Hmm, interesting data. Before you go too far, maybe it's function that's not clear in the Perseus study. Only 1.0% of blogs were created by people in my age bracket, and I have to wonder of that 1.0% how many are men/women? I tend to drift towards people who are within a decade of my age. Is it possible that age impacts you as well -- without your being aware of it? And do your links reflect a proportionality on this basis?

I think that's a very good point. I have no way of knowing outside of, I guess, asking to know this. But I suspect there is definitely some valid data to be derived from age. I also tend to drift towards folks within a decade of my age. Younger than their late 20's and my interest in what they have to say falls off. Older then me not so much. As many of those much older than I, more than their late 40's, tend to be authorities in their field their age is irrelevent to me.

I have been thinking a lot about this based on the Political Compass stuff. I'll perhaps post some more about this at RFB in the next few days.

After thinking about this, I realized I don't personally know many women (outside the blogosphers, in real life) in my age group who even understand what a blog is, let alone one that would keep one. They wouldn't dream of developing and launching their own website, either. I know many more in the age groups below my own that are much more literate -- makes me think there's a greater percentage of women bloggers who are younger rather than older. Have to believe this is a function you're seeing reflected in your links; you strike me as least likely to select a link by gender.

Damn it, not only can I not type today (making all kinds of typos and errors) -- but I've just made myself out to be older than dirt!!!!

That's okay. I'm older than calcium.

Well, I guess Dave (http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/) has his bases covered, here.

My partner, B (female), thinks that inherently the blogosphere is competition-driven and that women are statistically less likely to respond to those kinds of incentives. As we discussed this, we wondered whether any quantitative/ranking type metric inherently selects for the dynamics that men gravitate toward.

Just to complicate the picture a little... In blogs with comments, how many are posted with gender identifiable signatures? Of those posted with gender-identifiable signatures, how many provide URLs that access other comments or entries, on the same blog, on another blog? How many of those connections are M to M, M to F, F to M and F to F? And if the study is done over time and over clusters of blogs a vey dynamic and evolutionary picture emerges. In any case this entry and this comment have led me less to attempt to try and discover the big big picture and more to ponder the gender politics of my own blog interventions. I do think that the frequency questio (number of blog inventions in per site per time period) indicates a record of "writing to" which may not reflect a "reading of" or even the "accessing of" [a hit is not a read]. Would be nice to have the time-based data to project the curves that correlate number of hits, number of repeat visits and amount of writing activity (entries and comments) and
at what point do connections start to appear (linking to other blogs, to other WWW resources, to blog archived entries/comments). Then some interesting comparaison could be done on sociological markers such as age, gender, sexual orientation. And then some sociologist could attempt to verify results in a decade, in a generation...