Diversity problem in the blogosphere?
Came across this rather interesting article, Blogging Beyond the Men’s Club which says that the blogosphere is dominated by white males.
“Does the blogosphere have a diversity problem? Viewed one way, the issue seems a bit absurd. These self-generated personal Web sites are supposed to be the ultimate grass-roots phenomenon…So why, when millions of blogs are written by all sorts of people, does the top rung look so homogeneous?.”
Interesting because in my random blog surfing, I have admittedly come across more males, but never felt that the blogosphere had more whites. But considering the high penetration of Internet in predominantly-white countries, the self-perpetuating nature of blog popularity and the fact that women tend to have less free time than men ;o), I guess the results are not that unexpected.
I’m not sure about the actual stats but I reckon a large percentage of bloggers would still rather maintain anonymity.. at least until they muster enough courage to gave out their url’s to a fellow-conspirer or two :)
While A-list bloggers’ i-scratch-your-back-you-scratch-mine activity is a nasty issue, the “Harvard conference” that the author uses to drive in the point is one of the worst examples he could have picked. Who but a very few elite can afford to pay for the attendance at these conferences?
So, yes if you look at the number of people who have been featured in newspaper reports, attend big conferences, pimp their links, you do have a white male world. But that does not mean that blogosphere populations is predominantly white male. Saying so would mean that the reporter has not done enough research of blogs based in Asia and other non-white part of the world.