.uk) and noticed that besides blogging for practical reasons, blogs by men tend to be more about ‘educated’ subjects, like work issues, politics and finance. And sports. Blogging about and discussing sports on the internet seems a domain dominated by men. Also, what came to mind is that the men’s blog usually go with a lot of humour and self-mockery, which makes them amusing to read.
As opposed to men’s blogs, women’s blogs about their daily lives seem less focused to me. What I mean is that men usually pick one subject or situation and write a blog about that while women’s blogs tend to be more of a general description of their day or a situation, often lacking a good point or conclusion. I think this might be what annoys me most in reading women’s blogs. There is no point, no punch line, no good oneliner to close it off.
Not wanting to be associated with pointless girls might be one of the reasons I don’t keep a blog.
To be a blogger or not, it is someone rights. However, referring your last statement then I questioning, why don’t you think the other way around? You blog to break the stereotypical of women’s blog?
Can you come up with different reasons for thinking that there is a typical female or male way of blogging. And is it female/male and not a question about feminine or masculine blogging? One reason may be what kind of blogger gets space in media. And how is media writing about bloggers.
There are also several lists where someone have tried to list (for example) female political bloggers. For example: http://www.blogher.com/2010-mustread-political-blogs-women and http://politicsanew.com/list-of-200-women-political-bloggers/
There is also the blog researcher Jill Rettberg Walker, who is blogging here: http://jilltxt.net/
And here is an interesting course blog for Culture, power and Cyberspace: http://anthrocyber.blogspot.com/